IF (Minority Tory government) –> Tory extremes stymied in short-term –> (Lib–Lab opposition brings government down, takes blame as ‘irresponsible in time of crisis’) OR (Cameron goes for dissolution at time to suit Tories) –> Tory majority within a year –> Full enactment of Tory manifesto

IF (Lib–Con coalition deal) –> (Tory extremes stymied in short-term) AND (Small number of key LibDem priorities enacted in short term) AND [?]

There’s likely to be a whole load of flak flying the LibDems’ way in the coming days, months and years, especially from the “progressive left”. I suggest they accept no criticism that begins without unpicking the puzzle above – one that the election result set them. That [?] might include the implosion of the party. It might also include the large-scale loss of anti-Conservative tactical voters in the North and Scotland, or the gain of anti-Labour tactical voters in the South, or both. But it might just include major changes to the way we elect representatives to both Houses of Parliament. Our major political parties are stuck fighting for the perception of occupying a bland, but pernicious, centre ground. Voting reform (AV is just one essential baby-step) is the only way to unlock the system, to set them all free to properly represent their constituencies.

It reads to me like Clegg has bet the house on electoral reform. His coalition deal, for all its faults, was worth the risk. Maybe.

I wrote a longer, more speculative piece on this before the coalition deal was announced, at Liberal Conspiracy.

More specifically, their Turning the Pages project, 10 years in the developing, that put our national library in the very first rank of learning innovation worldwide. (See the video.) The project’s achievement has been to digitize 15 (so far) of the Library’s most valuable manuscripts, and deliver them inside an interactive online environment that re-creates the experience of handling them in the raw.

The interface allows you to zoom right in, to examine the books close-up in a way that would be impossible through a display case. To experience their magic and appreciate their craft, wherever you happen to live. The original Lindisfarne Gospels, the Sherborne Missal and Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an are now viewable by anyone with access to broadband Internet—most of us, in other words. As well as fulfilling an obvious cultural-historical remit, replication preserves these treasures (digitally at least) forever.

Of course, the job could have been done by the private sector; but the fact that it wasn’t is surely down to the unknown, unmeasured (or unknowable and ummeasurable), and very long-term, monetary returns from such a venture. In fact, there has been commercial interest, from overseas, including from private book collectors and the institutions that guard what’s left of Ancient Egypt. Some project costs will be recouped as a result.

More important still, non-profit entities in the UK have access to the BL’s technology at a price that doesn’t even recover those costs for the Library. Leeds’ Henry Moore Institute was among the first to make use of the technology.

Speaking at Online Information 2008 (#onlineinfo2008) in December, the BL’s Barry Smith trailed a project by Newcastle Public Libraries due to launch in 2009 (“before June”, Anne Waller, Newcastle Collections Project Officer, told me). They’ve chosen 12 texts from the city’s collection that capture the unique cultural, linguistic, and pictorial heritage of the North-East from a variety of perspectives.

NPL will make available to us all the originals of such books as The Howdy and the Upgetting (written c. 1790 in dialect) and Gray’s Chorographia (1649). The Heritage Lottery Fund grant to cover the project, which includes digitization, conservation and the building of a custom website to launch in tandem with Newcastle’s new city library, was £429,000.

Perhaps projects like this have no measurable or commercial value. But they certainly have value; the queues at the Turning the Pages consoles inside the British Library tell you that. And they’re only possible because the Library is run on the basis that it’s for us all, something that crass anti-state “libertarians” usually misunderstand and always under-estimate.

Image courtesy of Steve Cadman’s flickr set.

First published at Liberal Conspiracy.

If I lived in Florence, a family return trip of similar length to Livorno (birthplace of the PCI, home of the cacciucco) comes to about €33. From Brussels, a weekend rail trip to Bruges, 90km away, would cost us just over €49. A slightly longer journey in France, from Lyon to Chambery and back, comes to €59.

Such comparisons might seem mundane, trivial even. But it’s in the aggregation of everyday decisions, not position papers or pie-in-the-sky conference speeches, that policy succeeds or fails. In 11 years, New Labour has shown zero interest in affordable rail travel; they think more spying, and more “compliance” is the answer to congestion and pollution. The Tories, bless ‘em, think that more private capital (and less regulation) is the way to go. So far, then, that’s an F all round.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

Rarely has the mix been quite as fruity as this weekend’s end to the Italian football season, with all eyes on the race for the Serie A title. Most of those eyes, admittedly, will be on whether Internazionale blow a seemingly unassailable lead and hand the prize to Roma. Mine, though, will be watching politics and sport get it on in the battle for 4th spot, and an all-important qualifying place for next season’s Champions League.

In the red-and-black corner are AC Milan, the European aristocrats who were founded by expatriate Brits, the team of Kaka and Pato, and last year the spawniest European champions since, erm, we last won it. In the purple corner, representing Italy’s bucolic heart, are ACF Fiorentina, La Viola, from the city of Dante and Botticelli, supported by some of world football’s craziest fans. They’re a team, more importantly, that hail from (still) Red Tuscany, a nickname the region didn’t get from it’s wines. The city’s mayor is a former Communist.

It’s Milan, the squad of (ahem) Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his Mediaset empire, who must win at home to Udinese and keep their fingers crossed. Against Florence, with a 2-point advantage, who need to take something from a trip to Torino.

There are reasons aplenty for anyone, left or right, to want to push pies of gloat into Berlusconi’s pudgy face (excepting those too ignorant to know any better). Among them, however, isn’t the rumour that was flying round Florence last week: Mediaset bought the Napoli president’s latest screenplay in return for his team rolling over against Milan. Napoli won 3-1.

Failure to qualify could cost AC Milan, and Berlusconi personally, a delicious €25 million or more. With the added bonus that his smug face won’t be on ITV quite so often next season. And that, even for the football unbelievers among you, has to be something worth cheering.

A few years later, my partner and baby daughter were abducted outside my house. The guy, later convicted of kidnap and assault, was no Moriarty: he was in custody by nightfall. He was a known local crackhead.

Last month, a 27-year-old bloke had his phone stolen at knifepoint at 6pm in the next street to mine. A couple of days later Jamie Simpson, 33, was murdered for the day’s takings in my local Matalan. It would hardly be surprising if either or both attacks were drug-related.

Local crack addict Keith Beckles was recently jailed for eight years for attacking a Polish immigrant (not for the first time). Who knows how many people die in the drugs import business. And so on.

Now, one can imagine that if we were to hand the supply-chain for curtains, or orange squash, or embossed stationery, over to criminal gangs, trouble would follow. I’m no fan of state regulation, as a rule, but I’m finding it difficult to think of a market more suited to government oversight than narcotics. So there’s police shortages? How many booze dealers publicans are in prison? How many drug dealers was that again? To support continued prohibition isn’t to take a fine moral stand on the best way for young people to live their lives; it’s washing your hands, cowardice, nothing more. And closed minds solve nothing.

Ignoring a policy review from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs that the Home Office themselves requested is just the latest evidence-free missile fired in an unwinnable War on Drugs. Of course, I no longer feel ‘betrayed’ when Brown makes policy based on what will sound best in tomorrow’s Mail. Tory press officer Iain Dale asks why left-wing writers don’t hang on Brown’s every word. It’s simple: the left’s future will be built without him; he’s as irrelevant as this classification ‘debate’. He isn’t on the left; he isn’t even Mr Bean: he’s Nero. And he’ll go the same way.

It’s okay for the suburban seethers to tut and moan; to dismiss legalisation as a (pejoratively) ‘liberal’ concern. New Labour aren’t ever far behind with a new initiative (or deception) to hoover up a few of those votes; and the hypocritical Blue Blair is a match for them in that department. But the fact is: prohibition has failed, local policing can’t cope, and never will. Never mind those appeals to liberty that Tories don’t seem quite so keen on anymore.

And, in case Brown hasn’t noticed, it isn’t marginal Middle England that has to live with the fallout. While the political class collectively fiddle, those of us inhabiting inner city Britain get to swallow the consequences. Every day. Thanks for that.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

Q: What’s the difference between libertarianism and anarchism?

A: Under anarchism, the poor people get to shoot back.

Boom, boom. I guess that’s more a caricature than a joke, as such. Anyway, I’m not here for the standup. What I want to address is the arts, partly by way of reply to Chris’s post here last week, specifically the estimable libertarian objection to arts funding. In libertopia, arts funding is for private individuals. “There is no such thing as society” (some of them really write stuff like that, non-ironically), so spending on the collective is wasted. Immoral. Theft. In any case, the Dead Hand of the State (10,300 Google hits for a phrase I’ve never heard anyone actually speak) can only have a pernicious impact on private interaction, and what could be more private than art?

Let’s look at some evidence. First stop, Renaissance Florence, for which you’ll need a little background on patronage. You won’t often read that it was the ‘government’ of the city-state that commissioned and paid for such-and-such a painting. If it isn’t a religious order, the name on the contract is usually a Medici. The Medici were the government. They ran the city and taxed as they saw fit; they contracted and extracted, meddled and tinkered, in everything from the design of palazzi to the precise composition of works that appear to us the product of one artist’s genius. It wasn’t unusual for them to insist their kids appeared prominently, or insert their family saints. The grovelling tone of a letter from Fra’ Filippo Lippi to his public–private patron reproduced in this book shows just how much had to be approved, how often the Dead Hand of the client was holding the brush too.

Of course, the great Tuscan artists didn’t work only for the state. Giotto’s triumph was a private job (though he later freeloaded off the people of Naples). Piero Della Francesca did his best work for the Bacci family, but also served as a town councillor; Masaccio for the Carmelites.

Andrea Mantegna, the greatest painter to hail from that flat bit between the Apennines and the Alps, would have found himself even lower down in libertarian esteem. He did more than just cash the odd cheque from Mantua’s ruling Gonzaga dynasty; he worked for them. He was a waged bureaucrat, who according to Evelyn Welch even managed to cadge himself a bit of woodland.

The same pattern is repeated in Northern Europe. From 1512 until his death in 1528, engraver and painter Albrecht Durer made a living scrounging a stipend from the epileptic Emperor Charles V. Instead of going out to find a proper job, he studied Humanism and perspective – as well as Bellini, Leonardo and Mantegna. The waster. Roger Van Der Weyden sponged off the people of Brussels; Burgundian public money supported Van Eyck in Bruges.

But for sheer meddlesome bureaucracy, we need to rewind a couple of centuries and head back to Tuscany. Siena in the 1300s was a civic, republican culture that both nurtured and was nurtured by public art. Almost all funding came from The Nine, elected burghers who ruled the city for one (relatively) enlightened century until the Black Death. Gothic creativity blossomed, in painting and architecture. Forget the Sistine Chapel, Siena’s medieval town hall is the greatest site of public art on the planet – precisely because Simone Martini’s 1315 Maesta and Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government was conceived of as public art. Reminders, frescoed on the walls of the council chamber, of the essence of good politics, which for medieval Sienese included justice, trade, concord and cross-dressing dancers in the piazza.

There’s no ducking it: this art wouldn’t exist without state funding. It was paid for by the people of Siena. In any case, at any reasonable estimate of the discount rate, the Sienese have got their money back. Never mind that there’s a world of costs and benefits that we haven’t worked out how to count, yet.

So, where am I going with all this? Here: that there’s a tendency on the ‘free market right’ to think that public choice theory describes the world, rather than just provides a frame in which to sketch bits of it. Say I suggest that the US’s overdependence on private arts funding only produced Regus meeting room pap like abstract expressionism. Or propose the absence of any British art of merit between the Wilton Diptych and JMW Turner for the same reason. Or that it’s the Pre-Raphaelites‘ commitment to art as a public good that makes them the only British movement worth the name. And so on. The world doesn’t work like that. It isn’t that deterministic. Or simplistic: causes and effects, measurable and unmeasurable, public and private, aren’t distinctions that can easily be made when it comes to art. Great art, anyway.

So –

Q1: Is the State’s hand really all that Dead?

Q2: Should we fund the arts?

A: It depends.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

But if we want those doey-eyed little ones looking up at us to have a future free from acid rain, hurricanes and summer floods, it’s time for a festive fightback. No, I don’t mean making common cause with the fundies, but what better day than the feast of Santa Lucia to publish a cut-out-and-keep guide to an enlightened Winterval.

Here are fifteen ideas to get us started; feel free to add your own below.

1. Shop local, eat seasonal. There’s a reason why mange tout and kiwi fruit compote isn’t part of the traditional lunch. Christmas shop by bus, to your local high street; not by car to an out-of-town mall. And so on.

2. Buy from John Lewis. It’s a wholly-owned workers’ co-op. Plus you get an extra year on your electronics guarantees. And free delivery.

3. Watch out for truly minging ‘charity’ Christmas cards, that give a tiny fraction of their cover price to good causes. The Charities Advisory Trust’s 6th annual shit list is here (pdf); you won’t believe who won this year’s Scrooge Award (or maybe you will). The UK’s first 100% charity card, benefiting the Make A Wish Foundation, was launched this year.

4. Make a contribution to local education by shopping for the kids at Yellow Moon. Up to 25% of every purchase kicks-back to your chosen school.

5. Promote neighbourhood harmony by sending the whole street a (charity) Christmas card. Despite what you read in the Express, no one is likely to respond by calling for you to be beheaded outside Primark.

6. Cut down on the airmiles of your festive bubbly by buying British: Nyetimber is a match for any Champagne at the price.

7. Promote one of the few remaining examples of cooperative capitalism: buy book tokens. Way easier to track down than a Wii.

8. Take the reply-paid envelope from every seasonal loan offer that drops on the doormat, seal it and stick it back in the mail. It costs the bottom-feeders money every time.

9. Protest the onward creep of capitalist Christmas by boycotting the shops on Boxing Day. The Poseidon Adventure‘s probably on, anyway.

10. Put up some lights, build a crib, fly the flag of St George if you want. Nobody’s going to arrest you, not even your ZaNuLabour multicultural police taskforce. Just don’t bloody whinge about it.

11. Support a small business run by treehuggers. Now in its 10th year, Little Green Earthlets sells organic clothes and skincare products, sustainable and Fairtrade stocking fillers and even Clive Litchfield’s Organic Directory 2008.

12. For a sustainable fish course, make the smoked salmon organic, the prawns North Atlantic, or best of all go for the trusty mussel, reared with the kindest form of aquaculture. There’s even a festive recipe here.

13. Like Charlie said, or was it Jesus: don’t forget to think of others. Development charity World Vision publish a list of their most needed alternative Christmas gifts here. The price of a Leapster buys 10 mosquito nets in Zambia; or reunite a Cambodian child with his family for less than a good bottle of Puligny-Montrachet. Alternatively, become a festive volunteer at the Crisis Open Christmas here.

14. Recycle or compost everything – from trees to the turkey carcass. Choose a sustainable tree.

15. Protest your right to protest by candlelight, with anti-carols. Details here.

And remember, don’t blow a gasket when the little people ask you ‘Is he coming yet?’. Point them here on Christmas Eve, where they’ll find Santa’s flight plan mapped out on t’Interweb, put your feet up and get stuck into the mulled wine before it turns to vinegar.

Merry Christmas.

A kidney patient who travelled to the Philippines to search for a live donor has defended his decision to become a so-called “transplant tourist”.

Stories like this hit the bullseye of the inherent tension between ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ ways of looking at the world.

A liberal (even ‘libertarian’) solution would be simple: we should be allowed to sell a kidney. It’s our body, and we should be free to do what we want with it. The borders of the state must stop at the dermis. Liberty is that simple. Or simplistic.

A left analysis would first point out that the burdens of this ‘freedom’ would fall disproportionately on the poor. Should they need a kidney, they won’t be able to afford one. A rich person is unlikely to need to sell his; a poor person, the opposite. Kidney sellers will be poor; purchasers usually rich. A freedom isn’t a freedom unless its universal; it’s more like a privilege. Just like my freedom (or ‘right’) to buy a Porsche. In a system that relies on exploitation, what we call capitalism, words like ‘freedom’ are sometimes meaningless. (There’s an analogy here with smoking in pubs, but that’s another story.)

There’s really no ‘left-liberal’ solution to this, not in the philosophical sense anyhow. There’s also no place for supporting or condemning one man’s attempt to prolong his life. Perhaps the place to start is with common sense. Support for the BMA’s position on presumed consent is little more than acknowledging the existence of a market failure that can be corrected. Easily and liberally.

First published at Liberal Conspiracy.

Like Dave, I doubt the Greens can build a systematic left-wing alternative to Labour, now properly classified as a ‘centre-right’ not a ‘left’ party. But I do believe the popularity of mainstream greenish politics offers something. A ‘moment’, perhaps, for slipping something with a progressive flavour in with the recycling. A reasonable place to look for inspiration is Sweden.

Sweden’s Green Party have just finished 8 years as junior coalition partners in a red-green government. Top of their list of achievements was the inauguration, in January 2005, of a so-called Alternation Leave policy. Under this scheme, 12,000 Swedes have the annual opportunity to take a government subsidized sabbatical from work (similar to parental leave, but without a baby). Three main conditions apply: employer consent is required; the vacancy may only be covered by recruiting from the pool of current unemployed; you may not work while on leave, except to start a new business.

While headline UK unemployment is low, we have above-EU-average rates of economic inactivity for males aged 25-64 (pdf, p.9). More than supposed sick-man France. Schemes that give the jobless employer-based training may pay us back in the long term. Alternation policies similarly support entrepreneurship: give your big idea a go, with a twelve-month safety net should things go Pete Tong.

We hear a lot about ‘lifelong learning’ – this policy puts its money where its mouth is. Here’s a year – go fill your head. It’s also liberal (voluntary), costable (set numbers in advance) and even supports ‘family values’. Plenty of Swedish alternation-leavers have spent their time raising children or extended family. It’s a practical way to show government commitment to ‘work-life balance’, that goes beyond platitudes.

None of this will smash the capitalist system and reclaim surplus value for the working (wo)man, of course. It’s not a workplace panacea. It does, though, combine sellability with the seeds of a new model for employee/employer relations. A start towards ‘Scandinavianizing’ British working life. Maybe even a real-world path to a Citizen’s Income. Even more interesting than the details of the policy (which I’d call ‘intriguing’ rather than ‘convincing’) is the realisation that in a galaxy not so far, far away from us, There Is Never No Alternative.

Of course, for our Greens to get anywhere near Westminster, we’re going to need a serious dose of electoral reform first. And that, as they say, is another story.

First published at Liberal Conspiracy.

“I’m not pro-smoking just pro-freedom. “Having a pint and a cigarette in a pub is one of the last great enjoyments left for the working classes. “

You have to like the cut of his mainsail. It makes you wish he was right, but alas he’s 180 degrees wrong. Calls to liberty – working class or otherwise – are spurious on this one. As much as hard hats on a building site, or breathing apparatus down a mine, smoking legislation is about workplace safety. I suppose any staff who object to a pub pea souper could always work somewhere else. Your average Victorian mill owner would have agreed.

Tell that to the student working off his overdraft, or the single mum who needs employment that fits round school hours, or the 50-something asthmatic roadie who’s plain forgotten how to do anything else. Or any number of other constructs a hack-philosopher might invent. Can any of these make a meaningful choice, a free weighing of the alternatives, before selecting their place and conditions of work? That we don’t always have a real choice is a cornerstone of left thought; it’s all about the power, stupid. Asking: “Who has it; who doesn’t; how does that change things” is what separates liberals from the ‘I want, I want, it’s soooo unfair’ breed of prep-school ‘libertarians’. (That’s a misnomer, of course; these chaps are nowhere near as concerned about liberty as they are about property.)

In any case, there’s nothing special about private property that gets us off our obligations to each other. This is no more a case of liberty at threat than are the Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations 2002. You’re not allowed to poison your staff, not even minimum-wage workers. There’s an easy, costless way to internalize your externality: get off your backside, take three paces to the door and smoke outside. You could use the exercise.

First posted at Liberal Conspiracy.