fisharepeopletoo

How To Split the Lib Con Coalition and Have Fun Doing It. #ge2010 #ge2015

We've woken up with a whole new political rule set, and everything from now on is going to be lots of fun.

The rules of politics in the age of coalitions are about listening, negotiating, collaborating and coming up with unexpected solutions.

But most of all the new rules are about shifting alliances.

Everything is always to play for.

And in our day and age, "everything to play for" is the best and most beautiful state to be in.

Everything is fluid, uncertain, changeable, unexpected, chaotic and complex. Any state we are in from now on is always just another state waiting to be born.

From this morning onwards all sorts of wonderfulness from science and economics and even maths have come into play. Ideas about self organising systems, game theory, evolutionary biology, autopoiesis, complexity science and systems thinking, all of which I can't even pretend to properly understand, are suddenly our guiding principles.

And one of the things these ideas reveal is that small actions can have big effects, which is great if we don't want to wait around for the over-networked posh idiots to sort the world out for us. Things that we can all do in structures outside of party politics matter. In complex non-linear systems the small things have unexpected consequences, it's a mathematical fact!

There are lots of big challenges of course, but that is great because you can't have a decent story or a decent game without risk of failure.

And best of all is that this new rule set is perfect for, and demands, creativity. Political systems become a subject for creativity.

I read a smshing definition of creativity in neuroscience the other day: "creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way. "

And if nothing else, what was sadly sadly missing over the last 13 years was anyone ever doing anything "non obvious". They made an obsession of finding out the obvious and doing it. No one ever, ever, took a step back and looked at the system as a whole and said "ok what is really going on and how can we really change it?"

For all the battered nobility of his last few days, all Brown ever wanted to do was sit in the centre and command the world to change based on the force of his will and his absolute understanding, and his chosen mechanism for doing so was to throw tax revenues at it skimmed from the City.

But the world just doens't obey that command any more, if it ever did.

So here is a policy to test out in breaking up the current coalition:

Local income tax.

It's a Lib Dem policy I think anyway. The Cameron wing of the Conservatives would have to pretend to be in favour given how much they have gone on about localism, but the devolutionary implications would be too much for the right. If it passes then the control of revenues and the autonomy that goes with it will allow Labour to build up the independence of its English regional strongholds and push for greater freedom from London regardless of which coalition is in power there. And a hundred city states all experimenting with the rule sets of government is million times more creative.

God knows whether that would work or not in any way.

But that's not the point. The point is the process. Release early release often. Prototype. Beta test. Declare a republic in Sunderland and see what happens.

That is the world we are in now, and it is miles better than the old one, regardless of who it is that thinks they are in power.



A great essay about creativity and experimentation in political rule sets here.

A useful primer about systems thinking here.

A bonkers and almost mystical introduction to autopoiesis here.

Who Would Play Gordon Brown in the Film?

If you read it as a story, which for most of us it might as well be, then the big character in the middle still feels like Brown.

He's the one who has got the most to loose. Not so much his job as of himself.

Look at his face. That has got to be a man who is lying there awake in the middle of the night, and he cant even turn the bedside lamp on because he doesn't want to wake his wife up, and he couldn't concentrate to read even if he did.

And what he is thinking about in the dark is that everything that he thought he'd done for the best might be judged a failure because of his own decisions, and in 100 years time there will still be people writing books arguing about how much he was to blame for a culture that brought the world to its knees.

A few weeks ago, he made a speech feebly blaming "lobbying" and "pressure from the Conservatives" for deregulation of the banks, which suggests he is already beginning to try and find a way to tell himself about his choices, but it will be all the harder to bear the answers because he will tell himself he made the choices in good faith, with good intentions, in order to use the tax revenues to do good.

And now everything that he may or may not have achieved before it will seem uninteresting to history compared to the crash. That's what he is now, as a public figure. The Bankers' Crash, guilty or not?

And that is quite a shift in what he can tell himself about himself in the last 24 months or so.

There is only one job in the whole world in which he can do anything about that, in which he can take action to change the ending of the story written about him, and of the story he can tell himself with any honesty. And that job is Prime Minister.

That is what will be torturing him. That perhaps as soon as tomorrow he's not going to be able to do anything else about changing the end of the story. If he looses the job then all he can do, from his new job at Oxford or Havard or wherever, is wage an undignified campaign for his own reputation, not change the future on which that reputation will rest.

Compared to that, Clegg and Cameron don't have much of themselves at stake. Cameron will probably get the knife if he can't deliver a coalition, but wanting to be the next Tony Blair isn't a failed ambition that anyone would find it too hard to recover from.

And as for Clegg, if he makes a tactical mistake he'll suffer only according to the strength of his principles, which ought to be what guides him anyway. If he follows them, he can't blame himself too much if it doesn't work out, and he's the only one of the three who is certain to be around for the next election with chance to try again.

That's why the big scene is, or has already been, when Brown understands, or is made to understand, that he has to let go, and when he knows that this time there isn't any more fight to be had. To work as a scene you'd have to write it such that he had real self knowledge and honesty, which he may or may not have.

But if the character of Gordon Brown has that self knowledge and honesty, then that is the scene when we'd watch a human being suffer at the hands of the only thing that can't ever be changed, our own choices in the past.

The problem isn't the excluded. It's the included.

If there are pockets of generation-to-generation "exclusion" and wasted human potential in the UK - and that means low birthweight babies, doing badly at school, tragically narrowed life chances, unemployment, ill health and early death - then it is because for a child born in those places the odds are stacked so heavily against them that only the most exceptional and determined could ever have any hope of overturning them.

And it's a lot to ask of a newborn baby to make up its mind to be so exceptional and determined by the time it is 3 years old.

The reason those odds are so stacked is because through a mixture of history, bad government and malice aforethought we've ended up with a political rule set designed so that the included, for example this retailer of bankers' culture, can shamelessly game the system to their own advantage through old school connections, lobbying, political party funding, corporate hospitality, corporate sponsorship, slack corporate regulation, internships for each other's children, board membership of private companies and public institutions and so on and so on and so on.

Welfare for the rich, taxes for the poor.

If you haven't noticed that over the last 18 months, you really haven't been paying attention.

And if you give any sort of a shit about human beings having the freedom to waste their lives on their own terms and not on anyone else's then you've really got to be asking about system-wide structural changes to the rule sets.

Because if you think that the inclusion problem is going to be solved by the included being nicer, then you'll very soon find yourself taking the piss .

[square brackets]
a report on the freedom to waste your life on your own terms

Martha Lane Fox is Our Last Best Hope!

No one is excluded from digital opportunities, or any other opportunities!

We don't live in a centralising, homogenising plutocracy in which rule sets are made in the best interests of a few tens of thousands of wealthy and privileged people.

The last 18 months have proved that.

So there is no need to challenge the plutocracy, or challenge exclusion.

Martha Lane Fox isn't at the heart of, and hasn't profited from, a plutocracy and that is why she will never ever need to suggest anything to challenge it.

And just because she has done a bit of charity work on her gap year doesn't prove otherwise.

Which is why she wasn't appointed as “digital exclusion tsar” (or Champion, or whatever).

Because there won't be people up and down the country from Hackney to Inverness with years of hard won experience in trying to reduce digital and every other kind of exclusion (and if there were they'd all have their own charitable foundation anyway!) –  so there is no need to give them some money to experiment with, let them get on with it, measure what works and copy that.

And  we don't need structural changes, so we don't need any negotiation about new rule sets –  Sunderland should continue to be governed by rule sets designed for Canary Wharf!

Sunderland shouldn't define its own rule sets in its own best interests.

Appointing yet another consultant wouldn't be a very tired old New Labour way of trying to change things  –  it's effective and at the same time not at all starry eyed in the presence of rich and powerful people who got their wealth from their existing privilege.

And if there were ever to be such a thing as digital exclusion, the only possible solution would be to appoint someone who is adept at using wealth and privilege for gaming the hidden mechanisms of analogue power, because it wasn't rich, powerful people shamelessly gaming the mechanisms of analogue power (old school connections, lobbying, political party funding, corporate hospitality, corporate sponsorship, internships for each other's children, board membership of private companies and public institutions and so on and so on and so on) that got us in this mess in the first place.

Everyone is included in power, no one is excluded!

No, it wouldn't be naff to appoint Martha Lane Fox as digital exclusion tsar!

It wouldn't be like voting for Ester Ranzen to "clean up politics"!

"Digital exclusion? Martha Lane Fox!" It's easy to say out loud and keep a straight face.

Which explains why whoever would have made the decision to appoint her didn't have any fear that it could or would be held up to ridicule, and it doesn't prove how secure powerful people feel in their control of politics and media.

Martha Lane Fox may or may not be an admirable person in her private choices, but I would never question her good faith in public action.

Because in good faith, she would never take the job!

TL;DR? In seven words.

Only the Over-Networked Posh Idiots Can Save Us Now!

I know it's a bit late to be saying this, but even so.

Digital Exclusion?

Martha Lane Fox!

Fuck off.

MacDonaldsville and Starbucksia (and Tallstoria, Nolandia, and Aircastle)

It really really really does depend who is talking and who is listening.

Why MPs Were Right to Fiddle their Expenses

Because we let them.

Corruption is the UK is structural not personal.

What are those structures?

Is it because we are the second most centralised country in the world after North Korea?

Which means we are all victims of invisible analogue corruption that is far worse than the cost of a few tins of cat food*.

And, if you want my opinion, the way to end that structural corruption is to

• break up the English nation state* completely - it shouldn't even have a darts team, let alone a "parliament"
• replace it with a constellation of self governing city-states and regions
• give them power to make their own laws, raise taxes, conduct foreign policy and have their own darts teams

that way, the people to whom you grant authority to act on your behalf won't need a "second home allowance" because they will live on your street and work in your town hall, and if they abuse your trust, you can go round and wring their necks.

Of course, my opinion isn't worth sh**e (but nor is anyone else's from outside the centre of real, analogue, power).

And it's not very likely to happen anyway (but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying to make it happen.)

But if we are up in arms about the cat food, we have a responsibility to ask how it happened, be honest about who else has benefited from letting it happen*, and take responsibility for doing what is needed to stop it happening any more.

Asterisks:
*What do you think Peter Mandelson was doing on that Russian oligarch's yacht last summer? Talking about the football? A Lord and a gangster were carving up your life. How do you think the world's financial institutions got so "de regulated"? Anyone ask you if you thought it was a good idea to put your job and your mortgage at risk so that over-networked smug idiots could pay for their single estate first press olive oil importing businesses?

*nation states are sooo 19th century.

* And among those who benefit are the very same people stirring up the outrage in order to sell a few more copies of the Pyongyang Daily Worker.

Everything That Is Wrong With Our Shitarse Country Made Flesh In One Frail Human Being

A couple of weeks ago I was banging on as usual about what everyone could already see for themselves - that the reason we are in such a fine mess was because Margaret Thatcher deliberately wiped out any counterbalances to the City of London (financial services industry).

This meant there was no one left with any political authority to say

 "letting 28-year-olds make massive bets with other people's money, pay themselves billions of pounds of bonuses based on what they claim the bets are going to win some time in the future, [and] retire at 35 to set up an organic single estate first press olive oil importing business because they've always been passionate about the finest ingredients"

isn't the only possible way to run a country.

The pixels weren't dry on the page before the Independent had a double page feature (I can't be bothered to find a link to it - why would I make this up?) on Harry Blain, the owner of the Haunch of Venison art retail outlet.

Harry was brought up in Surrey, went to Eton, and was a stockbroker before he retired to set up an organic single estate first press olive oil, sorry, art gallery in Mayfair.

You see what I mean?

I Just Don't Like Being Taken for a Mug

Saturday's Guardian sport had an "interview" with the Fulham footballer Danny Murphy that was blatantly cut-and-pasted from an email written by a PR person from the club.

How could anyone think that this sounds like real human speech patterns?:

"Like them, Fulham are now an efficient unit, hard to beat. We don't play with great width, attacking wingers and dribblers, but with effective team players who get it down and play."

And that is just two lines taken from a speech of no less than 140 words long, end to end.

Danny Murphy's words are in quotation marks, next to a big photo of the player, under the heading "Saturday interview", so to me that is claiming it's him talking.

I'm sure this happens all the time - this isn't the first time I've thought "that doesn't sound like a person talking" - and that I'm the only one who isn't already in on the joke. I'm not even all that bothered - the tabloids are probably nothing but.

I just don't like being taken for a mug when it's so badly written.

It must be easy to build or adapt software that scours news sites for anything within quotes, analyses the word patterns and marks up those that were written by PRs - it probably already exists somewhere. If you mashed this up (are they still called "mash ups"?) with PR company client lists and the names of in-house PRs and cross referenced it with journalists' names, you could map who was lying on behalf of who (should that be "whom"?).

You could probably even build in some sort of quality scale to identify the PRs who were crap writers and which journalists were laziest.