Hoping For More Than Slogans

Political stories

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:20:00 +0000

It's been a minute!

Brief post to reflect on this video by Richard J Murphy.

The video makes a great case for thinking clearly about the change we want to make in society and doing something about it in an engaging, optimistic way.

To reinforce the case, I would point to the most successful politicians in democracies often being the best at telling a powerful story. Churchill, Thatcher, and Blair are good examples from the UK. Now Farage is gaining ground simply by articulating (wrong-headed) stories about immigration and "wokeness".

In fact it's difficult to think of a current frontline politician other than Farage with that ability. (Though obviously he's massively helped by the wealthy and their media in spreading his stories.)

On the other hand, there are also many examples of politicians who are great at telling a powerful story but didn't achieve the lasting social change they deserved. I'd suggest Tony Benn for one.

I've dissected and played with political narratives many times over the years. See this post from a decade ago, for example.

However what I particularly liked about Murphy's video is that it's not about the clichéd longing for a "great leader" to rally behind; but instead a democratising call for all of us to develop and tell our own stories of social change.

I doubt I've changed many minds in my time, even when I think I've got a compelling narrative. But I suspect that just the processes of developing and sharing authentic stories for change might help us all be a little clearer about what's important and how we might get there, and make us a little more circumspect about the emotion, half-truths and rhetoric of snake oil sellers.

The "I Can't Forgive the LibDems" soundbite

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 23:49:00 +0000

You sometimes hear "I can't forgive the LibDems for propping up the Tories".

This is odd, because thanks to the LibDems being part of the Government, the austerity cuts were LESS than the cuts Labour had promised. So are these people who "can't forgive" saying they can't forgive Labour either?!

Also, remember that the 1997-2010 Labour Government went along with the neo-liberal consensus that said the banks didn't need much regulation, and the result was the financial crisis. Labour then chose to bail out the banks. The crisis had dire, far-reaching consequences for the country's finances, consequences we're still living with.

Declaring "I can't forgive Labour" on the basis of this history would be utterly pointless. Labour's platform NOW is what counts. Same for the LibDems.

Now the coalition did many things I disagreed with, not least the bedroom tax. But then the coalition was 80% Tory, so what do you expect?!

The LibDem 20% didn't just ensure less austerity than the Tories and Labour. They also ensured the consequences of Labour's neo-liberalism didn't fall on the low paid: the 3 million lowest paid were taken out of income tax. And the next 26 million paid less tax. At the same time, by clamping down on tax avoidance and tax evasion, many tax breaks for the rich were abolished, which Labour had failed to do. Would a 100% Tory Government have done that?!

Or is this "can't forgive" thing simply about saying the Tories wouldn't have been in power without the LibDems? Because that's just not true.

A LibLab coalition wasn't numerically possible. So that would've meant a minority Tory Government. And a minority Tory Government would've quickly turned into a majority Tory Government after a second General Election (which Labour didn't have the money to fight).

So would the people who "can't forgive" have preferred a 100% Tory Government?! Because that's what it would've been. And then it's not only austerity that would've been worse. You only have to look at the many dreadful things a 100% Tory Government has done since 2015 to realise what those 57 LibDem MPs prevented thanks to being in the coalition.

And why does this "can't forgive" thing apply to the LibDems and not to Labour? On almost every important issue, the last Labour Government was on the side of the Tories:

the illegal war in Iraq
the pride in "light-touch regulation of the banks"
the enthusiasm for indefinite detention without trial
the doubling of income tax on the lowest paid
the tax cuts for the rich
the renewal of Trident
the promotion of nuclear power
the love of fracking
sluggish action on climate change
the introduction and escalation of upfront tuition fees
the use of PFI...

Again, declaring "I can't forgive Labour" on the basis of that huge list would be utterly pointless. Labour's platform NOW is what counts. Same for the LibDems.

Finally, lots of good things happened as a consequence of the coalition, that you can never imagine a 100% Tory Government doing, such as:

2 million apprenticeships
200,000 new affordable homes
the Green Investment Bank
the Pupil Premium
the restoration of the link between pensions and earnings
proper regulation of the banks
the ending of child detention in immigration cases
shared parental leave
same-sex marriage

So when you hear "I can't forgive the LibDems for propping up the Tories", please ask whether they have forgiven Labour.

After all, when the Tories intend to wreck the country with Brexit, isn't it time to put past hurts on one side for now and #UniteToRemain ?

A Pox On All Your Parties

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 11:20:00 +0000

The British are so arrogant that, in our hearts, we refuse to accept that fascist populism could happen here. We fondly imagine our democracy is safe forever.

"Mother of Parliaments!"

"We saw off Hitler!"

"Too bloody-minded to put up with tinpot dictators!"

I want to tell you that we are rushing headlong towards the end of democracy, and we're too blind to see it.

There are Labour Party members who call themselves "socialists", who profess to care about the low-paid, about the NHS, about schools and new homes, about "building a Britain that works for the many, not the few". They must know by now that Brexit will mean a weaker economy whichever party is in power and so less money for those laudable things they say they care about. And yet these people are happy to let Brexit damage Britain for a generation or more, because they think a damaged country will hasten a Labour government. That's more than cynical. That's sick.

Moreover it won't work. The voters will notice that Labour was complicit in letting Brexit happen. Labour might hide behind the "respecting the referendum result" mantra, but even though the flaws of the 2016 referendum are well-known (financial fraud, Russian interference, the exclusion of the 3 million people most affected by Brexit), "Leave" didn't even attain 50% of the electorate, let alone two-day thirds of the vote. Labour had the opportunity to give the voters the final say on the actual Brexit deal, rather than the Brexiteer bullshit that was promised in 2016, and it has made a deliberate decision not to even discuss the possibility.

So make no mistake: Labour will be damaged by this catastrophic error, just as Britain is damaged.

There are Conservative Party members who call themselves "One Nation Tories" or "Thatcherites" or "traditionalists", who claim to want a strong Britain: united, prosperous and geo-politically powerful. They must know by now that leaving the single market is disastrous for business; that leaving the customs union means ripping up hard-won free trade agreements that we cannot hope to improve upon; that leaving the EU requires a massive permanent expansion in bureaucracy to manage trade; that the effects on Northern Ireland and Gibraltar are profoundly damaging to the UK's unity and influence; that the costs of Brexit will require higher taxes; that the brain drain will severely reduce Britain's capacity for innovation; and that the divisions created in society by the referendum are deep and long-lasting.

The Conservative Government has a simple face-saving way of avoiding this disaster: give the voters a final say on the Brexit terms, with an option to remain in the EU. But the only reason this isn't happening is because Theresa May has made it the party line not to countenance this get-out.

Once the reality of life outside the EU becomes apparent, the voters won't blame themselves. They will blame the party which started the disaster, which pushed it through in the face of all entreaties from British businesses and institutions, and which refused to pursue an obvious solution. They will say Conservatives put party before country.

And before the smaller parties start to rub their hands with glee at the blame that will accrue to Labour and the Conservatives, the voters see you trying to stoke the emotive divisions in the big parties for political gain, rather than trying to build cross-party consensus for a solution.

All politicians will be brought into disrepute by this disaster created in Westminster. Complete disillusionment with politics will become the norm. Anger at this self-inflicted wound. Anger at the world for laughing at us. Diminished services, damaged institutions, a failing economy, an angry underclass screaming "Betrayal!", struggling businesses, an ignored intelligentsia fleeing for a better life elsewhere, a political class unable to do anything other than bicker...

And who will gain from chaos?

Checks and Balances

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Sun, 17 May 2015 09:23:00 +0000

Image: David Muir

I've chosen to remain silent for almost 3 years: Lib Dem strategists seemed oblivious to the alternatives to a disastrous 2015 election, and I didn't want to do anything to jeopardise the chances of Labour keeping the Tories out of power. In the event, Labour engineered their own 2015 disaster.

Many other writers have produced excellent analyses of what went wrong, and so I have no burning desire to reiterate the clear lessons to be learned. No doubt I will return to these lessons en passant in future posts. Nor is it especially productive for me to let off steam about my fury with the Lib Dem leadership, with Labour's dreadful Tory-lite offering, or with friends who voted Green or Red only to predictably let in Blue.

Nor is it necessary to outline the horrors that await our country thanks to the Tory's majority government. I think we're all too well aware.

No, I can return to all these topics more rationally once the heat has died down.

What I want to do is flag up a few key policy issues that I believe we're failing to address properly and that have something in common:

1. We haven't yet put much in place to forestall future economic collapse caused by incompetent banks and tax-dodging companies.

2. Overspending and other mismanagement by politicians is all too easy, given that a party can win power on 37% of the vote, and with a mandate from less than a quarter of the electorate.

3. Vital parts of our community infrastructure - such as hospitals, schools, post offices, libraries, youth centres, shelters, etc. - are vulnerable to closure when times get tough, despite intense local demand for alternatives to closure.

4. Defiance of human rights, snooping by the state, lack of access to the justice system, newspapers little better than propaganda press, and harassment of the innocent by the media all seem to be getting worse.

5. Perceptions of immigration being "out-of-control" and of an oppressive European bureaucracy are not being assuaged by trying to co-opt and moderate the swivel-eyed xenophobia of UKIP.

6. We are sleep-walking into climate catastrophe through the actions of polluters and the inactions of governments.

One thing I believe all these areas have in common is the lack of clearly identifiable checks and balances (in a broad sense) to restrain the power of governments, institutions and companies to cause harm, while at the same time minimising infringements on freedom.

Whether Left or Right, Green or Free-marketeer, liberal or conservative these are issues that should be very relevant to us all.

The Simpsons are going to Hell

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 01:01:00 +0000

I think The Simpsons is a brilliant programme, and couldn't resist eagerly downloading "The Simpsons: Tapped Out" game for my mobile. The game is also very funny, but has a slightly disconcerting habit of making loud notification sounds when the game isn't running and the mobile is in your pocket with the screen off. Apparently there's no way of turning these sounds off within the game on my mobile, without muting all notifications.

Now, I was at the funeral of a family member this week.

I put the mobile on silent mode before entering the chapel. Of course I'd have done that anyway - I'm not an idiot - but I really didn't fancy Homer yelling out "WOOHOO! NEW BUILDING!" as I entered.

Then during the first hymn I remembered that occasionally my mobile "forgets" it's supposed to be on silent mode, as if it's bored of sitting quietly for so long. A terrifying vision flashed through my mind of the vicar solemnly paying tribute to the deceased's skills as a chef (she was a chef)... a reverent pause... then suddenly everyone hears Homer saying "MMMM... CROPS..."

I surreptitiously switched off my mobile, which is what I should have done in the first place. No respect.

But then while listening to the vicar I suddenly worried that the switch off hadn't worked. On a couple of occasions in the last few months I'd been startled by the mobile ringing after I thought it was off. Holding down the power button isn't enough: you then have to select "Power off" from an options menu.

However the only way to tell if the phone was off was to press the power button. And if the phone was already off, this would bring it to life with a cheery fanfare during prayers.

"Oh well. What's the worst that could happen?" I asked myself.

And then I realized what the worst would be. The curtains smoothly closing, the mourners inwardly bidding their final farewells, the coffin gently gliding towards the furnace... and Homer yells out "BETTER THEM THAN ME!"

I removed the mobile's battery.

Time to think

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:14:00 +0000

Image: Gabba Gabba Hey!

In my previous post, I draw attention to the immense (and potentially insuperable) situational challenges the Lib Dems are facing. In this blog I haven't been simply sitting on the sidelines carping about Lib Dem strategy. I've tried to be balanced in my reflections. I've balanced criticisms with acknowledgements of the limited room for manoeuvre and I've tried to do my best to devise some practical suggestions for improving narrative, strategy and the explanations that lie just one step removed from the soundbites.

Perhaps they're not very good suggestions. I don't know. But I think I've largely failed to get through to fellow Lib Dems: Over the last few years I've been getting gratifying numbers of readers, but very few links or responses on other blogs.

It's time for me to reflect on whether there might be better ways to engage social democratic liberals across parties. I have to think about whether I can do better than I'm doing, to bumble on, to try more oblique approaches, or to just stop.

Is the Lib Dem "core vote" circling the plughole?

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 15:55:00 +0000

Stephen Tall's article "Do the Lib Dems have a core vote, and can we grow it?" has stimulated a very interesting discussion on LDV.

Image: Nicoze

Stephen identifies three reasons why the Liberal Democrats have historically lacked a "core vote":

"1) liberalism tends towards rational scepticism which rarely equates to core votes, which tend to be any or all of the following: class-based / ideological / tribal;

2) liberalism, at least in the UK, is generally centrist in terms of the key issue for most voters, the economy. As a result, our party’s ‘Venn diagram’ overlap with the Conservatives/Labour means liberal voters are less oppositional by nature, and more likely to move between us and one of our two opponents;

3) liberalism’s disdain for vested interests means it’s harder to coalesce an interest group. We don’t do favours for trade unions or big business: that’s fundamental to who we are. But it means we don’t have powerful lobbies campaigning on our behalf — still less the news media — persuading the public their future will be rosier under the Lib Dems."

The article and the subsequent comments are perceptive, and well worth reading. Some excellent points are made, on all sides of the arguments. It's also worth reading Simon Titley's 2008 article arguing that "The Lib Dem vote is like a bath with the taps left on and the plug left out."

I would venture that three groups of voters who have traditionally come out strongly for the Lib Dems can no longer be taken for granted:

1. With the advent of the Coalition, many of those in England who used to vote Lib Dem as a protest against the prevailing Lab-Con duopoly might well switch to smaller parties - Greens or UKIP, one supposes - or not vote.

2. Lib Dem strengths in the so-called "Celtic fringe" are likely to be severely disrupted by the presence of Lib Dems in a Tory-led coalition, by the SNP having a majority in Scotland, and by long-term adjustments in Welsh politics as a consequence of the growing importance of the Welsh Assembly.

3. Young, independent-minded, largely middle-class graduates who do not have strong political affiliations (and so assess the arguments of the parties on merit) will be much less likely to vote Lib Dem, as a consequence of (i) perceived broken trust; (ii) NHS changes; (iii) austerity measures; and (iv) a possible return to "We need to keep X out" thinking, because of the Coalition and the rejection of AV.

Image: Vaidotas Mišeikis

Furthermore, at the next general election Labour might well be revitalised by being back in its comfort zone of opposition to public service cuts. The Conservatives might well be revitalised by being back in their comfort zone of enforcing economic discipline. If the economy is seen to be recovering well, the Conservatives will be the likely beneficiaries. If austerity is seen to be causing unemployment, stagnation and plummeting public services, Labour will likely benefit. There are no obvious scenarios in which the Lib Dems can expect credit for their role in fostering economic recovery or protecting public services.

So commentators who predict a "perfect storm" for the Liberal Democrats at the next general election are, in my view, on the money.

Moreover, the signs are not looking good that Lib Dem strategists know what to do about this. I'm not convinced that suddenly acquiring a "core vote" is plausible; I doubt that focusing all energies on retaining current seats would work either; there are no indications that lessons have been learned from 2005, 2010, or the AV campaign; some seem to think it's just a matter of crafting a compelling enough message in a couple of years time to motivate voters who tend to liberalism or to attract or persuade other voters; current policy development lacks drive; narratives are confused; and not much seems to be happening to improve rebuttal, persuasion and projection.

And if strategists are playing a subtle, behind-the-scenes game that I wouldn't be able to see, the outcome measures look poor: the public continues to see Clegg as compromised; the Lib Dems are repeatedly out-manoeuvred by Labour and the Conservatives in the Commons; leading commentators rarely have good things to say about the Lib Dems these days; and British political culture remains inimical to liberal, pluralist politics [1, 2]

I'm a natural optimist (How could I be otherwise, being a long-time member of the Lib Dems?!) and I think the Lib Dems have the best agenda for the country and a talented leader. But the situation is not looking good.

What's wrong with Nick Clegg?

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 11:50:00 +0000

Image: Marie Jenkins

Nick Clegg came to Exeter on Friday. In a room normally used for training Flybe cabin crew, he faced questions from a public audience for an hour. And then he mingled in a room full of LibDem activists.

This summer he's doing similar events all over the country: The "Feel the Hatred" Tour, some wags have dubbed it.

All credit to him. No stage management. No specially-selected audience (there were a couple of Labour councillors at the Exeter event). No speeches. No vetting of questions. Just him on the receiving end of a sceptical public.

Paraphrasing...

Why we are giving so much in foreign aid when care costs for the elderly are under pressure?
Why is the dole so cushy when we're desperate to recruit a sous-chef?
Why do you want to deport me when my local area is desperate for my dentistry skills?
The Lib Dems were running Exeter City Council a few years ago. Now they're down to just 5 councillors. Doesn't that tell you something?
What next for Lords Reform?
Why not channel money from "quantitative easing" to over-stretched workers rather than to greedy bankers?
Why is the council supporting my tenants when they refuse to leave my house at the end of their tenancy?
Isn't it a problem that you and Cameron are so similar in looks and background?
Are you going to waste the next three years, like Labour wasted its first three years?
Why is it fair that, because I work, I don't get a carers allowance for my child who's got Downs Syndrome?
If you give tourism a boost by lowering VAT where there's matched funding, the Government will end up with a net profit. Why don't you do that?
I'm working hard towards my GCSEs. Are they now going to be seen as worthless thanks to Michael Gove?

Clegg engaged thoughtfully, put issues in the wider context of the problems faced by many people, addressed questions directly, gave a good account of what was being done and why, and offered to follow up personal circumstances when relevant.

Then he mingled with local Lib Dems: the ex-councillors who lost their elections thanks to the Government's austerity; the activists whose local organising is being undermined by loss of trust over tuition fees and the NHS; and the many quiet but committed members who are uncomfortable about political communications failures, climate change, free schools, internet snooping, welfare changes, economic stagnation, threats to Lords reform, and so on.

And again, Clegg did a great job of acknowledging concerns, providing a fuller context, and indicating sensible strategies.

I'm biased, but I think public and members alike were generally impressed with his answers, his engaging manner, his grasp of detail and arguments, and his passion to tackle unfairness, disadvantage and unaccountable power.

I sense that people don't quite warm to him like they did Charles Kennedy; he's not got Ming Campbell's gravitas; and he's not at the same level of Paddy Ashdown in terms of rhetoric and steeliness.

But, almost more than any contemporary politician, he has Tony Blair's exceptional linguistic ability to set out the arguments clearly and persuasively. He is operating, though, in a political culture that appears to pathologically despise error, inconsistency, compromise, inaction or long-term solutions.

My view, then, is that Nick Clegg's problem is not personal, and not even that much about policy. The challenge for him is twofold: (i) to avoid the continuing tactical errors that reduce his standing in the eyes of the commentators; and (ii) to develop the 2015 narrative (see also here). Unless Clegg gets better advisors quickly, journalists' predictions of Lib Dem wipe-out are likely to come true.

Sack Paxman

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 18:20:00 +0000

Last night Twitter was abuzz with the "car crash" interview of Treasury minister Chloe Smith. People were still tweeting and blogging about it this afternoon. With my usual excellent timing, by now there will be no-one left on the planet with even the vaguest interest in clicking through to yet more comment on that interview.

So well done on making it this far. And here goes...

I agree entirely with Richard Morris' succinct review of why Chloe Smith had no excuse.However, I want to focus on Jeremy Paxman. I've blogged previously about why I no longer watch Newsnight when he's presenting. But I would now go further than that. I think he deserves to be sacked.

Image: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 by englishpen

Not for this interview in particular. It was quite legitimate for him to be asking when the decision to delay the fuel duty rise was taken, why Smith appeared to have changed her mind about the issue, how the measure would be funded, and why this measure took priority over reducing the deficit.

And not because of his bullying approach per se. His technique last night was no worse than Paxman has deployed many times before; and although I detest the default attitude to politicians of "Why is this lying bastard lying to me?", it is sometimes necessary to deploy an aggressive approach to try to cut through obfuscation about very serious matters.

No, I think he should be sacked because he is incompetent. And this interview illustrates this perfectly.

Before the interview, we already knew that the decision was a last-minute one. We also knew that it would mostly be funded by departmental under-spends, but that it wasn't yet clear how much would be taken from each department.

So what could a good journalist realistically hope to achieve in this interview? I would suggest that the five key things we would have liked to have found out are:

What are the justifications for the Government changing its mind?
At a particular moment when tax receipts are sharply down and borrowing sharply up, why wouldn't the money be better spent reducing the deficit?
How does this decision square with the Prime Minister's boast that his will be "the greenest government ever"?
Why was the decision so last-minute?
When will it be known which departments are to experience budget cuts as a consequence of this decision?

A smart interviewer - such as Jon Snow, Robin Lustig or Andrew Neil - might well have started with questions that a Treasury minister should be able to answer, following up with thoughtful questions that attempt to tease out ambiguities and gaps in the logic. It's true that there might be times when an interviewee can be unsettled by a relentless, aggressive, opening attack; but overusing such a technique means that future interviewees will be resolute in sticking rigidly to their talking points.

Instead, sensing the weakness of the Government's position on the decision, Paxman set out to entertain the audience with the ritual humiliation of a minister:

He asked Smith about 10 times "When were you told about the decision?" (or words to that effect)
He repeatedly shouted, hectored and interrupted Smith.
He asked an excessive number of questions phrased in such a way as to humiliate rather than to elicit serious responses, including:

"Is it hard for you to defend a decision you don't agree with?"
"Is this some sort of joke?"
"Did you get the sums wrong?"
"Do you ever wake up in the morning and think 'My God, what am I going to be told today? '"
"Do you ever think you're incompetent?"

To be fair, Smith could have made a much better fist of responding. After all, a decision to delay a tax rise is hardly the most difficult position to defend in politics. She needed to keep pivoting back to "Hard-working people and businesses aren’t interested in the process. They're interested in the outcome, which is the Government listening to how badly people have been harmed by Labour's deficit, and so we're taking the right decision to ameliorate Labour's taxes. This will help people who commute to work, people who travel because of their jobs, people who live in the country..." Of course that's easy for me to say. It's not so easy to do it under the hot lights and the sneer of a boorish interviewer. But that's her job, so I'm not overly concerned about that. And she'd already been through one interview earlier in the evening, so she knew what questions were very likely to come up!

So how well did Paxman do? Of the "five key things we would have liked to have found out" I identified earlier, how many did we gain information about?

And this interview isn't an isolated case.

If it turns out that BBC News is actually a subdivision of BBC Entertainment, then Paxman's bosses should be rightly proud of his continuing ability to attract attention. On the other hand, Nick Clarke, Vincent Hanna and Charles Wheeler will be turning in their graves.

What mark would you give Paxman?

Gove's O-levels take us back to basics

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 08:09:00 +0000

As Parliament prepares to discuss the Education Secretary's proposals to abolish GCSEs and bring back O-levels, it's perhaps worth examining why we abandoned O-levels in the first place:

(i) O-levels were designed to filter children, not to assess capabilities.

O-levels were not intended to provide either a broad education or a recognition of all children's attainment. They were a mechanism to sift from the most academic children those who would be suitable candidates for A-levels, which would in turn identify the lucky 5% who would make it to university.

Consequently O-levels used norm-referencing: fixed percentages of children achieved each grade. By design, every year exactly the same proportion of children were given an A grade, a B grade, and so on.

If you happen to be born in an academically strong year, your answers could receive a worse grade than if you happen to be born in an academically weak year. If society gets dramatically smarter, say because of improvements in nutrition or teaching methods, the results won't reflect this. If teachers get better at identifying who's likely to fail the O-level and enter them for CSE instead, the percentage of failures is not allowed to drop, so many of those who would have got an E grade are then given a fail. And it's not obvious from the results if educational standards are falling, which lets the Education Secretary off the hook!

We now know that 40%+ of children are capable of university-level study, but since O-levels were filtering children rather than assessing attainment, it's now clear that O-levels were holding back huge numbers of children.

Moreover a successful modern economy requires a diverse, adaptable workforce, capable of taking on jobs in emerging areas. Employers need to know what an individual is capable of, not what percentile of the population their scores happened to be in a particular cohort. O-levels didn't tell employers what applicants can do.

(ii) O-levels wrote off most of the population.
Because only the most academic 20% of children took O-levels, CSEs were introduced for the rest, rather than have them leave school with nothing.

But this two-tier system created a rigid divide between children, based on decisions at 13- 14 years old, that had consequences for the rest of their lives. O-levels were a high-stakes social filter that determined who got to continue their education. So this divide disadvantaged the many children who mature later, who discover their motivation only when they encounter specialist subject teachers, who have tough home lives, or who struggle with adolescence. Stigmatised as CSE dullards, 80% of children were unfairly excluded from further education and from a huge range of occupations.

The FT notes:

A third of children who score in the bottom 25 per cent at the age of 11 break out of that grouping by the age of 16. If they are placed in a second-class category at an early age, there is a risk that these children will be written off. This is no recipe for tackling low performance.

(iii) O-levels equated education with academic study.
If you wanted more education, you had to do well at O-levels. But O-levels were intended to identify potential candidates for academic study. This inevitably led to academic study being seen as the only type of education that mattered, to the detriment of technical and vocational education. We now realize that our economy has been held back by failing to nurture the engineers, inventors, designers, programmers, technicians, electricians, plumbers and so on that a modern society needs. Many of the people who have been successful in these occupations have got there in spite of the binary divide - academic study or nothing - that was forced on children at an early age.

Indeed, the biographies of many of the previous generation of "captains of industry", inventors and designers recount how they left school at 15 or 16 because it offered them nothing, and were passionately driven to prove society wrong in its apparent judgement of them as having no talent. This triumph-from-adversity mechanism worked for them, but who knows if they might have achieved even more for the country if they had had the proper education they knew they deserved? And how many massively talented men and women have we never heard of, because instead of being inspired by their ejection from school, left with their spirits crushed?

Moreover, the powerful classical idea that education is a lifelong personal pursuit, worthwhile for its own sake, also lost in the feverish race to be in the top 5%. A better educated society is a more thoughtful society, yet the O-level + CSE system failed to foster creativity and engagement in our cultural life.

(iv) O-levels failed to prepare children for modern society.
Derived from a nineteenth century perception of what an undergraduate would need to know, the narrowness of the O-level curriculum was failing to equip children with the knowledge and skills needed for the world of work.

Moreover, the dominant method of assessment - timed, written examinations, with no modern tools or reference sources allowed - meant that an O-level grade was decided on a single day, enabling children to cram beforehand, without it mattering how much they remembered a week later.

Intermittently reductive and tricksy, O-levels failed to inculcate a spirit of independent inquiry. O-levels also failed to rigorously assess proficiency in the kinds of challenges met in modern working environments: dealing with multiple sources, handling messy data, sustained work over a period of time, collaborative tasks, practical aspects, and so on.

My personal view is that the last thing we should be doing is going back to such a grossly unfair system that lacks the rigorous methods and procedures for assessing the knowledge and skills expected of 21st century schoolchildren, whether they end up as professors, engineers, accountants, plumbers, call centre workers, journalists or members of Parliament. See also what respected education journalist Mike Baker has to say on the history of O-levels.

All that said, however, it's a good moment to look back at O-levels and ask whether anything vital has been lost in the transition to GCSEs, and whether there are ways in which British examinations at 16 can be improved.

So I have a few questions.

Image: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by teaeff

1. Are we really best served by GCSE grades D, E, F and G?

We have got into the habit of referring to "good passes" at GCSE, because we know that there is a huge difference between someone achieving a grade A* in design and technology, and someone achieving a grade G. In one sense that's fine: surely it's better to get a lower grade than nothing at all to show for years of schooling?

But in a typical GCSE, about a third of children get grades D or below. How useful are such grades in practice?

Firstly, grades such as F or G are rather demeaning for the child: A simple "fail" can be portrayed to oneself, family and friends as a near miss that you should be able to put right with a retake; whereas a grade F or G seems to imply that's your level. It must also be terribly demotivating for children who are stuck for two years in a set in which the best they can realistically hope for at the end of it is a grade D, or maybe a C if you were arguably in the wrong set to start with.

Secondly, such grades are very confusing for potential employers: Does this E grade mean the applicant got all the questions half right, or half the questions entirely right? Not terribly useful for judging if this person is up to the job.

Thirdly, these lower grades are damaging for the GCSE as a qualification: The kudos of "having a GCSE" is devalued because of the huge gap between A* and G. And needing to assess down to a grade G means questions have to be included that discriminate at that level, e.g. the infamous "To look at the moon would you use a microscope or a telescope?" question.

But here's the really worrying thing. As Chris Cook in the FT shows, the poorer the household, the greater the chances of a child getting these lower grades. In other words, the education system is continuing to reproduce inequality rather than challenging it.

When he made his statement to the Commons last week, Michael Gove said of this analysis

I have had a look at the Financial Times analysis and think that it suffers from one thing: it itself is a prisoner of the culture of low aspiration which we are tackling.

Meanwhile, the first question to Gove in the Commons was from a fellow Conservative, Graham Stuart, the Chair of the Education Select Committee. He said:

I welcome improved rigour, stretch and achievement for our most able pupils, but the central problem facing this country is not about its most able pupils but about the lowest-performing and, all too often, the poorest. Can the Secretary of State tell us: How will these changes and proposals improve the outcomes for the lowest deciles of achievement in our population? Socially and economically, we cannot afford the tail that we have inherited from the Labour party.

Gove's answer was:

My Honourable Friend makes a very good point. One of the principal problems with our education system is not only that it has fallen behind other nations, but that it is one of the most inequitable, stratified and segregated. The way in which we tackle that is not by dumbing down on qualifications, but by raising expectations at every level.

I have an idea that might help raise expectations.

Most GCSEs are tiered anyway. How about formalising the tiers by having "Foundation" and "Higher" versions of each GCSE? A Foundation GCSE would contain the kinds of things that we expect every school-leaver to know and to be able to do. For each subject, everyone takes Foundation as soon as they're ready, possibly even at the start of secondary school, rather than loading all the stress onto the end of Year 11. And restrict grading to "Pass", "Fail" and "Distinction", to keep things simple. If you fail, you retake until you pass. Then you move onto the Higher GCSE, unless you've reached 16, in which case you might choose to do a BTEC.

This is good for employers because it tells them what students with a Foundation GCSE should be able to do, rather than trying to work out whether that E grade means they got all the questions half right or if they got half the questions entirely right. This is good for children, because they get to aim for a qualification that shows they can do something, rather than a grade E, F or G that everyone seems to presume means they're not very bright. It's also good for children, parents and teachers because passing Foundation GCSE indicates who's now ready to take the Higher GCSE, and passing Higher GCSE indicates who's now ready to take a BTEC or an A-level. When the school-leaving age increases to 18, it will be vital to maintain this sense of motivation and progression.

Of course it might be objected that this is simply reintroducing CSEs by the back door. However, the differences are:

(i) Criterion-referencing instead of norm-referencing
Children are assessed on what they can do, rather than on how well everyone else is doing.

(ii) No writing off
Instead of two very different qualifications, it's two syllabi within the same system, and as soon as you've achieved one you can start studying for the next. There's no dividing the sheep from the goats at an early age. The assumption is that everyone will get Foundation eventually, just that it might take some children longer than others.

(iii) No devaluing of technical and vocational education
Unlike the O-level, a Higher GCSE doesn't force people into an academic strait-jacket. As now, it can lead to a BTEC or an A-level.

(iv) Preparation for modern society
There's no return to the narrow curriculum and limited assessment methods of the O-level.

Incidentally, our children are already "among the most tested in the world". I think if this idea of a Foundation GCSE is taken up it's only fair that we drop the remaining SATs. These bureaucratic tests serve little educational purpose for children, parents or teachers. Their role as a means to assess schools could easily be replaced by some kind of sampling.

2. Do improved grades imply standards are falling?

Every year when the results come out, there are predictable reactions:

If the grades are up, it must be grade inflation; so standards are falling. "Harumph! Exams were harder in my day..."
If the grades are down, it must be because of delinquency and trendy teachers; so standards are falling. "Harumph! Need some discipline..."
If the grades are much the same, Britain is being overtaken by third-world countries because schools are complacent and stagnating. "Harumph! Teach 'em the basics, I say, instead of these airy-fairy projects..."
Whatever happens to the grades, teachers and parents are very proud of all the hard work their children have put in.

So are exams getting easier? There seems to be insufficient research going on in the area to be able to tell, as Ben Goldacre explains.

Image: © freshidea - Fotolia.com

Moreover, because of criterion-referencing it's entirely possible for grades to increase year-on-year, as teachers discover improved ways to teach tricky topics, as government investment in schools pays off, as individual children are steered away from qualifications that experience suggests they're likely to fail, and as each successive generation of parents is better educated than the last. In fact, isn't this state of affairs what we would want in an ideal world? We want education to improve, don't we?!

However Gove and other educational hawks interpret improved results as evidence of falling standards. In their view, a "standard" is a criterion that determines a grade based not on educational attainment ("You get an A grade if you know and can do blah, blah, blah...") but on national percentiles ("You get an A grade if you're in the top 10% of the country."). This view is grounded in a philosophy of traditionalist conservatism, which emphasises the need for hierarchy and order in society.

No wonder they are shocked when the rest of the country welcomes improved results.

In a norm-referenced system, if education is improving, the proportions of children getting each grade remain fixed. So if we can't tell from the results if education is improving (or declining), what do you do? You can't tell by looking to see if the raw scores are higher: this might just mean the paper was too easy. Instead, you set a sample of children exams from previous years, see how they do, and compare with the current year.

In a criterion-referenced system, the idea that someone who did particularly well on a 1951 O-level should necessarily be as good at fulfilling the wider demands of a 2012 GCSE (and vice versa) is absurd. So again, there is a big mismatch of expectations.

I am amazed at how politicians seem so unwilling to take a position that international comparisons of children's test performances really don't assess all that's important for 21st century society. If we actually want Britain to be up at the top of the maths league table with South Korea, let's reduce the maths curriculum to the content of the international tests, and ditch all the stuff that we think is valuable for the well-educated citizen, the prospective professional, the budding Richard Branson, or the aspiring Cambridge wrangler.

Or maybe if we want to be at the top of the science league table with Finland, we should follow their model by abolishing Key Stage 1, league tables, school inspections, streaming, and national examinations before the age of 18. The lessons we draw from other countries need careful examination and do not necessarily travel well.

In fact I think we have pretty good and well-known evidence that GCSE standards can't be too bad: The proportion of young people who go to university is well over 40% now, up over a third from the last days of O-levels. Maybe university standards are falling as well, and we're all getting dumber and dumberer. ;-)

Anyway before we undertake a monumentally huge upheaval in our school system, I suggest we need rock solid evidence for the claim that standards are falling.

3. Should we make GCSEs more rigorous?

Separate from the issue of whether standards are falling, should we make GCSEs more rigorous anyway?

The meaning of "rigorous" needs some clarification. Does it refer to the worth of available GCSEs, to the quality of syllabi, to the difficulty of getting higher grades, or to the methods used to assess students? To all of the above? Or to something else?

(i) the worth of available GCSEs

GCSEs in "Leisure and Tourism", "Physical Education", "Hairdressing" or "Media Studies" are an anathema to some people. Not just woolly content, they would say, such qualifications are not fit for academic study, and allowing such GCSEs misleads children into thinking such qualifications will be taken seriously.

Although I only made up one of the example GCSEs in the previous paragraph, I think such criticisms can fall into the trap of imagining that only academic qualifications are worthwhile. Moreover, I am sure that experts in these fields can devise a curriculum for 16-year-olds every bit as demanding as History or French, although obviously demanding in quite different ways.

Nevertheless, I would question whether such qualifications are appropriate at 16. If (as I think) it's desirable for all children to study English Language (plus, where appropriate, Welsh or other national language), English Literature, Maths, one or more science subject, History, a modern foreign language, one or more design and technology subject, and one or more expressive arts subject, there's a danger of overloading children with exams. Vocational subjects and subjects that aren't considered core might well be appropriate as part of the 16-18 curriculum.

(ii) the quality of syllabi

Some people have the idea that GCSEs have woolly content like the episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa's math class is encouraged to reflect "How do numbers make you feel? What does a plus sign smell like? Is the number 7 odd, or just different?".

Given the range of very serious stakeholders in GCSE syllabi - industry, professional organisations, universities, politicians - this particular concern seems unlikely to be true.

"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else."

On the other hand, a more common belief among educational hawks is that a high quality qualification should have a curriculum that is rooted in a classical grammar school education, emphasising theoretical knowledge over applied; memorisation and proficiency over understanding; utility over creativity. GCSEs do not have these emphases.

While few hawks propose the idea that 2013 exams should be testing the same knowledge and skills as 1951 O-levels, there is a perception among many hawks that, for example, the memorisation of "kings and queens", dates of battles, and similar facts constitutes an innately more educational value than understanding the causes of the First World War. They see being able to reproduce a diagram of the inner ear as more challenging and lasting than knowledge of current limitations of gene therapies. They see an encyclopaedic knowledge of cloud types as a better test of ability than understanding the controversies surrounding climate change.

I personally don't buy any of that, but it's right that stakeholders explain their reasoning in detail in particular subjects.

(iii) the difficulty of getting higher grades

As noted above, staunch advocates of norm-referencing are almost inevitably going to be dissatisfied with the level of difficulty with which higher grades are obtained under a criterion-referenced system. So they will need to make a case for going back to norm-referencing, rather than giving credit where credit is due. See James Atherton's arguments, for example.

I've outlined earlier why I think such arguments are problematic. In particular, requiring that a fixed proportion of children fail exams makes no sense to me. Melanie Phillips would describe my attitude as "All Must Have Prizes". On the contrary, I as a taxpayer have just paid for 12 years of education for these children: As a simple matter of accounting for this money, I want to know what they can do, and I want them to have a certificate that tells employers what they can do. I don't want them to have just a cruddy bit of paper that says "FAIL" and a crushed attitude to learning likely to return the country to the levels of prosperity we saw in the Dark Ages.

Nevertheless, and here I'm agreeing with Gove, I suggest that whether assessment is criterion-referenced or norm-referenced, if education were improving each year we wouldn't actually want to "maintain standards" at all. We'd want to tweak the curriculum each year to include new demands that would stretch those at the top. Otherwise this would eventually lead to a situation in which tiny differences between marks mean the difference between an A and a fail.

Of course, year-by-year employers, schools and universities would want certain kinds of consistency. You wouldn't want wild shifts. How would the sudden introduction of O-levels (thus automatically requiring a large increase in the proportion that fail) help employers, who would suddenly be faced with a barrage of applicants who think they're rubbish at everything and have the grades to prove it? Instead, I would argue we would want to prevent results skewing upwards: not by unfairly giving lower grades for the same answers, but by making the curriculum very slightly harder as national educational attainment improves.

In a sense, this process probably already goes on to some extent, as ideas that used to be at the cutting-edge of research (quantum theory, representations of women, economic interpretations of history, say) get taught at undergraduate level, and then (in some form) at A-level, and maybe even become part of everyday knowledge. But perhaps we need to hear more about such changes to the curriculum: Anything that makes the curriculum harder needs to be clearly flagged, to ensure that those who use lower results to bash teachers are aware.

(iv) the methods used to assess students

Earlier I will have slightly startled educational hawks by referring to O-levels as lacking rigour in assessing proficiency in the kinds of challenges met in modern working environments. The hawks' perennial complaint is that the most rigorous assessment is that timed, written exam.

GCSEs make it too easy for students, they say, because a range of assessment methods are used, including coursework ("Their parents do the work, or it's copied off the internet or their friends."); calculators ("The calculator gives them all the answers! These days they can't even add up for themselves."); having source material in the exam ("They're allowed to cheat by bringing in all their books"); scope for interpretation ("Examiners give marks for any old rubbish, and get sacked if they're too strict."); and multiple choice ("You can do it randomly, and still get a C!")

However, I'm very happy that how we're testing in exams is much closer to the reality of work. How is restricting maths and science solely to problems that don't require calculators useful? How kind of engineer isn't allowed to refer to the manual? Do all historians agree with each other? There is also a lot of ignorance around about contemporary assessment. Coursework is often done under very controlled conditions. There's also a mental arithmetic component to Maths GCSE. One duff question ridiculed in a newspaper doesn't mean all the questions are duff.

In my view, the current, almost universal, clamour for a single exam board is a bit of a red herring. It's vital to the success of exam boards that they maintain their integrity, so I've no doubt that they and Ofqual have strict procedures in place to check the validity of assessments and the consistency between boards and over time. A "race to the bottom" would be madness, and so I doubt it's happening. And if it is, it should be stopped. But, in any case, I would hope the curriculum can adapt, as society becomes better educated, as job demands change, and as academic knowledge advances. A single exam board simply restricts choice, without changing anything about year-on-year consistency or comparability across subjects.

And as for the now ubiquitous claim that Ofqual has provided evidence of a "gradual decline in standards" and that "not enough has been demanded of students", well I'm afraid that's just a politician's clever spin.

There could arguably be more openness by Ofqual and exam boards about instances when assessment arrangements have had to be improved. However, I can quite understand the temptation to keep confidential what is likely to be shamelessly misrepresented in newspapers!

So might there be other ways to increase rigour in relation to assessment methods? Yes. Much of office life these days relies on effective use of the internet: searching, weighing up sources, and dealing with unknowns or incommensurable systems. Yet using these important skills in current exams would, of course, constitute cheating. But just as the invention of the steel-nibbed pen meant that assessing handwriting with a quill pen became irrelevant, and just as the invention of the calculator meant that the slide rule no longer features in exams, so too we need to consider how it is possible to assess accurately and fairly if the internet were to hand.

To be honest, I can see many challenges for such an idea, and they might be insuperable. However, I'd suggest assessment is not rigorous if it simply assesses what is easy to assess, rather than assessing what we expect of an educated person in a modern society.

4. Should we be using qualifications at 16 to judge capacity for university study?

One criticism of GCSEs is that by failing to discriminate at the upper end, they fail to give universities sufficient information about suitability for undergraduate study.

Image: CC BY-SA 2.0 by jameskm03

I think this view has some merit. Qualifications at 16 are trying to do a variety of things: to provide evidence of what an individual has learned; to motivate and reward hard work in the preceding years; to ensure a good basic education for as many as possible; to act as a focus for inculcating social norms; to guide career choices; to fulfil requirements for certain occupations and for further study; to provide information on the performance of schools and teachers; and to help schools and teachers improve their methods.

That's a lot of diverse purposes, and I bet I've forgotten a few important ones! Cambridge University says "Our research shows that post-16 examination performance is a much better predictor of degree success". I don't think this is any surprise, given these diverse purposes, and given that for many adolescents the preceding years may well have been emotionally turbulent.

So whether we should be trying to make qualifications at 16 a better predictor of suitability for university, I'm not so sure. What's more, I'm not convinced it's necessary. A-levels are designed to have that function, and a big reason why a university might use O-levels rather than A-levels to make judgements is that universities are required to make judgements before A-level results are known.

There have been repeated sincere attempts to try to solve this problem of university applications, and there is not space here to explore the issues, but in my view this is a problem that needs addressing. We know that A-level students from poorer backgrounds and from state schools are under-represented at the top universities, and one of the main reasons often cited by universities is that they don't apply in the first place. Application after the A-level results are known creates a more level playing field, in which the basis for deciding where to apply is not predicted grades, or what students from the year above did, or where parents went, or how well connected the teachers are... but the students' actual grades.

We currently have a bizarre system in which we say we want students from poorer backgrounds and from state schools to aim higher, but we fail to give them the one thing that could boost their confidence into doing that: their results.

5. Some further questions

There are few other questions I'd like to ask about qualifications at 16. For example:

What should we do to improve the status of technical and vocational pathways? As the FT says: "In England the path for a would-be university student is clear and schools know how to guide pupils down it. But for others there is little help and too often even less respect for non-academic qualifications."

Is "5 GCSEs at A*-C" the best measure to use of school performance?

What evidence is there that academy schools or free schools get better results, separate from the benefits of the additional money they are given compared with other schools?

Should teachers, as professionals, not have a role to play in helping shape new education proposals such as Gove's? I have a gut feeling that real educational improvement comes from enabling teachers to try new ways of teaching, not from dramatic new initiatives by ambitious Education ministers.

How important are teachers' qualifications? There have been claims in the past that teachers with better degrees (in their subject) make better teachers, or that requiring masters degrees will improve teaching. What evidence is there for these kinds of claims?

Concluding thoughts

I've outlined here why I think a return to O-levels would be a mistake, but I've also tried to identify a few ways it might be possible to improve GCSEs.

My view is that O-levels were designed to filter children, not to assess capabilities. They were consequently responsible for writing off most of the population; for holding back technical and vocational education, and for failing to prepare children for modern society. I have singled out norm-referencing as particularly pernicious. Instead of trying to artificially stratifying society, it's much better to give credit where credit is due.

I agree with Graham Stuart that the major educational challenge for the country is how to improve outcomes for the long tail of performance in the population. Even after the massive (and welcome) investment by Labour, our education system still seems to be reproducing economic and social inequalities, and we all want to know what to do about that.

Among the suggestions for improvements, I've proposed...

turning the lower GCSE grades into a Foundation certificate, to be taken by all children;
abolishing the remaining SATs;
using A-level results rather than O-level results or A-level predictions as the basis for university applications;
consulting teachers when big changes are proposed.

As with all big proposals, there should be piloting and evaluation before any decision is taken.

Incidentally, although it's a bit unfair on Gove, here's an entertaining performance by Ed Balls when he was Education Secretary in 2009:

GCSEs: Ladies and gentlemen, we are being played by a spin doctor to rival Alastair Campbell

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 05:18:00 +0000

When Ofqual's regular reviews of GCSE subjects find no significant differences between exam boards or over time, there's no little or no publicity, because such findings don't confirm the angrily-held prejudices of the vocal educational hawks who work for the right-wing press.

Two months ago, however, the new Chief Executive of Ofqual, Glenys Stacey, appointed by Michael Gove last year, began making big headlines about grade inflation being confirmed.

For GCSE, her claims were made on the basis of:

(i) A comparison of Biology in 2003 and 2008: a review over two days by subject specialists of the Biology specifications, assessment materials and samples of student work.

(ii) A very similar comparison of Chemistry.

These reviews were conducted and acted upon in 2009, but only published this year. Both reviews identify examples of good practice and bad practice, things to be tightened up, changes already underway, and the like.

The findings from the Biology review were:

The introduction of How Science Works resulted in significant changes in content, with more stress on methodology, applications, implications and issues, and less coverage of content in other areas. However, this change did not affect the demand of the qualification overall.

The increased use of short papers containing multiple-choice and short-answer questions reduced the demand of written assessments in 2008 when compared with 2003. This also led to discrimination between students becoming more difficult and in particular more limited opportunities for A-grade students to demonstrate their abilities in relation to higher-order skills such as organising information and analysing and interpreting complex data.

The report fed into changes made to the Biology specifications later that year. Problem identified; problem dealt with.

Meanwhile, the findings from the Chemistry review were:

Changes made to the nature and emphasis of the assessment objectives (AOs) – for example increasing the proportion of assessment allocated to application of knowledge and understanding (AO2) – made the qualification more demanding in 2008 than it was in 2003.

The inclusion of How Science Works in the 2008 assessment objectives – introducing concepts such as understanding how scientific evidence is collected, analysed and evaluated in terms of validity and reliability when presenting and justifying conclusions (AO1 and AO3) – made the qualification more demanding in 2008 than it was in 2003.

Variations in the nature of schemes of assessment, for example the relative weighting of external and internal assessment, and the styles and types of assessment instruments (such as type of question or type of task) mean that students are assessed against different combinations of the AOs, which may have an impact on the demand of the qualification experienced by different students.

Again the report fed into changes to the Chemistry specifications in 2009. In particular "The aims and learning outcomes in the new criteria are written specifically for chemistry, rather than being generic across all GCSE science subjects."

These reviews look to have been thorough and useful, helping to keep standards comparable. Hardly earth-shattering, but valuable work. Despite the differences between GCSE and O-levels, there would have been quite similar reviews of O-level exams.

So let's look at how these sober findings were reported (I'm including the mentions of A-level, for completeness, but I'm only discussing GCSEs here).

Sunday Telegraph:

Glenys Stacey, the chief executive of Ofqual, said that after more than a decade of “persistent grade inflation” in exams, which was “impossible to justify”, the value of A-levels and GCSEs have been undermined.

To restore public confidence, wholesale changes were needed to the structure of exams and the culture within exam boards, she warned.

It is the regulator’s first admission that the continuous rise in results has been fuelled in part by the cumulative effect of examiners giving students the “benefit of the doubt”.

... "If you look at the history, we have seen persistent grade inflation for these key qualifications for at least a decade,” she said. “The grade inflation we have seen is virtually impossible to justify and it has done more than anything, in my view, to undermine confidence in the value of those qualifications."

BBC:

GCSEs and A-levels in geography and science are easier than they were 10 years ago, the exams watchdog warns.

... A DfE spokesman said: "Ofqual's reports show evidence of a gradual decline in standards and that the exams system as a whole falls short of commanding the level of confidence we need.

"In particular these reports show that in recent years not enough has been demanded of students, and that they are not being asked to demonstrate real depth and breadth of knowledge.

The Guardian:

GCSE and A-level exams have become easier over the past few years, a review has found, prompting the government to warn of a gradual decline in standards.

The Daily Mail:

A-levels and GCSEs have got easier over the past decade, an official analysis has confirmed.

A series of reports by Ofqual, the exam watchdog, has found that science and geography papers are ‘softer’ and ‘less demanding’.

Teenagers now have more multiple choice questions and papers with less scientific content.

The watchdog warns that the dumbing down is leaving pupils ill-prepared for university and means there is less opportunity for good students to shine.
...
Damian Hinds, a Tory member of the Commons education select committee, said: ‘I doubt there is anyone left who will be surprised to hear that standards were eroded under Labour.

‘Many ways were found to make the results tables look better, and many young people given bad advice to take more “accessible” subjects and supposed GCSE equivalents.

‘Now we know that even within these traditional subjects papers became easier.

‘In the end the people it lets down are the students who worked so hard for those exams, and it is right for young people’s sake that this government is determined to ensure rigour in exams.'

The Daily Telegraph:

GCSEs and A-levels in key subjects have become easier following a 10-year dumbing down of exam papers, according to the standards watchdog.

Ofqual said that changes made to tests over the last decade have “reduced the demand” of qualifications taken by hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren.

In a series of damning reports, it emerged that teenagers were facing more multiple-choice exams and short, structured questions that prevented bright pupils displaying their knowledge.

Many exams had been stripped of core academic content, it emerged, with students required to study less of the syllabus to pass.

The Independent:

... GCSEs have, without question, been devalued by rampant grade inflation and ever-easier questions.

So we start with a calm, sensible qualitative comparison between two years, for Biology and Chemistry, in which some things got a bit harder and some things got a bit easier during a period of change in the curriculum. And the things that were wrong were put right.

But we end with a frenzied conclusion by the news media that there's been a "10-year dumbing down" of all GCSEs and "rampant grade inflation". When someone as even-handed as Stephen Tall believes "the reality is that [GCSEs] are easier than a generation ago", you know that this is a truth now firmly lodged in the consciousness of the political classes.

And lo and behold, just a few weeks later, Michael Gove rides in to save our children by announcing the abolition of GCSEs.

But you know what? Even if there were evidence (which there isn't) of rampant grade inflation, exam boards slashing standards to attract business, examiners selling answers on street corners, and gerbils being awarded 15 grade As at A-level, the answer still wouldn't be O-levels. The answer would be to regulate the exam boards properly.

Ofqual had been doing that up until April this year, but the lack of evidence of declining standards did not fit with Gove's desire to roll back the educational clock to his youth. And suddenly "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" (to coin a phrase).

Look at each of the statements in the media reports above, particularly the quotes from the "DfE spokesman". Observe the distinct lack of evidence.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are being spun by a master.

The Chancellor's Brain is Borked

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 17:47:00 +0000

Most people agree that action is needed on climate change. But most people also don't want a huge tax hike to pay for that action. Or a larger energy bill. Or a wind turbine at the end of their garden. Or a P45 because their employer is struggling to remain competitive while cutting carbon emissions. So what's to be done?

An inhospitable political climate The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has quickly succumbed to the simplistic idea encapsulated in the image below. "We're not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business", he says. For him, it's a simple choice between doing the right things for the planet and doing the right things for the economy. Environmental considerations are a burden, and the economy is of overriding importance. Hence the cut in support for wind energy, solar energy, and energy efficiency. He has also been trying to back out of Britain's commitments on cutting carbon emissions, while increasing subsidies for the most energy-intensive, carbon-polluting businesses. The fossil fuel lobby exerts a powerful hold on most parts of the Government, and on many MPs, Labour as well as Conservative.

Image: © lucky - Fotolia.com

Meanwhile (against all the evidence) the talking points of the fossil fuel lobby have become commonplaces: that green subsidies are why our energy bills are so large; that wind turbines cost more energy than they produce; that wind turbine output is too variable for the National Grid; that turbine blades chop up bats and birds; that offshore wind energy is obscenely costly; that solar energy isn't viable in Britain; that the planet is cooling, not warming; that gas, coal and oil can easily be made clean; that shale gas is the answer to all our problems; that renewables can only produce a small fraction of the country's energy needs; and so on.

At the same time, the nuclear industry also exerts a strange hold over Government. Massive public subsidies for past and future nuclear power plants continue. Somehow subsidies for nuclear are fine; subsidies for renewables are not. And somehow (again against all the evidence) the timescales for new nuclear are going to plug the energy gap and cut emissions in time.

I'm not going to debunk all of these absurd anti-green myths here. Folks with more scientific knowledge have done that brilliantly elsewhere, much better than I could. Suffice it to say that there are good economic reasons why the alleged choice between the planet and the economy is a false dichotomy. Stimulating jobs and growth through green initiatives that generate energy and cut emissions will put the economy on a faster path to sustained prosperity.

All of the anti-green chaff distracts from the real discussions there need to be about questions such as...

What levels of support for the various renewable and energy efficiency initiatives give Britain the best economic and environmental returns?
Where is best to site turbines and energy storage facilities?
Which house-building, transport and broadband initiatives will help address both immediate social needs and longer-term energy efficiency?

And in a way, George Osborne has a point: The Stern Report suggested that the action needed might cost up to 2% of GDP. That's not going to win elections.

No, my purpose here in highlighting the Chancellor's attitude and the public mood is not to trash them, but to observe that the political climate is inimical to the action that is urgently needed to save the planet. Moreover, many of the public who accept the need for action seem to think that we can wait until someone comes up with some great technological solution, or that the US and China will sort it out eventually, or that the problem will somehow just go away. Or they just put the problem out of their minds: not so much apathetic as distracted.

This is not for want of attempts to convince the public. The compelling evidence of the risk of a runaway greenhouse effect did not break the stranglehold of denialism and passivity, perhaps because it seemed the stuff of disaster movies rather than reality.

Next, the equally compelling evidence of increasing risks of storms, floods, droughts, desertification and sea level rises also failed to break through into public concerns. Maybe it seemed too remote: in time, geographically, probabilistically.

Subsequently, alerting people to the financial costs of failing to act similarly got nowhere. For every £1 we fail to invest in cleaner technology before 2020, we'd need to spend an additional £4.30 after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions [IEA, 2011]. But no dice: a bird in the hand, and all that.

Now we'll have to wait to see whether people are convinced by the argument that the way out of the economic mire is in promoting green jobs and green growth. I'm not sure this will get through to people either: mindsets are hardening around a austerity-stimulus dichotomy that fails to take account of the interrelatedness of the economy, infrastructure and carbon emissions.

And while there are mass protests on the streets about pensions and about certain companies' tax bills, the idea that anyone but a hardcore of green activists would protest about the Government's failure to protect the planet from environmental disaster is seen as slightly wacky.

When Friends of the Earth is wasting its energies during Rio+20 attacking the leading green advocate in the British Government, you know that this inhospitable political climate is not changing any time soon.

So what's to be done?

Germany gets 20% of its electricity from renewables [Guardian, 30 May], the UK under 10%. What's striking though is who owns the means of production. In Germany, over 65% of renewable energy capacity is owned by individuals or communities: typically home solar panels and wind turbines in farmer's fields. In the UK it was less than 10% in 2010 (although this will have increased slightly in the last 18 months, because of the great success of the Feed-In Tariffs scheme, now sadly hobbled).

So British homes and businesses remain under the thumb of the big energy companies, while a huge number of Germans get to control their own energy, get cheaper energy, cut emissions, and make money on the leftover electricity they feed into the grid.

In Britain we like to grumble about our energy bills (driven higher by the rising cost of imported gas) but quite reasonably object to energy companies trying to plonk turbines down in local beauty spots. Why should we bear the environmental downsides of those turbines if the only benefit we'll see is maybe a small decrease in our bills in a few years time, shared out across the whole country, and only if the energy companies are kind enough to pass on the savings to consumers?

Instead, we can drive those energy bills down by owning local turbines ourselves and reaping the benefits.

The Chairman of the Commons energy committee, Conservative MP Tim Yeo, was almost there in his suggestion that local communities should be "bribed" to accept local wind farms.

But getting thrown a few scraps from the big business trough doesn't sound as great to me as your neighbourhood controlling its own energy, getting cheaper energy, cutting emissions, and making money on the leftover electricity that's fed into the grid.

Instead of so much human energy being wasted in emotionally charged planning battles between electricity companies and concerned residents desperately fighting damage to their neighbourhoods, residents can make their own decisions on where (or whether) to site wind turbines.

And not just that: once local councils realize the benefits of supporting these kinds of local initiatives, perhaps funded by taking a small cut of the income, who knows what innovations in energy generation and efficiency may result? For example, maybe the council would choose to invest in offshore wind farms, as the premium its residents are willing to pay to avoid the local environmental cost of onshore wind [Bassi, Bowen and Fankhauser, 2012]. New advanced modelling of the economic impacts show that, despite the propaganda, offshore wind has huge benefits for GDP, jobs and trade [Cebr, 2012].

Onshore or offshore, local communities would be seizing the initiative, rather than waiting for self-serving energy companies and fugacious politicians; and this would be the beginnings of a move from passivity to action.

Maybe people will then eventually notice the lack of political will at national level, and demand action.

As some wise fellow once wrote:

"Citizens need to be able to experience both the benefits and costs of their decisions locally, or we will continue blithely down the path towards environmental calamity."

How to save the planet

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 16:54:00 +0000

An inhospitable political climate

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has quickly succumbed to the simplistic idea encapsulated in the above image. "We're not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business", he says. For him, it's a simple choice between doing the right things for the planet and doing the right things for the economy. Environmental considerations are a burden, and the economy is of overriding importance. Hence the cut in support for wind energy, solar energy, and energy efficiency. He has also been trying to back out of Britain's commitments on cutting carbon emissions, while increasing subsidies for the most energy-intensive, carbon-polluting businesses. The fossil fuel lobby exerts a powerful hold on most parts of the Government, and on many MPs, Labour as well as Conservative.

Meanwhile (against all the evidence) the talking points of the fossil fuel lobby have become commonplaces: that green subsidies are why our energy bills are so large; that wind turbines cost more energy than they produce; that wind turbine output is too variable for the National Grid; that turbine blades chop up bats and birds; that offshore wind energy is obscenely costly; that solar energy isn't viable in Britain; that the planet is cooling, not warming; that gas, coal and oil can easily be made clean; that shale gas is the answer to all our problems; that renewables can only produce a small fraction of the country's energy needs; and so on.

At the same time, the nuclear industry also exerts a strange hold over Government. Massive public subsidies for past and future nuclear power plants continue. Somehow subsidies for nuclear are fine; subsidies for renewables are not. And somehow (again against all the evidence) the timescales for new nuclear are going to plug the energy gap and cut emissions in time.

I'm not going to debunk all of these absurd anti-green myths here. Folks with more scientific knowledge have done that brilliantly elsewhere, much better than I could. Suffice it to say that there are good economic reasons why the alleged choice between the planet and the economy is a false dichotomy. Stimulating jobs and growth through green initiatives that generate energy and cut emissions will put the economy on a faster path to sustained prosperity.

All of the anti-green chaff distracts from the real discussions there need to be about questions such as...

What levels of support for the various renewable and energy efficiency initiatives give Britain the best economic and environmental returns?
Where is best to site turbines and energy storage facilities?
Which house-building, transport and broadband initiatives will help address both immediate social needs and longer-term energy efficiency?

So what's to be done?

Instead, we can drive those energy bills down by owning local turbines ourselves and reaping the benefits.

"Citizens need to be able to experience both the benefits and costs of their decisions locally, or we will continue blithely down the path towards environmental calamity."

Image: © lucky - Fotolia.com

Exeter's burning theatre dreams

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:03:00 +0000

Today's Express and Echo contains three letters noting that Exeter City Council has plans for the redevelopment of the decaying Bus Station site: plans that do not include the possibility of a 1000-seater theatre for the city.

Before considering the merits of this proposal, one should note Exeter's poignant history in relation to theatre. Three of its theatres, all situated close to the current Bus Station site, were destroyed by fire in the 19th century.

A tragic history

As the excellent Exeter Memories website recounts, The New Theatre in Bedford Street was very successful, one highlight being Edmund Kean's production of The Merchant of Venice. But the building lasted only 30 years, destroyed in 1820 when a gas-lit chandelier set fire to the rafters.
	The New Theatre (1787-1820), Bedford Street

This building was replaced by the first Exeter theatre to be called The Theatre Royal. As with many Victorian theatres, the new invention limelight was installed. Alas, the oxygen-hydrogen mix needed for limelight was a big fire hazard, and the building was destroyed by fire in 1885.
	The first Theatre Royal (1821-1885), Bedford Street

A new 1500-seater Theatre Royal, designed by Charles Phipps, was built at the top of Longbrook Street. This building had a short life, and a tragic end. The story of the worst theatre fire in British history is told at Exeter Memories, the BBC and the Arthur Lloyd website. 186 died.
	The second Theatre Royal (1886-7), Longbrook Street

The Exeter Theatre Fire of 1887 was one of the events that led to Parliament introducing strict fire regulations for all British theatres. The legal requirement for a safety curtain is an example.
	The Exeter Theatre Fire of 1887

The replacement theatre, seating around 1000, was built in the same place in Longbrook Street, with Sir Henry Irving providing input into the design, and it opened in 1889.
	The third Theatre Royal (1889-1962), Longbrook Street

The Arthur Lloyd website notes:

"This, the third Theatre Royal in Exeter, had a long and successful career, staging everything from Music Hall, Drama, and Ballet to Pantomime...

However, like so many Theatres around the Country, by the 1950's the Theatre was converted for use as a Cinema and by 1962 it had closed down completely.

The Theatre was demolished the same year, 1962, and an office building was constructed on the site."

In this potted history of Exeter theatre destruction, we should also probably note the building that stood for over 100 years where Boots is now, very close to the location of the Theatre Royal. Concerts were held there 1820-1908, when it was known as the Royal Public Rooms. As The Hippodrome, it was a 1000-seater theatre 1908-1929, a music hall venue where Charlie Chaplin is said to have performed. It then became the Plaza Cinema, but was destroyed in the Blitz of 4 May 1942.

Victoria Hall (1873-1919) in Queen Street had a similar changing function from 2000-seater public hall to theatre to cinema, before burning down in 1919. Meanwhile the 1000-seater Queen's Hall (1912-40) in Paris Street became the Palladium cinema in 1921 and didn't survive the Blitz.

Incidentally, not really theatre, but looking at the variety of venues used in Exeter for pop and rock, I was amazed to discover visits by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Dusty Springfield, Roy Orbison and the Walker Brothers.

Today's Exeter theatre

In 2012 we have no large theatre, but in some ways a more flourishing theatre scene than ever:

The Northcott, on the Exeter campus, 500 seats

The Corn Exchange, 500 seats

The Barnfield, 300 seats

The Phoenix, 200 seats

The Cygnet New Theatre, 100 seats

The Bike Shed, 60 seats

Tomorrow's Exeter theatre?

Lyn Gardner of The Guardian wrote in April, in an article entitled "The future of theatre? Look towards Exeter"...

"Exeter offers an opportunity to see how a non-building-based producing outfit, Kaleider, led by Seth Honnor, formerly of Theatre Bristol, might deliver a new artistic vision by working in tandem with: existing buildings such as the Northcott and the Phoenix; companies such as Theatre Alibi; young, unfunded upstarts such as the Bike Shed; as well as its University and organisations such as Wide Awake Devon. The money it gets over three years will be used to animate the city (a participatory project called Ancient Sunlight will take place over four days at Easter 2015) and take part in a collaborative artistic conversation with local artists and audiences about the kind of work they want to make and see. The challenges for Kaleider will be considerable, but its successful bid demonstrates that the Arts Council is prepared to be bold. Bravo – and the best of luck."

I'm not sure. I don't think it's an either-or. The productions of Exeter's small theatres happen to suit my tastes. But one of today's letters in the Express and Echo points out that we don't get The Lion King, The Mousetrap or Oliver. Plymouth and Bristol get the big productions and concert orchestras because they have the theatres of the necessary size. Another makes the point that we are already well served by shops and swimming pools. A third recalls the Theatre Royal and its status as a cultural focal point.

The leader of Exeter City Council, Pete Edwards, rejects the idea of a 1000+ seater theatre in Exeter, on the basis that Exeter is too small. He is quoted as saying "We have a big theatre in Plymouth and if we had one similar in Exeter I think it would destroy both."

So on the one hand we have the argument that touring companies wouldn't go to both Exeter and Plymouth, and that audiences would be too small here. And on the other hand, we have the argument that a theatre able to attract national and international touring companies would bring more visitors and prestige to Exeter, and enhance the cultural and economic life of the city in the evening.

Having originally being strongly in favour of a new theatre, I put some of these points on Twitter to Councillor Paul Bull, who is a theatre sound designer. He makes a powerful case that it's not the right time for this kind of initiative.

I'm still not sure: I think it'd be good to have a study of the economic viability. But I'm hoping Paul will blog about the current state of theatre in Exeter at some point, because he knows far more about this subject than I do. But in the meantime, I will leave you with some collated tweets of his thoughts on #Theatre4Exeter:

Storify: Paul Ball on #Theatre4Exeter

Update 24 June:

I've received via Twitter some positive responses to this post. I was particularly pleased to get this from Seth Honnor:

I agree its not either or. Happy to have a proper conversation about both. Maybe here: devotedanddisgruntled.com/events/dd-road… #Theatre4Exeter #DandDR
— Seth Honnor (@sethhonnor) June 23, 2012

I'd also like to highlight Ignite: Exeter's Festival of Theatre 2012, which begins this week.

Come on Lib Dems: what would Birgitte Nyborg do?

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 01:24:00 +0000

I'm often amazed at reviews of episodes of political dramas such as The West Wing, Borgen, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones. Reviewing such episodes without discussing the choices faced by the protagonists is like reviewing Rocky without mentioning boxing. There may be more going on than just the obvious subject matter, but you really ought to pay some attention to what's in front of your nose.

Being fiction, all the available choices would typically have dreadful consequences. But the dramatic resolution would hinge on some wily fellow coming up with a brilliant choice that no-one had thought of. A lot of the fun is in trying (usually failing) to work out what that choice might be.

Sometimes, of course, there is no brilliant choice, and we watch sadly as pragmatic protagonists cope badly with trying to minimise the damage of the least worst compromise, when it might have been more satisfying to go down in a blaze of fiery defiance.

I occasionally wonder whether we are all getting better at political analysis because of the skills we are honing in fictional scenarios.

And then I read the newspapers.

But what I find interesting about problems like the Jeremy Hunt vote, is that we often seem to prefer to present our real life political choices as a little bit more black-and-white than the fiction. It's as if we'd like politics to be a series of Doctor Who-style moral choices in which if we'd only stick to our principles, be nice to odd-looking creatures, trust the Doctor's got some trick with a sonic screwdriver up his sleeve, and be jolly brave, it'll all be alright in the end.

I don't know.

I couldn't live by the morality of the dastardly folk in The West Wing, Borgen, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones. Nor, for that matter, those in Doctor Who. But, at the same time, it doesn't end very well either for
*** !!!! SPOILERS FOR ALL THE ABOVE SERIES !!!! ***
these honourable folk.
*** SPOILERS END ***

On the Hunt issue in particular, I've no idea what Lib Dems should do. (I told you I was bad at guessing the dénouements to political dramas!)

[I'd probably propose an amendment deleting Labour's wording and replace it with something essentially identical that sounds emollient ("... recommend the Secretary of State is given a chance to clear his name by enabling an independent review of the facts by Sir Alex Allan..." or some such) but still achieves the right result, while saving face for the Conservatives ("Following sensible advice from the Deputy Prime Minister, I have decided to support this amendment, in the interests of ensuring that the Secretary of State is treated fairly.") But I doubt such a move would work because I think Cameron is implicated more than we know.]

However I note that it costs Lib Dem bloggers little to take the moral high ground (1, 2, 3), whereas Nick Clegg and the other ministers have the responsibility of living with the realistic consequences of such a stance.

Now Clegg's political nous is far from reliable, in my view; but I hear no-one putting a case for "We must back Cameron on this one, to ensure our more important policies get through".

And that worries me a bit. It shouldn't be beyond the pale to consider such positions.

It's a pragmatic approach, sure. And that can fail badly, as we saw in the case of tuition fees. But sometimes flexibility can help advance the greater good, as I think is illustrated by
*** !!!! SPOILERS FOR ALL THE ABOVE SERIES !!!! ***
these wily folk.
*** SPOILERS END ***

This continuing disconnect - between a smart but idealistic rank-and-file on the one hand, and a pragmatic but fitful leadership on the other - cannot end well.

Update 13 June 3:30pm

I still haven't seen anyone in the Lib Dem blogosphere arguing to vote with the Tories on this one. However, Stephen Tall has put forward the argument that an abstention makes sense because "We should conserve our energies and furrowed brows for issues that matter to folk beyond SW1".

And Stephen also noted sweetly on Twitter:

Fwiw I think abstention meets @LonWon's Birgitte Nyborg criterion, "a brilliant choice that no-one had thought of" :) bit.ly/L6pBlO
— Stephen Tall (@stephentall) June 13, 2012

Meanwhile, backbench MP Adrian Sanders - not a rank-and-file member of course, but far from a slavish follower of edicts from the leadership - has made a similar argument to Stephen's.

It's true that the balance of Lib Dem comments on LDV and Twitter seem to be strongly in favour of voting for Labour's motion, but I think these reasoned articles by Stephen and Adrian may well cause some to allow the value of this point of view on future issues.

The last word though is from Peter Doyle: "Good question! What would Birgitte Nyborg do? I imagine she'd 'invite' Jeremy Hunt to become Interior Minister for Greenland...."

Just in it for the craic: A special #FF

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 20:33:00 +0000

A couple of months ago I celebrated reaching 100 posts on this blog. Today I reached 10,000 tweets.

I'm not going to attempt a "Best of" list for those tweets as I did with the blog posts: it's rather harder to trawl through 10,000 tweets than 100 posts! And the richly context-dependent nature of tweets means I couldn't begin to write some kind of similar narrative of my use of Twitter over the last 3 years.

I had been very sceptical about the value of Twitter when I signed up in April 2009. I would say though that the experience has been both positive and negative:

Positives

Encountering many fascinating and engaging people. I'm following about 260 at the moment.
A great way to find out about interesting articles.
Often very very funny.
Opportunities for engaging in short chats about topical issues, sometimes with the key players too. Great for exploring problems and ideas.
A good way to let potential readers know about this blog (I seem to get a lot of my readers via Twitter).
An outlet for thoughts and questions that I probably couldn't muster the energy to try to craft into a decent-sized blog post.

Negatives

I probably get a little too side-tracked from things I should be doing!
Scratching a sudden intellectual itch via a tweet makes it much less likely that that itch will grow into the urge to write an article for the blog; and blog posts are less ephemeral than tweets.

Some people think that ranting bigots, dullards and spammers are a big problem on Twitter. I haven't found that. I don't have to follow anyone I don't want to, and I can block them if they don't want to go away.

Guido Fawkes: My Part in his Downfall

One of the most hilarious things I've discovered recently about Twitter is that somehow (I've no idea how) I've managed to offend the infamous political blogger Guido Fawkes to the extent that he blocked me at some point in the last three years.

I don't think I've ever followed Guido on Twitter, and I stopped reading his blog years ago, because I think his vituperative and cynical attitude to politicians diminishes the quality and capacity of our political discourse. For the same reason I think it's also unlikely I've written many tweets in which his name appears.

But clearly for a nobody like me to have impinged on the mighty Guido's radar, my contempt for him must have leaked out in an idle tweet. Guido, taking a break from dishing out bile, and eagerly surfing (bless) for delicious morsels of adulation, must have read my tweet and been so tearfully upset that he turned his back on me forever, blocking his dainty ears against someone who briefly failed to ignore him. Poor delicate flower.

Or a minion accidentally leant on the keyboard.

A special #FollowFriday

As noted earlier, one of the things I love about Twitter is discovering people one might otherwise never have encountered.

And the people I follow are an eclectic bunch: Lots of LibDems; true, but also some wonderful Green, Labour, Conservative and non-aligned folk. Lots of interesting Exonians; but loads more from all over England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and further afield. Lots of thinkers; plenty of flâneurs; and most just in it for the craic.

I hate doing the #FF thing, and usually regret it straight away, finding it horrible to appear to single out some over others. But if you're looking for interesting folk to follow, here are a few ideas.

Image: Tig Cóilí I (CC BY-NC 2.0) by Gavin Clarke.

Hunt and BSkyB: What is Labour up to? And what is Cameron hiding?

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 04:51:00 +0000

How to tell a Minister is damaged

Respected political journalist Martin Bright has some tough words about Jeremy Hunt's appearance in front of the Leveson Inquiry.

"Has there ever been such a woeful performance at a public inquiry...?"

"There has rarely been a frontline politician as vain and primping as the Culture Secretary..."

"... smug, grinning complacency..."

"... Hunt has become an icon for the loathsome arrogance that could spell the end of [this] government."

"... Our democracy is diminished by his presence."

Even the headline "What a cowardly Hunt" calls to mind James Naughtie's unfortunate spoonerism when talking about "jeremy Hunt, the Culture secretary".

Now it's true that I recently used the term "Cnuts" to refer to the climate change deniers trying to make it illegal for the sea to rise in North Carolina. But I was legitimately invoking the well-known but possibly apocryphal story about the 11th century king of Denmark, England and Norway commanding the tide to halt.

Nevertheless, aside from Bright's personal loathing for the Minister, the post makes a single specific allegation:

"It is now beyond question that Jeremy Hunt was batting for the Murdochs."

Having listened carefully to the questioning of Hunt at this week's hearing, I don't think this is "beyond question" at all.

It's clear that Hunt wanted the News Corp bid for BSkyB to succeed: Hunt's views on this were well-known before he was given his "quasi-judicial role" in the matter.

But whether Hunt was biased in his decision-making, and whether News Corp received information from Hunt's office that it shouldn't have done, are not proven on the basis of the evidence we have heard so far.

Nor, for that matter, is it proven that Hunt was culpable in the appointment or management of his Special Adviser, or that Hunt misled Parliament.

Yet Labour continue to make all these claims. Why is that?

In one view, Labour has mishandled the attack on Hunt. The smart thing to do would have been not to angrily assert these claims and demand Hunt's resignation, but to keep asking the questions: Was Hunt biased? What information did News Corp receive? How was Adam Smith managed? etc. This keeps the pressure on the Government, aligns Labour with the news media's agenda in finding out the truth, and highlights that Leveson doesn't have the remit to answer these kinds of questions.

Instead, angry assertion and demands for resignation reach high pressure quickly, but then have nowhere to go in the absence of new allegations. You can only get so angry on such an issue. Repeatedly calling for resignation has diminishing impact. Dissipation of pressure is inevitable.

However, there's an alternative view of Labour's strategy here: It's that actually Labour want Hunt to remain in office for as long as possible, wounded and continuing to damage the Government day-by-day by embodying Labour's charge that the Government is out-of-touch, lying and corruptly favouring its friends in big business. On this account, Labour's style of attack is a clever way to drag out the drama.

What's more, with Cameron defending a position of not referring Hunt to Sir Alex Allan, the government's independent adviser on the ministerial code, it's now almost inevitable that Labour will table a motion in the Commons that Hunt should be referred. And this will put the Liberal Democrats in a quandary about how to vote. For such a motion could only pass with Liberal Democrat support.

And of course every fibre of a Liberal Democrat's sinew is likely to be screaming that a referral is the proper course of action: due process, independent, fair, transparent, holding politicians to the highest standards, and so on. There is no doubt LibDems would be supporting such a motion if they were in opposition.

But it's not at all clear that LibDem Ministers can vote for such a Labour motion without causing a crisis for collective responsibility within the Coalition. Moreover, Cameron can quite rightly point to how he kept Vince Cable within the Cabinet for the sake of the Coalition, when Cameron had the grounds and motivation to sack him over the BSkyB bid. Now, Cameron would say, Clegg needs to repay the favour and show loyalty to the Coalition. And even if LibDem Ministers vote against, Conservatives would see LibDem backbenchers voting for Labour's motion as a clear demonstration of breach of faith, and the knives would be out.

So if you wondered why Hunt so preoccupies Labour when they could be focusing on the cuts to public services, that's your answer. Hunt's continuing presence in the Cabinet helps Labour's narrative about an "out-of-touch Government" and about LibDems "sacrificing their principles to prop up the Tories".

In that case, what's stopping Cameron referring Hunt to the independent adviser on the ministerial code? After all, from the outside, that looks to be the easiest option for Cameron. OK, so initially Cameron said he wanted to wait until Hunt gave evidence at Leveson, and when that happened he said no; therefore referring Hunt now would look like weakness. But that's easily got round by Hunt asking Cameron to refer him anyway, in the interests of clearing the air: the request coming from Hunt allows Cameron to act without losing face.

But why say no at all? What's the problem?

It seems to me that Cameron has so far refused to refer Hunt for one of three reasons:

1. Cameron believes Hunt is innocent of the charges. Cameron is loyal to those who are loyal to him. And if Labour get their way on this, the media will taste blood, and Cameron's authority will be damaged.

2. Hunt is a useful lightening rod, protecting Cameron from criticism because of his close relations with Coulson and Brooks.

3. There is some unknown fact, yet to come out, that somehow implicates Cameron in improper behaviour in relation to the bid, but that would likely come out of an inquiry into breaches of the ministerial code over the bid.

In relation to (1), I think the chances of Cameron's authority being diminished more by the act of a referral than by the continuing rejection of an inquiry are small. And I'm sure Cameron must know this, and has a well-honed sense of self-preservation that would overcome the feelings of hurt pride or unfairness that a referral would engender.

(2) is not strong either. The facts about Cameron's connections with Coulson and Brooks are already known. Heat on Hunt does not change those facts.

But (3) is interesting.

I'm reminded of Cameron's body language at a particular moment in the debate following Hunt's statement to the House of Commons on 25 April. The video is here, starting at 13:12:50, Hansard HC Deb, 25 April 2012, c965.

David Rutley, the Conservative MP for Macclesfield asks:

"Will my right honourable Friend confirm to the House that the process he describes was authorised and approved not just by the Cabinet Secretary but by the Permanent Secretary at the DCMS?"

I doubt it was intentional, but this is actually a trickier question than it seems. At this point in the debate, Hunt has not said that the Cabinet Secretary has "authorised and approved" the process.

Hunt has earlier said:

"... when I was appointed to be responsible for the bid, my views about the bid, some of which had been made public, were explicitly reported to the Cabinet Secretary, who decided that it was appropriate for me to take responsibility for it in a quasi-judicial role..."

He has also said that the role of Hunt's Special Adviser was agreed by the Permanent Secretary, but (at this stage in the debate) nothing beyond that.

Hunt replies to Rutley:

"I can confirm that the permanent secretary was closely involved in this very important decision at every stage of the process. In particular, he gave me strong advice about how to ensure that the process was handled objectively and fairly and was seen to be handled objectively and fairly."

It's slightly odd that Hunt doesn't confirm at this point that the Permanent Secretary authorised and approved the process, because later on in the debate Hunt goes on to say that "we set up a process that was approved by the Permanent Secretary". But maybe that's not significant. Hunt appears to be choosing his words particularly carefully in this answer, but stumbles over the word "involved". Is he searching for a strong way to express the importance of the role of the Permanent Secretary in influencing the design and conduct of the process, and decides that "closely involved" is more emphatic than "authorised and approved"? It isn't to backbenchers, judging by the way they return to this point in later questioning. I suspect that in Hunt's eyes, it's not just that the Permanent Secretary approved of arrangements that Hunt made, it's that the Permanent Secretary helped make those arrangements.

However Hunt very noticeably doesn't confirm in his answer that the Cabinet Secretary authorised and approved the process. That's not particularly surprising: the matter of Hunt's suitability for the role is clearly a matter for the Cabinet Secretary, everything else to do with the process would typically be a matter for the Permanent Secretary.

But Cameron's body language during this answer is unusual. First he stares up into the distance, as if thinking back to something.

Then he stares up intently to where Rutley is sitting.

His eyes move back to staring into the distance. And then he sticks out his chin, strokes it and scratches it.

And finally, he puts his chin down and protects his throat, as if threatened.

And then he lowers his chin even more.

The camera does not show him displaying such behaviour at any other moment during the debate.

I might be wrong, but if I had to guess about the nature of "some unknown fact, yet to come out, that somehow implicates Cameron", I'd suggest it has something to do with the Cabinet Secretary.

For me, the key questions remaining after Hunt's testimony are:

Why was a Special Advisor the point of contact between DCMS and News Corp?
Was any information passed inappropriately to News Corp?
Did Hunt mislead the House of Commons over his contacts?

These are not primarily matters for Leveson, and in my view an inquiry is needed. If Cameron refuses to refer Hunt to the independent advisor on the ministerial code, the DCMS Select Committee should initiate its own inquiry. And call the Cabinet Secretary to give evidence.

Acknowledgements

"Feeding Time" [CC BY-NC 2.0] by Flickr user PictureWendy.

Not a bad month for blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Thu, 31 May 2012 04:32:00 +0000

Disney's Cheshire Cat isn't quite
as sinister as Lewis Carroll's

I think May 2012 has probably been this blog's most successful month in terms of visitors.

I certainly haven't noticed getting over 3000 pageviews in a month before. (The total is 3042 as I write)

Exeter

About a third of those pageviews were for the results of the Exeter local elections (941), making this the most read post on the blog.

Related posts include:

"Exeter Elections, May 2012 - the basics": actually posted in April but receiving 64 views this month, making 212 altogether (9th most read post on the blog).
"Exeter Elections, May 2012 - the issues": again posted in April but receiving 112 views this month, making 226 altogether (7th most read post on the blog).
"Some Exeter Lib Dem candidates" (63)
"Brief thoughts on Exeter's local election" (94)
"Exeter Elections, May 2012 - Post hoc analysis" (78)

Craig Oliver and Norman Smith

There has been much media comment this week about the accidentally-recorded row between Downing Street's Communications Director (Craig Oliver) and the BBC's Chief Political Correspondent (Norman Smith).

Most of the comments have focused on the body language, the subtext, the strategy and the parallels of Craig Oliver's complaint. But not the actual complaint.

My post "It's not BBC bias: It's an unbalanced view of 'balance'" was able to draw on a transcript I'd made of a dodgy report made by Smith 18 months ago when the Cabinet minister whose position was under threat because of the News Corp bid for BSkyB was Vince Cable rather than Jeremy Hunt.

I had thought the post was a fairly unique focus on the substance of the row rather than the froth, and a bit of form on Norman Smith. But it received just 53 pageviews. Meanwhile my post from December 2010 "BBC journalist gets Cable the wrong way round" got an extra 79 views this month, making 186 views altogether.

I'm clearly no journalist then!

Liberal Democrats

Two of my LibDem posts attracted some interest:

"The LibDem local election campaign was not LibDem, local or a campaign" (96 pageviews) was certainly negative, but I make no apologies. The signs do not look good that the national party has learned from the mistakes of the 2010 General Election campaign or the 2011 AV referendum.

"What do Liberal Democrats want?" (224) was my attempt to provide a positive way forward in terms of political narrative. LibDem blogger Andrew Emmerson said some very nice things about this post, and brought it to the attention of the party's President, which undoubtedly led to such high readership. It's the 8th most read post on the blog. Sadly no placing in the Lib Dem Golden Dozen!

Incidentally, I don't want to give the impression that LibDem campaign staff have an easy task: in another post I drew attention to the huge communications challenges (61) facing the LibDems at the next General Election.

Other politics

I had a first go at mapping out the Political Narrative Battlegrounds for 2015 (80) for the Conservatives, Labour and LibDems. I have a lousy reputation for crystal ball gazing, so it'll be useful to look at this post again in a year or two.

Continuing the development of my "Evil Liberal Masterplan" (perhaps "Localism-Plus" is a more saleable name!), I explained "How to get growth" by fostering more local decision-making about big developments and public services. I genuinely think this is an original contribution to the debate, even if perhaps unlikely to happen. But sadly this post got just 39 pageviews, despite my increasingly desperate attempts to plug it on Twitter. Just a bad title I suppose.

So I was convinced the title of the tongue-in-cheek "Why Scottish independence will lead to a new Dark Ages" would have outraged Scots beating a path to my door. But again, just 40 pageviews. Oh well...

Acknowledgements

"Cheshire Cat in Disneyana" [CC BY-ND 2.0] by Loren Javier.
"Why Vote Liberal Democrat?" [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] by Helen Duffett.
"BBC balance" and "Local government gears" [CC BY-SA 3.0] by LonWon.

It's not BBC bias: It's an unbalanced view of "balance"

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Mon, 28 May 2012 23:42:00 +0000

The Government's Director of Communications, Craig Oliver, has been complaining about biased reporting by the BBC's Norman Smith. The report was about the Culture Secretary's precarious position in relation to the News Corp bid for BSkyB. Craig Oliver's complaint has remarkable similarities with objections I made 18 months ago about how Norman Smith reported the Business Secretary's position in relation to the same bid.

In the previous incident, the transcript of Norman Smith's report for BBC Radio 4's PM programme shows that Smith effectively gave his own personal opinion that Vince Cable should resign. He asserted that Cable's position as Business Secretary was "fatally compromised".

Making such an assertion is not Smith's job, I argued. He's not a columnist. He's not a politician. He's not a player.

Smith could have said that The Opposition was calling for Cable's resignation. He could have said that a key question under discussion was whether Cable's position as Business Secretary was fatally compromised. He could have said that his Government sources were sceptical that Cable could survive. But Smith didn't do that. He asserted that Cable's position as Business Secretary was in fact fatally compromised. This exceeds Smith's role.

Smith saw himself as providing balance by saying "there would be huge reluctance to see [Cable] go". This does not provide balance, because it does not offer an alternative view to Smith's assertion that Cable's position as Business Secretary was fatally compromised.

“Balance” would have been to quote those saying that Cable hadn't compromised his position, or that Cable's words were private and taken out of context, or that Cable needed to recuse himself from the decision. Now Smith might not agree with these views, but Smith's view isn't important.

Smith portrays the balance as between Cable being fatally compromised and it being politically damaging for Cable to go. But actually the balance is between Cable being fatally compromised, AND NOT.

In the same report Smith also asserted that a Government press conference was a “charade”. Again, this was The Opposition's view. It wasn't the Government's view, and it wasn't Smith's role to declare that it was (even if it was).

Smith's understanding of the notion of "balance" is wrong.

In the most recent case, raised by Craig Oliver, Smith asserts that the "Prime Minister having his name in the same headline as the Murdochs is a problem". Just as in the Cable case above, Smith accepts The Opposition's argument and dismisses the Government's argument.

And again, Smith might or might not be right. That's not the point. The point is that a BBC correspondent has a duty to report the facts and provide insightful analysis, rather than to take one side or another. Smith seems to view "balance" as a requirement on him, as a BBC correspondent, to weigh up fairly who is right. I.e. in this instance: is the Prime Minister damaged by his association with the Murdochs? But such judgements are not Smith's job. His job is to present the arguments and counter-arguments as fairly as possible.

Now I'm no cheerleader for government directors of communication, nor of the Prime Minister, let alone Jeremy Hunt or Rupert Murdoch. And I'm certainly not one of the "The BBC is full of biased Guardianistas" brigade. I have good friends in the BBC, and I've had very few good things to say about Cameron or Hunt or Murdoch. But it seems to me that Norman Smith has a mistaken view of impartiality.

In the video Oliver gives another example of Smith picking a side. Smith asserts that Jeremy Hunt's memo to the Prime Minister in favour of the News Corp bid for BSkyB (a memo sent before Hunt took up a quasi-judicial role in the matter), constituted "making representations". The implication is that Hunt lied to Parliament.

This might be right. There are plenty of respectable commentators saying just that. And the Opposition is saying that. But there is an alternative view, expressed very clearly by the Government, that Hunt's memo was to the Prime Minister, not to the person making the decision at the time (Vince Cable), and that this memo was deemed by senior civil servants as constituting no bar to Hunt taking over responsibility for the decision.

Once again, Smith sees "balance" as weighing up whether the Government is right or the Opposition is right. And he comes down in favour of the Opposition. Smith thinks it's balance if he makes an (honest) attempt at a personal judgement about who's right, without bias or prejudice. But that's not balance. "Balance" in this instance would be explaining the Government view, explaining the Opposition view, indicating some of the unanswered questions, and giving an insight into what key players are saying about the relevant merits of these views.

Now is Smith's view of balance shared by his editors? Does it represent the official policy of the BBC? Because if it is, then we have a serious matter on our hands. It would mean that BBC News is redefining its view of impartiality.

Why Scottish independence will lead to a new Dark Ages

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Sat, 26 May 2012 04:02:00 +0000

The argument that Scottish independence will lead to a new Dark Ages depends on four propositions:

1. Scottish independence means that Britain's nuclear deterrent will need to be relocated to Devonport.

The UK's current nuclear weapon capabilities depend on four Vanguard-class submarines based at Faslane in Argyll and Bute, and on the ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads stored nearby at Coulport.

Local political opposition to locating the nuclear deterrent in Wales or Northern Ireland means that a base will have to be found in England.

Devonport, in Plymouth, is the largest naval base in Western Europe and is the sole nuclear repair and refuelling facility for the Royal Navy. Even then, extensive work will need to be carried out to make Devonport suitable as a base for the submarines.

2. Devon achieving nuclear capability will lead inexorably to Cornwall developing its own independent nuclear deterrent.

It is inconceivable that Cornwall would sit idly by, while Devon flexed its nuclear muscles, itching to blow Truro to kingdom come. That Cornwall is oppressed by English rule is bad enough, but for Devon to possess weapons of mass destruction would be seen in Cornwall as a deadly threat to the peace and stability of the region, if not the world.

A devastating nuclear attack by Devon on Brittany, Cornwall's strategic celtic ally, could be over within less than 40 seconds.

The realm that produced notables such as Captain William Bligh, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Rick Stein and Rory McGrath would not hesitate to summon up its brightest and best to create the weaponry necessary to deter the Devonshire aggressors.

3. Then all hell breaks loose.

If the Cornish get nuclear weapons, we're all done for. That Pasty Tax is out, for a start. Bitter rivalries over the order of jam and cream on scones will then turn into an all-out South West civil war. Meanwhile, aggressive exports of clotted cream and Cornish fudge will quickly clog the arteries and rot the teeth of the decadent English middle classes.

With Cornish military power in the ascendant, radioactive piskies will multiply and infest the whole mainland. Roaming bands of tin miners will terrorise the land, so stern and taciturn they reduce the gruffest Yorkshiremen and hardest Geordies to girlish simpering. Wreckers, pirates and zombie-like surf dudes will cause devastation along the coasts of the British Isles. Jamaica Inn morality will rule.

4. The Greater Cornish Empire rises.

A resurgent Mebyon Kernow seizes power, claiming that only they can return order. They are sustained by vicious elderly watercolour artists brandishing brushes and a distracted air, and wearing black shirts (well, black with a white cross in the middle, and more like smocks than shirts really).

They are led by a newly awoken man called Arthur Pendragon, who promises to unite the celtic diaspora and drive the perfidious Saxons into the sea. He ruthlessly deploys massed ranks of harpists, bagpipers, and richly timbred choirs to great military success across the British Isles.

From then on, it's a few simple steps to the abolition of paper in favour of celtic stone; the replacement of the internet and telephones with signal fires; the reworking of medicine and dentistry in line with an all-encompassing philosophy of "It's just a scratch. Just leave it."; the rejection of roads as "Roman rubbish"; the eradication of weird foreign foods such as potatoes, tomatoes and rice; and feudalism.

So be careful what you wish for, Scots. You cry, Gibson-like, for freedom now. But you may end up annexed by a Greater Cornish Empire. "Onen hag oll" (One and All) will ring out from Land's End to John o' Groats.

Think carefully before you vote "Yes" to Scottish independence.

How to get growth

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:05:00 +0000

National governments are rightly focused on reducing the deficits that are causing massive threats to their economies. But the resulting austerity leaves little scope for schemes to stimulate economic growth. And growth would increase tax revenues, thus helping to eliminate the deficits and reduce debts. So what's to be done?

Socialists believe that more can be spent on stimulating growth, while maintaining spending on public services, by taxing the rich more. Deficit hawks believe less should be spent on public services and on growth schemes, while increasing taxes across the board. Neo-classical liberals also believe in spending less, but that reducing taxes can stimulate growth.

I don't know that any of these views are right. I'm not an economist, and the arguments on all sides fail to convince. But who knows?

However, in the UK I think there's something that might help, whatever your economic view: empowering local engines for growth.

Different parts of the country should be able to take advantage of their own particular local strengths to encourage growth. This requires central government loosening its fevered grip just a little on taxation and expenditure, and letting strong councils take advantage of local conditions.

I want to draw attention to two important aspects of this form of localism: (i) local decision-making about big developments; and (ii) local decision-making about public services.

Local decision-making about big developments

Developments can get stalled at an early stage by emotionally charged battles between enthusiastic proponents of stimulus schemes (house-building, wind farms, engineering projects, and the like) and wary residents fighting damage to their neighbourhoods.

Both sides think the system is weighted against them. The reality is that if local people rather than ministers are the ultimate arbiter of proposals, proposals will have to be designed to unarguably benefit local communities rather than to align with well-meaning but amorphous national policies.

This is not simply a case of transferring decision-making from ministers to councillors. Councillors do need to play an important role in this: referring back proposals that clearly contribute insufficiently; ensuring stakeholders are involved in the discussions; commissioning research comparing alternative options; and proposing conditions such as a local tax, an inspection regime, modified plans or new community facilities. But local electronic plebiscites make the final decision.

Good developments are more likely to succeed quickly under this form of localism, because developers will need to design proposals that make it easy for locals to judge that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. And bad developments will no longer be able to rely on multiple appeals, inattentive councillors, vague planning policies and ministers with nothing to lose in the locality.

At the same time, developers will not be faced with the knee-jerk local opposition that comes from justified scepticism and sense of powerlessness about the planning system. Constructive engagement is more likely.

Local decision-making about public services

A second way in which local engines for growth can be enabled is through liberalising public services.

Rather than the State controlling public services centrally, like some totalitarian regime, councils would be free to pursue their own preferred ways of delivering particular services, whether that's in-house, through contracts with companies, or in conjunction with other organisations or councils. At the same time, power to vary taxes enables those with different ideas about what works to put those ideas to the test.

Those councils that want to stop the cuts get to stop the cuts, but they will need to borrow the money or raise taxes. Those councils that want a balanced budget will be able to cut spending and increase taxes. Those councils that want to reduce taxes get to do that. But more importantly, councils are free to decide on the priorities for schools, hospitals, police, post offices and so on that make sense for local people, taking account of local needs and opportunities.

Through this encouragement of innovation, the country does not put all its eggs in one basket, but is able to pilot different ways of stimulating growth and dealing with debt, within broad but sensible constraints set by central government.

What works in one part of the country does not automatically work elsewhere, but by evaluating the factors affecting success in every part of the country, the Government will see good ideas being taken up across the country, and bad ideas being quietly dropped with no loss of face to central government.

More autonomy allows ideas to be put to the test. Of course it's true that councils might choose to go for the monorail rather than more frequent buses; they might choose to build the casino rather than the theatre; the nuclear power station rather than the wind farm. But councils must be allowed to make mistakes, so long as there is complete transparency and accountability to local voters.

Why won't this happen?

This "localism-plus" means that good developments are more likely to succeed quickly, and that public services can innovate under democratic local control rather than stagnate under monolithic central control. These are strong engines for growth.

I've outlined the key objections to this proposal. But the main reason this kind of thing is unlikely to happen is not because of potential costs, uncertainties or fragmentation; nor even (at a philosophical level) fears of privatisation or of localism. It is that battle-lines are already being drawn for the next election, and that for all but a few liberal-minded politicians, the dream of enforcing one's own prescription for success across the whole country overrides all other considerations.

Acknowledgements

"N30" [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] by Flickr user churchofpunk.
"Piggy bank" [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] by Flickr user Teresa Gibbison.
Photo of Sir Stuart Rose [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] by the CBI.
"Local government gears" by LonWon. [CC BY-SA 3.0]

Why the lack of film blogging?

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:51:00 +0000

When I looked back recently on reaching 100 blogposts, I was surprised to note that I almost never blog about films. "Surprised" because, although I doubt I've seen many more films than average, I do love watching films and talking about films and hearing recommendations for good films to see.

So why is it that I don't seem to be able to write about films then?

Thinking hard about this, I've reached the conclusion that a big problem is:

If the film is really good, and it stays with me, I never feel I've got the writing skills to do justice to it.
If the film is really bad, I feel embarrassed for having watched it, and just want to forget about it.
If the film is somewhere in the middle, I find it hard to get motivated to write about it.

Another problem is what to write about. Let me explain.

I've mentioned previously that I hate having my enjoyment of a film spoiled by reviews that destroy elements of surprise or that tell me what's good or bad about the film in advance, thus shaping how I see the film. At the same time, how can I tell what films to watch? And once I've seen a film, where do I go to read interesting thoughts about it?

What I need doesn't seem to be available in the mainstream media. Typically we are provided with clever-clever reviews that show off the reviewers' knowledge, give away half the plot, and set up filters for my viewing that I don't want. I need sufficient information to help me decide whether I'm likely to find this worth seeing, and absolutely no more. I don't need the reviewers' know-it-all gloss on exactly why the film is good or bad, or exactly how it resonated with their personal experience and aesthetic (or didn't), or how it taps into the Zeitgeist, or what it says about the personalities or careers of the director and the actors, or whatever.

Once I've seen a film, though, all that kind of thing is grist to the mill. Except... after I've seen the film, these kinds of reviews are intrinsically inadequate: they inevitably contain as much chaff as grain because they have to avoid giving away too much of what happens to the characters. So before the film these reviews contain too much information, and after the film they fail to engage properly with the film as a whole, because of the need to be coy about giving away the ending.

So I think I'm wanting there to be short previews for those who haven't seen the film, and reviews for those who have. And those are the things that I would like to be able to write.

But again my skills are lacking.

Firstly, I find writing previews a challenge because I never feel very confident about delineating the kind of audience attributes that determine whether or not they might like the film. Good film critics are able to do this entertainingly and (for most people) accurately.

Secondly, I find writing reviews a challenge because I have a problem with exploring the mechanics of film-making. Anything that diminishes the suspension of disbelief seems to somehow reduce the film for me. That's clearly not true of very many people. The private lives of the actors; the quality of the plot, characters and dialogue; the intentions of the director; the skills of the cinematographer, the editor, the composer, the designers, etc. are often clearly fascinating, and for me too. But while many people's enjoyment is firmly enhanced by the "behind-the-scenes" story, by "the making of", by the rumours, triumphs, failures and career trajectories, I seem to get less pleasure from the film itself the more I know about the film-making.

This is in no way a criticism of film-makers. I love what they do, and I am fascinated about the choices and skills involved. But I am saying there is a failing in me: I should be able to maintain my enthusiasm for a film while also pursuing my interest in how it was made. But I don't seem to be able to do that.

Knowing how the Hurt Locker was made, for example, increases my admiration for the film-makers, and for the film too; but it decreases my engagement with the film. I have to pay attention to actors not people, dialogue not what I'm hearing, camera angles not what I'm seeing. Some people can pay attention to both process and product. I can't.

So this is why last year I resolved to avoid reading or hearing interviews with actors, directors or writers, and to refuse to watch behind-the-scenes clips. And this is also why I've been trying to steer away from discussing the film-making of films that I really like.

However, even with these strictures, I have found it difficult to finish reviews. I was strongly motivated to review Spielberg's Adventures of Tintin because I wanted to try to capture exactly how a film that had everything going for it turned out to be so unsatisfying for me. And with The Prestige I wanted to solve a tricky puzzle about the plot. But beyond that, I've not managed to click "submit" on any other film reviews.

And yet I do want to try to provide the kinds of reviews that I would like to read.

Maybe it's time to take a different tack. Perhaps a Twitter-style restriction - no more than five sentences, for example - might help me to preview and review.

We'll see...

Acknowledgements

Popcorn by Vegan Feast Catering. [CC BY 2.0]

What do Liberal Democrats want?

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Mon, 14 May 2012 04:39:00 +0000

If you believe The Telegraph, the LibDems are bleeding heart, immigrant-loving, EU fifth columnists desperate to promote a fraudulent green gravy-train. (Ewww... green gravy). And if you believe The Guardian, the LibDems are basically Tories, but worse than Tories because they take votes that are Labour's by right.

Whereas if, like most people, you maintain a healthy scepticism towards all newspapers and political parties, you might well have a view of LibDems as well-meaning but easily used do-gooders who get a bee in the bonnet about "civil liberties" and tie themselves in knots over tuition fees and NHS reform.

It's easy to get a rough-and-ready handle on what Conservatives want (strong businesses, strong law-and-order, traditional values, that kind of thing) and everyone knows that Labour is about strong public services and jobs for all. But what do Liberal Democrats want?

There are three senses in which that's a very easy question to answer. But one sense in which a sharper answer is needed.

Let's go back to first principles. (Bear with me: it gets a little less Janet-and-John by the end!)

1. Values and aims

Firstly, the values and aims of the LibDems are beautifully set out in the preamble to the constitution, which begins...

"The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity. We champion the freedom, dignity and well-being of individuals, we acknowledge and respect their right to freedom of conscience and their right to develop their talents to the full. We aim to disperse power, to foster diversity and to nurture creativity. We believe that the role of the state is to enable all citizens to attain these ideals, to contribute fully to their communities and to take part in the decisions which affect their lives."

It's worth reading the whole of the preamble if you don't already know it. It's only about 800 words. If you want to understand what LibDems want, there's rarely a LibDem who doesn't wholeheartedly support almost all of this.

You might object that we don't always live up to these ideals. But politics is the art of the possible, and letting the perfect be the enemy of the good ends up helping no-one. (Enough clichés already! Ed.) You might also agree in general with the principle of compromise, while at the same time disagreeing with particular instances of compromise (the 2012 Health and Social Care Act springs to mind). But that doesn't change the ideal.

Nevertheless, values and aims don't automatically predicate policies. You only need to look at New Labour's enthusiasm for the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) or the Conservative Party's official position on marriage equality.

So values and aims are important, but not enough: we also need to look at the policies...

2. The Manifestos

The second way in which "What do Liberal Democrats want?" is an easy question to answer is that almost every election (local, general, whatever) generates some kind of manifesto that sets out specific proposals, often costed, focused on the perceived problems that concern the particular voters in that election.

For example, the 2010 General Election Manifesto (pdf) emphasised...

raising the personal income tax allowance to £10k, funded by closing loopholes used by the wealthy and polluters;
targeting more money at schools with poorer children;
creating jobs by investing in green infrastructure;
and increasing democracy by giving voters a power of recall, a fair voting system and an elected second chamber.

These policies clearly aimed to address the values and aims referenced earlier.

You might object that certain policies at various times were wrong; or that different LibDems reaching different conclusions about what's needed in different parts of the country somehow amounts to hypocrisy; or that deviating from the manifesto because of changed circumstances is no different from lying. But none of that invalidates manifestos as an answer to the question of what LibDems want.

Nevertheless, manifestos don't infallibly determine what happens in practice. New problems arise; policies turn out to have unintended consequences; circumstances change; disagreements occur; and (of course) coalitions mean that compromise is essential.

So manifestos are important, but not enough: we also need to look at what LibDems do in practice...

3. What LibDems do

All over the country, Liberal Democrat councillors work hard at improving life for local people; Liberal Democrat MPs and peers work hard to channel legislation and Government actions in the direction of LibDem values and aims; and Liberal Democrat MEPs do likewise in relation to EU legislation.

Now, you might object that some of these people do not work hard, and some fail to live up to LibDem values and ideals. You might think that councillors, MPs and MPs from other parties are just as hard working or make better decisions. But generally you can see what LibDems want from what they do. Well, to some extent...

For example, it's pretty clear that a government can do very little to improve the lot of the citizens if the country is bankrupt. Whatever the lazy nonsense sometimes talked about "just being in it for the ministerial cars", LibDems formed a coalition with Conservatives in order to sort out the economic crisis threatening the country. We did this knowing perfectly well how it would damage the party's popularity.

At the same time, LibDems in the Coalition have also helped...

shift taxes from low and middle earners onto the richest
get extra money to schools to help poorer children
create more new apprenticeships than Britain has ever had before
create the world's first Green Investment Bank
restore the link between pensions and earnings
set-up proper regulation of the banks
restore many of the civil liberties thrown away by the previous government
increase social housing for the first time in 30 years
halt the previous government's post office closures

You can see from this list the kinds of things that LibDems want.

On the other hand, LibDem parliamentarians have also found themselves having to vote for things that jar very hard against LibDem values, aims and manifestos: increasing tuition fees; cutting the top rate of tax; the 2012 Welfare Reform Act; and the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. And the lack of Government action in support of green growth must be very frustrating for them. The reality. though, is that Conservative MPs outnumber LibDem MPs five to one. So this kind of trade-off is inevitable. It's great to have achieved so much with so few MPs.

Thus you can't always tell what LibDems want from individual votes: you have to look at the package as a whole. And it's not just the things in the "good list" above that show what LibDems want; it's also the things that the Conservatives weren't able to do because they were blocked by the LibDems. It's blindingly obvious to everyone apart from the extremes of left and right that the Government is a better government for having LibDems in it.

Is this when the English subjunctive finally died?

Nevertheless, the question "What do Liberal Democrats want?" is not about what is being done now, but about how things might be different in the future. And this leads to the fourth type of answer to the question.

4. Frames

Much of the 2010 manifesto is already being implemented by the Coalition, so the priorities for the 2015 manifesto will be an important indicator of what LibDems want.

It's likely that the number one priority for the next parliament will be something like "Ensure the deficit is sorted". That doesn't really set the LibDems apart. All the parties want to do that, while doing as much as possible to promote growth and protect public services and the most vulnerable in society, although there are obviously detailed disagreements about the best way to do that.

Parties don't publish manifestos far in advance, because the situation will have changed by the time of election, because good ideas will get nicked by opponents (which is fine if you're a protest party; but not if you want to be in government), and because it gives opponents plenty of time to spread misinformation about the proposals.

So, you might say, let's just wait for the LibDems' 2015 manifesto, just like we have to wait for the Conservative and Labour manifestos.

Except that doesn't cut it. And here's why...

We know that the disparate collection of policies in the Conservative manifesto will have as a loose unifying theme that rough-and-ready conception mentioned earlier: strong businesses, strong law-and-order, traditional values, that kind of thing. OK, you might formulate this conception differently from me; or point out that Conservative touchstones evolve over time; and different leaders stress their own particular takes on the party philosophy. But everyone knows in advance roughly what sort of buttons the manifesto is going to push.

Similarly for Labour's manifesto. You know it's going to bash the Coalition's handling of the economic crisis in many ways, and there will be a whole host of commitments; but the manifesto will have as its central theme the impact of the cuts on the vulnerable, on public services and on jobs. Ignoring the details, everyone knows in advance what Labour is roughly about.

However, the LibDems lack a widely-held rough-and-ready public conception. I suspect that for many voters, the LibDems used to be "the party in the middle which you vote for if you can't stand either of the other two" but devolution and being in government mean that this framing of the party doesn't work well any more.

A variety of attempts have been made to help the public get a handle on what the LibDems are about, using as few words as possible: freedom; fairness; freedom and fairness; freedom, fairness and opportunity; some combination of freedom, fairness, opportunity, ~~ruthless efficiency,~~ sustainability, etc. But when the mainstream political debate is framed so often in terms of dichotomies between left and right, it is difficult to find simple formulations that work in every policy area.

It's instructive to consider how the 2010 manifesto's priorities have fared, not so much as policies but as LibDem frames: "Fair taxes that put money back in your pocket", "A fair chance for every child", "A fair future, creating jobs by making Britain greener", and "A fair deal for you from politicians".

Yet again, I don't think LibDems have ended up at in 2012 successfully owning "fairness" as an overarching frame, largely because all politicians are in favour of fairness; it's the particular prioritisation of instances of unfairness as deserving of action that distinguishes the LibDems. So "fairness" is too general. I also think "A fair deal for you from politicians" ended up destroyed by breaking the promise of "no more broken promises"; and "fair votes" was scuppered by the AV referendum. And while "fair taxes" does have some purchase (i.e. LibDems are about raising the income tax allowance; the Conservatives are about lowering the top rate of income tax), Labour now has a powerful array of frames (Granny Tax, Pasty Tax, Charity Tax, Church Tax, etc.) to undermine "fair taxes". At the same time, the Pupil Premium has been widely praised, but is now, for poorer children, about mitigating the cuts to education spending rather than providing new help. Meanwhile, the "green route out of recession" (which I really liked as a frame at the last election) has been scuppered by the animosity of George Osborne and others in the Conservative Party who believe there is a choice between being green and a strong economy.

So the LibDems urgently need new, positive ways to frame its concerns, as part of a strong narrative that builds to the 2015 manifesto.

Suggestions

I've argued for a 2015 LibDem narrative along the lines of...

"In 2010 we put aside our differences with the Conservatives, to get the economy back on track, after Gordon Brown and Ed Balls screwed up. The most vulnerable in society would have suffered even more without the steps we took. Now we must act to prevent that crisis happening again. We must stimulate real growth, not fake bubbles. We want to create sustainable jobs. We want to make those with power accountable. We want to devolve power to democratic councils, which will stimulate enterprise and innovative public services. And we want to protect household bills and business costs from the consequences of fossil fuel dependence."

What frames help trigger this narrative?

The crisis was made worse by New Labour: the key mistakes were overspending at the wrong moment in the economic cycle, and reducing regulation of the banks. (Against the "It was a global crisis; nothing Labour could have done" frame.)
We put political differences aside for the good of the country, knowing there would be a cost in popularity. (Against the "Propping up the Tories" frame.)
We stopped worse things happening: Cutting spending wasn't pleasant, but without our help, the country (and the most vulnerable in particular) would have suffered even more from New Labour's deficit. We should be proud of the Pupil Premium, the apprenticeships, the pensions link to earnings, the civil liberties saved, and the new social housing.
Now we must act to prevent that crisis happening again: This is the key problem a responsible government must address. (Sidestepping the unwinnable arguments between the Conservatives and Labour about how fast the deficit reduction should have been, and whether more could have been done to promote growth.)
In particular...

We want to create sustainable jobs: We must not rely again on property bubbles, excessive debts and polluting technologies.
We want to make the powerful accountable, whether that's bankers, energy companies, hospital chiefs, ministers, or those with vast unearned wealth.
We want to devolve power to democratic councils, which will stimulate enterprise and innovative public services: setting public services free can revitalise our counties and cities. The Government needs to support the evaluation of innovative pilots.
We want to protect households and businesses from the consequences of fossil fuel dependence. (Moving on from the stalled "We must take action on climate change" frame, to achieve the same ends.)

These frames help to construct a characterisation of LibDems as moderates, driven by the real problems that face the country, rather than by ideology; looking for "what works", rather than relying on dogma; and making sure that those with power and authority are held accountable.

In contrast, (correctly) labelling achievements and proposals as "liberal" activates the pleasure centres of the LibDem activist brain, but it does very little to help the general public to make sense of the LibDem agenda as a whole. Ensuring that the public gets an accurate conception of what LibDems want is not easy when the core media narratives about politics are the tussles between more spending and less spending, between private enterprise and public services, between being "tough" and doing nothing, and between being "sensible" and being "incompetent". It's tedious, over-simplified political discourse; but it shows few signs of changing.

So, to sum up, what do LibDems want? My answer is:

Actually LibDems want pretty much what mainstream Conservative and Labour folk want: We want great public services and thriving businesses. But we also want to stop Labour's economic crisis happening again. That means creating sustainable jobs; making the powerful accountable; devolving power in order to stimulate enterprise and innovation; and protecting households and businesses from the consequences of fossil fuel dependence.

And then of course, this needs to be backed up with creative, costed, well thought-through policies to achieve these goals...

Acknowledgements

Liberal Democrat logo taken from Wikipedia.
"Why Vote Liberal Democrat?" [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] by Helen Duffett.
"Liberal Democrat manifesto 2010": no prizes for guessing where that's from!
"Hornsey and Wood Green Liberal Democrats" [CC BY-ND 2.0] by the Liberal Democrats.

Communication difficulties for the LibDems

noreply@blogger.com (Lon Won) — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:48:00 +0000

Simon Rix has a good opinion piece over at Lib Dem Voice about the Liberal Democrats' difficulties in government. He argues that "whilst it's way too early to say our time in government has been a failure, it's not too early to say our communications have failed to hit the mark."

yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap
by Neil Wykes (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

He urges...

We must start rebutting all significant attacks on us, quickly and effectively.
We must be much more persuasive with our communications, by testing different ways of communicating our ideas.
We must do much better in projecting our messages, including being open and clear about where we disagree with the Conservatives.

As I wrote in a comment on the article, I think this is very sensible and timely advice.

However I have a few problems with Simon's point that...

"our polling… only dropped to the low teens when the narrative of 'Lib Dem broken promises' got traction in the autumn of 2010. The lesson from this is that pretending we agree with 100% of government policy is bad communications and counter productive."

Firstly, the challenge for effective communications is worse than having to counter "LibDem broken promises".

Without getting into too much detail on old arguments, it's clear that going back on individual signed personal pledges appeared to many of the public as worse than going back on manifesto commitments, regardless of the rights or wrongs of tuition fee policy. This fed into Labour's "LibDems are propping up Tories to get ministerial cars" charge. What made this even worse was that HQ had made "No more broken promises" as the central theme of the election campaign. It wasn't just breaking a promise; it was breaking a promise to end broken promises.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but even world-leading communication geniuses would struggle to come back from that one, whatever the quality of rebuttal, persuasion and projection of new policies.

Secondly, I'm not sure that the public believe we are "pretending we agree with 100% of government policy". Obviously collective Cabinet responsibility means it is more difficult to shout about clear dividing lines; but actually I think Nick, Vince and other ministers have done a good job in making clear many differences in priority and emphasis; and Tim Farron, Simon Hughes, Adrian Sanders, Andrew George and other backbenchers are making good use of their greater freedom to assert disagreements. I suspect the perception problem is less about pretending to agree and more about failing to stop Conservative proposals; and such a perception is simply an inevitable consequence of coalition.

Thirdly, an alternative lesson that might be drawn from the tuition fees episode is how it actually reinforces Simon's "rebut, persuade, project" points very well. LibDem ministers did a poor job at rebutting wild claims about what was being proposed; they failed to persuade the public about either the necessity of the tuition fee hike or the merits of the new fees system; and they decided not to project a vision for what a future LibDem-led government might want to do about this issue.

And similar considerations apply to the AV referendum, the Welfare Reform Act and the Health and Social Care Act.

The question then is not just about policy; but also how to get better at rebutting, persuading and projecting.

See also:

Hoping For More Than Slogans

Political stories

The "I Can't Forgive the LibDems" soundbite

A Pox On All Your Parties

Checks and Balances

The Simpsons are going to Hell

Time to think

Is the Lib Dem "core vote" circling the plughole?

What's wrong with Nick Clegg?

Top blog posts 2012 Q2

Sack Paxman

Gove's O-levels take us back to basics

1. Are we really best served by GCSE grades D, E, F and G?

2. Do improved grades imply standards are falling?

3. Should we make GCSEs more rigorous?

4. Should we be using qualifications at 16 to judge capacity for university study?

5. Some further questions

Concluding thoughts

GCSEs: Ladies and gentlemen, we are being played by a spin doctor to rival Alastair Campbell

The Chancellor's Brain is Borked

So what's to be done?

How to save the planet

An inhospitable political climate

So what's to be done?

Exeter's burning theatre dreams

A tragic history

Today's Exeter theatre

Tomorrow's Exeter theatre?

Update 24 June:

Come on Lib Dems: what would Birgitte Nyborg do?

Update 13 June 3:30pm

Just in it for the craic: A special #FF

Positives

Negatives

Guido Fawkes: My Part in his Downfall

A special #FollowFriday

Hunt and BSkyB: What is Labour up to? And what is Cameron hiding?

Acknowledgements

Not a bad month for blogging

Exeter

Craig Oliver and Norman Smith

Liberal Democrats

Other politics

Acknowledgements

It's not BBC bias: It's an unbalanced view of "balance"

Why Scottish independence will lead to a new Dark Ages

How to get growth

Local decision-making about big developments

Local decision-making about public services

Why won't this happen?

Acknowledgements

Why the lack of film blogging?

Acknowledgements

What do Liberal Democrats want?

1. Values and aims

2. The Manifestos

3. What LibDems do

4. Frames

Suggestions

Acknowledgements

Communication difficulties for the LibDems