Day 5354: DOCTOR WHO: Over the Moon

Saturday:


"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals," as, well, Agent K puts it in "Men in Black"!

Thomas Hobbes put it a little less pithily but made substantively the same point when he wrote his potboiler on human nature: "Leviathan".

And if you think Seventeenth Century philosophy is an unlikely starting point for an episode of Doctor Who, remember there's a very literal "Leviathan" Moon Dragon here.

A Leviathan, yesterday

So I'm going to start at the point where Clara asks the Earth to vote on whether or not to, as the episode title has it, kill the Moon.

To my mind that is where the heart of what this moral dilemma is about stands. It's not just about the rights and wrongs of killing, or of killing a baby, or the one life versus many billions. It's about how we make choices like that.

I'm not dismissing those dilemmas. They are important choices. And the episode is driving you to taking sides on each of them.

And frankly it's almost impossible to overlook the "abortion" metaphor. Although in a way I suspect that writer Peter Harness probably did; it's very much there to be read into the text – it's a choice made by women whether to kill a baby that might threaten their way of life or even survival – but that really doesn't seem to be the point that he's making.

The point that Hobbes and K are making – to go back to that – is that asked to make a decision en masse people default to the self-interested choice. Individual acts of kindness and charity happen, of course they do; but look at the outcomes and you must admit that most people will do the least they have to or ask what's in it for me? It's the thinking behind the "Prisoner's Dilemma". It's why we have sayings like "no good deed goes unpunished". It's why referendums are actually a pretty bad way to make decisions. It's why we have Tory governments for that matter.

What accounts for the difference – individuals kind; groups selfish – is information and accountability.

Random people in a large group are unlikely to have expertise in a specific subject, and almost certainly not the time or inclination to spend resources getting themselves informed. So they will make simplistic decisions based on gut instinct and the limited information they have available which is usually "how will this affect me".

At the same time, no one is going to ask them to justify the choice that they have made. We see this time and again in post-election polling: more people say they voted for the winning side than actually did. Or in some cases more people say they voted for the "good" party than actually did.

We have a couple of ways of dealing with this.

One of them is capitalism. Utopian systems such as Communism require every individual to know and understand their place in relationship to the system so that they will not overuse resources, and will appreciate say what the "needs" of others are in order to fulfil the "to each according to their needs" part. Capitalism gets around that by not requiring people to be angels. "Market forces" just means setting the self-interest of one group to cancel out the self-interest of another group and achieve an overall fairness. (Even then a true market requires "perfect" information – otherwise one side can take advantage of, say, insider trading – and since "perfect" information is impossible we have an unstable system where one side usually has disproportionate power, which is why at the very least we need regulations to rebalance the equation, and in the longer term something else altogether. The strengths and failings of liberal capitalism being really a longer essay for another time.)

But the main one is representative democracy: We chose the kind of people we want to make decisions – conservative or progressive, liberal or authoritarian – and expect them to go and get themselves informed on the subject and then make the decision for us.

Hobbes is not a fan of representative democracy, which he largely sees as swapping a large rabble for a smaller one. He favours a monarch, someone in whom the maximum information can be focussed and who has the maximum accountability (which suggests Hobbes knew very little about actual monarchs).

We see this reflected in "Kill the Moon". (Yes, back to the Doctor Who episode.)

Yes, of course it's unbelievable that every single light on Earth would go out. We like to believe that ordinary people would be better than that. And people make excuses, say it's governments or Mr Burns-esque power company bosses making the decisions. Or protest that only a narrow arc of the Earth actually gets a vote (typically it's Western Europe, continent of privilege that makes it.) That isn't the point. Earth here is Hobbes's Leviathan, the people's choice being nasty brutish and short-sighted. (And yes, Leviathan is where that joke about the Sontarans comes from; you probably know that.)

Clara is the person who has most information – not only because she is on the scene but through her experiences from travelling with the Doctor. And she is also the most accountable person, if only to the Doctor. Or to Courtney, her one witness from "real life". But perhaps even more so to herself, because she’s in a position where she can’t just say ‘well I couldn’t make a difference’.

These factors combine to make Clara the right person to make the right decision. The monarch.

And the monarch having made the right decision, the people flourish (the Doctor's vision of mankind's future unfolding across space and to the ends of time).

If you still think this isn't the point, then Courtney – arguably the person with the second best information – is, the Doctor tells us, implausibly going to become President i.e. secular monarch.

What fascinates me – and for me makes the Doctor a real Liberal hero in this episode – is that he denies Hobbes and choses to absent himself from the role of monarch.

When Clara lashes out at the Doctor at the end, she has every right to be furious. Her best friend has just abandoned her to what seemed to her the most painful choice –

This isn't a difficult choice. Difficult choices – and that's not always a politician's excuse for doing the wrong but expedient thing – are when there are only lose/lose options.

The threat to Earth is largely hypothetical. (We are told about flooding that has happened.) But if the baby turns out to be a threat, there are other things that can be done.

Killing the baby Moon Dragon really is just choosing the easy thing over the right thing.

[This week, this could so easily be a metaphor about refugees.]

Clara knows this. She knows what is right. But everything seemed to be telling her that doing the right thing had too high a cost, possibly the whole of the Earth. And when she needed him to support her, to be there, to hold her hand, the Doctor was gone.

But she's also dead wrong.

He knows that he is absolutely the wrong person to make this choice.

He's made this choice before. At the end of the Time War. First time around he got it wrong (or – retcon – he spent nearly three regenerations thinking he got it wrong). When he ended the Time War, he chose to take away everybody's choices.

And in Doctor Who, from pretty much the beginning on, taking away people's choices, whether by possession, mind control or extermination, has been directly equated with evil.

So if he makes it for us now, he's doing the same thing over again, ending everyone else's choices.

He knows that the right choice here is "don't kill the baby". But if he tells Clara that… if he tells her what to choose… he's "killing the baby", where "the baby" is humanity's nascent moral standing in the Universe.

This is why the Time Lords have a policy of non-interference. This is what the Prime Directive really means. DO NOT BE THE DALEKS.


This episode divides people, not – it seems to me – in the way "The Caretaker" seems to have done, which is on the question of quality, but in whether they side with Clara or the Doctor in response to his actions in leaving her to make the choice, or whether they think Clara was right to "overrule" that vote.

There is also a bit of division between those who get the screaming ab-dabs at the use abuse of science and those who get as far as Moon Dragon and shrug. For all that it is dressed up as a piece of hard sci-fi, it's actually a whopping great metaphor. In some ways it's up to the viewer whether you take that to mean the Moon Dragon is a metaphor for Leviathan, or for the unborn child, or for an Engorgio ad Absurdum of the Brothers Karamazov dictum:

"Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?"

Cards on the table, I think this is one of the very best episodes of Doctor Who. Ever.

It looks gorgeous, as usual – the use of Lanzarote as a moonscape is inspired, and the effects are outstanding: the CG space shuttle crash, the spider-germs, the Moon Dragon itself. It's proper Hinchcliffe scary with real monsters – probably the series' best spiders yet. There are some lovely references, particularly to "The Ark in Space", from the use of the yoyo for gravity testing and mention of the Bennet oscillator to it being an Earth-space-satellite horror with an inspiring speech about the nobility of human nature! (Even if it shoots the continuity of "The Moonbase" into little pieces.)

And the acting is total quality throughout. Yes even Ellis George's Courtney who is supposed to be that annoying – a very Earthly child. Hermione Norris – "Spooks'" Roz Myers – as bitter, cynical, disappointed, let down by humanity abandoning space travel Lundvik, who still rediscovers wonder at the end. Lovely to see Tony Osoba again too. But especially Jenna Coleman who has transformed as Clara from the previous year's cypher into someone confident, bossy, caring, flawed, terrified, angry and totally human. And of course Peter Capaldi, as the Doctor. Impossible and alien. And liberal and right.

That speech of the Doctor's at the end, played with a sense of wonder as though this is a gift from the Universe to him for trusting Clara to get it right, is one of the great speeches of "Doctor Who", up there with "Indomitable" and "Do I have that right?" both of which are clearly influences on this episode. It was so good that, just weeks later, we had it quoted at our wedding:

"In the mid Twenty-First Century, humankind starts creeping off into the stars, spreads its way through the galaxy to the very edges of the Universe. And it endures ’til the end of time. And it does all that because one day in the year 2044, when it had stopped thinking about going to the stars, something occurred that make it look up, not down. It looked out there into the blackness and it saw something beautiful, something – wonderful, that for once it didn't want to destroy. And in that one moment, the whole course of history was changed."

Look up not down. See the wonder not the blackness. Discover; don't destroy. Make the right choice.

Above all "Kill the Moon" makes you think. It's clever and challenging and if you get into an argument about it, all the better.

This is what Doctor Who is for.


Next Time Throw Momma from the Train! If "Kill the Moon" is flying the flag for Doctor Who's "rad" tradition, next time things get about as "trad" as they can go. Period drama! Oak panelling! Living Mummy! Gothic futurism collides with sci-fi horror monster mash! Look out Janet Henfrey, time for another death-by-undead! There's a "Mummy on the Orient Express"!

Day 4846: Joining the Blog Tour – a convenient way to make my excuses for where I’ve been…

Tuesday:

Someday's you're just walking down the street and our of the blue a perfectly nice strangers say: "don't you write Millennium's diary?"

(Hello, by the way!)

And the answer is: "Not so's you'd notice recently." And "Sorry!"

But then, quite flatteringly, I got invited to join The Writing Process Blog Tour, a kind of Internet chain letter between writerly types on the web. And I say flattering because there're some actual real quality people doing this.

The idea's a simple one. Each writer in turn answers four questions about their work and then pass the torch to someone else. My invitation came from Lawrence Burton, who is a friend and artist and author of the wonderful and remarkable Faction Paradox novel "Against Nature" which I reviewed here. He was also kind enough to create the cover art for my own book.

Previous entries on the tour are from Lawrence (obviously), Nick Sweeney and Sharon Zink and so on back.

And so this is me:

1 What are you working on at the moment?

I am writing an SF novel called “anarchy rules”.

Or to be more strictly accurate, the first volume, “before dawn”, is finished, and ready to publish, but most of the feedback I have had, while positive, has it as only whetting the appetite without delivering. And that’s fair enough, because it is very “prologue-y”. So I’m writing the second volume, “gods & men” (and occasionally parts of the third “there are no forevers”).

Volume two should start to have real story in it.

A bit.

But, the bad news is it’s looking like being about twice as long as the first volume, so it’s going to take longer to finish. It’s about half done now.

The worse news is that I have a full-time job which is taking ever-increasing amounts of my time, so what I’m mostly writing at the moment is incredibly dull, because it’s a set of monthly accounts.

Should I have any time of my own, though, that’s what I’m doing.

2 How does your work differ from others of its genre?

Philosophically, I’d say it’s because I’m a Liberal.

You need to start by saying who I’m like, I suppose. The people who I admire, and I guess try to emulate, are the likes of Douglas Adams, Iain (with or without an M) Banks, Charlie Stross, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Lawrence Miles… People with an incredible density of ideas on the page; people whose world-building is as vast and intricate as anything by Tolkien or Martin but whose starting point is a skewed version of our own sliver of reality.

But there is a tendency in this line to be a bit of a lefty, well just look at the list. Or worse, there are others who are full on Randian right-wingers. I’m trying to plough a Liberal furrow.

In practical terms, it’s all about stories within stories. The books are very much written as anthologies, seven short stories – ten to twenty thousand words apiece – within a framing device, and with other asides and spin-offs, that, as a whole, form a bigger picture: the first volume, say, the completed one is at its heart “origin stories for super-heroes gone wrong”. Then the three volumes together form a bigger picture, of order descending into chaos because you can’t give people godlike powers and expect that to end well. If it goes beyond that, there’s a bigger picture still to explore.

3 Why do you write what you do?

In a way, this question perplexes me, a bit like asking “why do you breathe oxygen?” Writing is as necessary as breathing and these ideas are the atmosphere I happen to be writing in.

My background, my student days as a mathematician, my politics, my partner, my preferred television – Doctor Who, the Avengers, Babylon 5 – the people who’ve inspired me (Andrew, Lawrence) and what they write about, the times we live in… all of these things combine to infuse me with the ideas that my stories are built out of.

I suppose there is a single overriding concept at the root of “anarchy rules” – I’m not going to say what it is because it’s part of that bigger picture to explore that I mentioned, so it’s not ready yet – but there’s a lodestone there that draws in the other ideas and sets them in their orbits, begins to accrete plot, and directs the overarching story.

That concept means writing a story that is a “story about stories”, about worlds within worlds, and about what is real and what is imagined and what is real because it is imagined.

4 How does your writing process work?

Like a magpie building a nest.

You start gathering lots of shiny things. Pop science, culture, faces seen in the street, news items… they are all sources of possible ideas, BBC Radio4 – now I’ve discovered a lot of their output is available as podcasts – is a terrific resource. And reading. Lots of reading. You’ve got to see how writing is done to know how to do it. (And then you’ve got to write a lot to work out how you can do it.)

Then from all the shiny things, you start to throw them together and see what sort of structure emerges. There’s an idea about a plot – that is a sequence of events that you’re going to hang this story around – but that’s actually remarkably fluid early on.

For each bit you write there’s direct research. Start on the Internet: Wikipedia (yes, afraid so) and Google Maps are incredible tools for the writer wanting to look quickly at a subject or a location. And again, your old fashioned actual books. More reading.

As you write, you start to get the feel of what your characters want to do, and that may be go off in a different direction than you thought. Keep on writing and connections will emerge that you weren’t aware of to begin with but you’d clearly been thinking of. You can trust to your subconscious a lot.

But also keep reading it back and don’t be afraid of chucking it out if it’s rubbish. Or just if it no longer fits. Keep the pieces, there’s always a chance you might be able to recycle them later. Keep writing stuff. Doesn’t matter if it’s crude to start with. Rereading it will give you the chance to hone your language. You can make sure your imagery and metaphors reflect and foreshadow once you know where you’re going to end up. Try not to write exactly the same thing twice. For me, I’m trying to show reflections, parallels, similarities in the stories, but time they do have to be slightly different every time.

I am, however, rubbish at finishing things. I flit from one story to another as bits of idea catch my eye. So there are seven stories to write and only one is finished. Another is getting nearly finished. A third was making good progress but hasn’t seen me for a while. The fourth is a framework, the fifth a skeleton, the sixth just a cloud of words and the seventh not even that, existing purely in my head as a location and a bit of a twist.

So in the meantime, here is a song…


We welcome you to Goblin Town
Where the king wears sunshine for a crown
We dance and sing for the pleasure of the king
And so will you when he's around

We welcome you to our Unselie Court
Where pleasure bent is our every thought
To play some more is the whole of the law
And we'll have our way in wicked sport

We welcome you to the place of feast
Where you'll love the taste of juicy meats
We'll have you for dinner too
For everything is good to eat

Welcome to our labyrinth of gold
Where jewelled trinkets overflow
You'll be amazed in our crystal caves
And vaults that hold you till you grow old

You're welcome too to iron and ire
To furnace hot, and forge and fire
Far from the sun our tunnels run
To the house of pain that ends desire

Welcome then to the heart of stone
Where gods of chaos make their throne
Where talk of rules is the song of fools
And you find yourself left all alone

Welcome last where the Deep Ones swim
Where the fires fail and the light grows dim
There's no coming back from the heart of the black
From the darkest hole where you've fallen down
We welcome you to Goblin Town
We welcome you to Goblin Town.


Now I suggest you go and check out Mr Andrew while I try to rope some more folks into this tour larks!

Day 4446: The Liberal Democrat What Do We Stand For Challenge

Monday:


Daddy Alex has challenged Daddy Richard to come up with a brief statement of Liberal Democrat belief in fewer than a hundred and fifty words.

But stuff that, it's MY diary, so I'M having a go...

At a pinch, I THINK I can trim our core message down to:

“The Liberal Democrats stand for the freedom to live your life enjoying the rewards for your own endeavour*, governed by your own choices – with equality before the law; without harming others.”

(*and before anyone else has a go, that's "fruits of your labours" translated into language a Conservatory might understand!)

But I would wrote MORE than that (slightly) because... well. that's what I DO.

Okay, but here are reasons too:

(a) when Daddy Alex wrote “freedom for every individual”, I immediately thought of the way he always says that Liberalism works in EVER-EXPANDING CIRCLES, starting with the individual, but linking to family and community and wider and wider to the whole world. So I wanted to add that in.

(b) I wanted to make those circles go through TIME as well as SPACE, because that means including protection for the next generation, which is where the need for GREEN ACTION and FIXING the DEFICIT both come from.

and (c) I definitely wanted to include that bit from the Preamble about "poverty, ignorance, and conformity", because that in turn is a kind of a reference to Mr Beverage's evil “Five Giants”: Squalor, Ignorance, Want and Dec, Idleness, and Disease.

Though I suspect that NOWADAYS we combine into "Poverty" the giants of "Squalor" and "Want" and "Idleness" (by which of course Mr B meant "Joblessness" not "Laziness", little clue for Conservatories like Master Gideon "workers v shirkers" Osborne and Hard Labourites like Mr Liam "strivers v skivers" Byrne there); that "Sickness" means supporting the NHS which all Parties did at its creation and which all Parties still do (no matter what Hard Labour hubristically think about it being "theirs"); and I'm rather glad that we've added the evil of "Conformity" to the list.

So, I end up with:

“The Liberal Democrats stand for freedom.

Freedom from poverty, ignorance and conformity.

Freedom for every individual, family, group, community, society or nation.

Freedom from inheriting the financial and environmental mistakes of earlier generations.

Freedom to live your life enjoying the rewards for your own endeavour, governed by your own choices – with equality before the law; without harming others.

To make that freedom real needs both fairness and practicality; opportunity and compassion: an economy that works, but where everyone also pays their fair share.

The Liberal Democrats believe in a better future. That’s why Liberal Democrats are working to build a fairer, greener society and a stronger economy, enabling every person to live the life they want.”

I’d also add the following riders as “derived” beliefs that follow logically from the above:

On government:
Liberal Democrats believe that government should act to protect these freedoms, but cannot be a blanket solution to solve all problems. We also accept that government itself can be a threat to freedom, that no government always knows best, so everyone must have a better say in decisions.

On taxes:
We accept that governments need to raise taxes – in order to relieve poverty, to supply education, to provide a safe and supportive society, to nurture and sustain the environment, and to encourage personal growth and freedom of expression – so we say these should be raised as fairly and as simply as possible, with a tax system that is progressive, understandable and works to release locked up wealth to work for the nation.

On Welfare:
We believe that everyone should be treated with dignity, protected when circumstances mean that they are unemployed, supported when they are unable to work, through age or disability, healed when they are sick. The Welfare State should free people to live lives free from the tyranny of dependence on their employer, making the labour market work for the individual while protecting from any failures of the free market, and enabling society to flourish by not wasting the potential of any individual.

So, the shortest form is 30 words, but the full thing has cut down Daddy's 158 words to, er, 323.

That WAS what he wanted, wasn't it?



Right, now I TAGSIE...

Auntie Jennie (Chaotic Good) for passion and heart;

Mr Mark Reckons (Lawful Neutral – for his saintly forbearance on House of Comments) for rock solid pragmatism and unshaking principle;

and I WAS going to tag Auntie Caron (Lawful Lovely) for the biggest smile and the soul of the Lib Dems... but Daddy got there first, so I will pick Uncle Andrew Hickey (Chaotic Sensible) for wisdom and sticking with the least worst Party instead!

Day 3915: The Big Conference Speech aka Quality of Mush

Tuesday:



Well, the meeja might possibly give more attention to what Captain Clegg has to say, but for me there was a MORE IMPORTANT speech this week, cos it was my Daddy Richard's FIRST TIME!

Many people do not realise that Daddy Richard has never spoken at Liberal Democrat conference before. It's probably because he is so ANCIENT! Okay so he has spoken at the BOTYs a couple of times. If you count flapping his mouth like a landed fish when I won my award in 2010. But never a proper speech. Until today!

Here's what he had to say:

Conference, listen to what Jill Hope has just said.

We can do so much better than this.

Have we ended poverty? Have we defeated ignorance? Have we banished conformity? We have so much more important things to do.

This paper invites us to base our policy development, our next general election, on the idea of "quality of life" or "wellbeing", a concept so nebulous, so warm and fuzzy, as to be almost meaningless.

It says, in the first line of the paper, and it's repeated in the motion, that "most people's aim is to have a good quality of life".

If that's the case, then this is a simple truism. All policy should always be based on wellbeing; I mean who would vote for a worse quality of life?

I'm not even sure it is true. I think most people aim to make ends meet, or to see their kids all right, or to go to the gym more. I aim to write a book. You can say all these things are about "quality of life" but you spread the definition so wide that it can mean anything .

And if you try to mean everything, you end up meaning nothing.

Yesterday, we debated Facing the Future, a paper that grudgingly mentioned wellbeing in the introduction and then forgot all about it. Today we have a quality of life wish list. A string of nice policies tied together by woolly thinking .

How does this fit with our existing policy? New regulations for business - do we say which ones we will be replacing under Vince's one in one out rule? More interference in the curriculum, more government telling teachers what to teach. And more bureaucracy, a whole new quango, just to collate data, not to do anything with it.

The paper breaks down quality of life into individual wellbeing, community and environment. I've got a phrase for that. It's Free, Fair and Green. And Liberal Democrats, we do that already.

If you want to improve people's quality of life: plant some trees. Or write music. Or fund the BBC properly.

But don't give up the core of who we are.

ALL Parties would say they intend to improve quality of life. We differ on how, and for whom. And it is our choices that define us.

It's not that there are not good things in this paper. Who could be against shorter commutes, or support for volunteering, or better mental health care?

Indeed, as I said, who is going to disagree with improving wellbeing. But it seeks to shift our focus away from Freedom onto "being nice".

I can see how, in a coalition with the Nasty Party, we would want to shout out to people "but we're the nice ones".

But at a time when we alone stand against the cruelty of unrestrained Tory capitalism…

…and against the folly of Labour's profligacy and mismanagement …

we don't need to redefine ourselves.

We just need to be ourselves!

I know we crave comfort from the pain caused by this world of austerity. But our ideas need to be inspiring, not just comfortable.

I was listening to Paddy Ashdown last night, and he reminded me that Liberalism isn't easy, it isn't warm and fluffy. It can be difficult to trust people to make their own choices, rather than promising to make it all all right.

Joe Grimmond didn't tell us to march towards our comfort zone; he told us to march towards the sound of gunfire.

Liberalism is like a flame: it warms you, protects you, lights the way. But it can burn.

It's not a soggy security blanket.

We don't believe in leading people by the hand. That's the other lot.

We believe in empowering them, trusting them and getting out of their way.

It's not about wellbeing. It's about Freedom!

Conference, please reject this motion.

To our surprise and quite a bit of relief, we were not the only ones against the motion. Ms Jill Hope, who daddy mentions, was first to oppose it, telling us how SILLY we were going to look on council estates and up tower blocks talking about "well being" when they want jobs and houses and the lifts to work. And Ms Christina Baron who highlighted how ridiculous it was to be setting up a new quango, the Institute of, or perhaps for, Wellbeing.

We managed to fight them to a count, and it was quite close: a hundred and fifty-eight to a hundred and twenty-two.

But the real shame was that my other daddy, Daddy Alex was not called to give HIS speech, 'cos it would have been a cracker and I think he could have won the day for us!

Have a read of what he would have said and decide for yourself.

Even so, it is to be hoped that such a NARROW SQUEAK for what should have been an EASY policy paper, and for what IS such an IMPORTANT one, will give the Party pause and maybe they will think again.

And if not, we'll just have to get Daddy Richard to stand for FPC again.

Day 3830: Either Or-ery

Monday:


Over the weekend Mr Mark Reckons wrote a piece I'd recommend reading on "Whataboutery", which is the way to play politics dirty so that you can attack someone who's proposing a policy you actually agree with.

This is the FALLACY of the RED HERRING: introducing an irrelevant case into an argument.

I'd like to give you a companion to Mr Mark's piece with one on another FALLACY, the fallacy of the FALSE DICHOTOMY.

Most famously presented by the former-Monkey-in-Chief, President Dubbya, as "you're either with us or against us", we've been seeing a LOT of this at the moment.

The most common occurrence is the "NHS fallacy": any reform is to be opposed with cries that the "only choice" is between the status quo and "privatisation", usually "privatisation by the back door" (to get around the fact that whatever it is clearly ISN'T going to be an actual privatisation). In fact, of course, the Hard Labour government oversaw the genuine privatisation of great swathes of our NHS through their Public Finance Initiative, which saw hospitals bought up by private companies and leased back to the public at often excessive rents (which is one of the things leading to the embuggerance of the NHS in spite of above inflation increases in government spending).

Topical this week, the public sector unions are going to go on strike over pensions because the "only choice" is between their current arrangements and "absolute daylight robbery".

Although SOME people might say that it's the UNIONS' position that is: "your money or your life public services"! I mean, just WHO is holding the "gun" saying "don't make me hurt the children" here?

Actually, the double standards employed by the Unions in this "debate" are outrageous. First, the Unions announce that they are going to go on strike. Then Mr Danny sets out the government's position. Now I call that being open and honest with the public, but the Unions call it "deeply inflammatory". They call it deeply inflammatory AFTER they've already announced that – regardless of the ongoing negotiations – they've decided to call a strike. Check the dates on the last two quotes: "Public sector workers back mass strike": 15th June; Danny Alexander's speech: 17th June. Deeply inflammatory. Right.

And now we have Ms Mary Bousted, leader of the ATL teachers' union, accusing the government of a "doing a Robert Maxwell on our pensions". So that would be saying that the government is illegally taking money OUT of the teacher's pension funds and using it to prop up, what, the rest of government spending?

Well, at the moment there is NOT ENOUGH money in those pension funds to meet the expected needs of the teachers (and other workers) who are paying in. So the government has to top that up from general taxation (that's ON TOP OF the employers contributions that we make).

So that would basically be the EXACT OPPOSITE of "doing a Robert Maxwell". That would be keeping the pension fund afloat at the expense of everyone else.

They tell LIES and they call us NAMES and then they have the CHEEK to try and distract your attention from it by saying that WE'RE traducing THEM!

I'd call Ms Mary a Bousted Flush!

Meanwhile, here is another example, this time from the Labour Conspiracy website:

"Our choice is to treat people with dignity or go back to the 1930s"

Is it actually USEFUL to polarise a very difficult debate about benefits and disability into "basic dignity" versus "1930s work programmes, institutions and eugenics" (and that's really not sufficiently coded to avoid cries of Godwin's Law, now is it)?

Could we not start from a basic recognition that the government isn't TRYING to be evil?

The aim of Mr Drunken-Swerve's reforms is SUPPOSED to be to enable people who want to work to be better off if they go to work, not - as the quote implies - to euthanase the disabled.

For the last thirty years, governments have been hiding unemployment among the genuinely long-term ill. It seems to me that one thing that could actively harm the interests of those who are ill is having to support the long-term unemployed out of the same pot of benefits. So, I have to ask: would a benefit system that undid that be better able to provide basic dignity for those in genuine need?

(You COULD reasonably argue "no"; e.g. you might argue that a sort of quasi-universal provision might be more effective, but you would need to justify that as a position, rather than just start from the assertion "any reform must be bad for the long-term ill".)

And if you are going to undo that hiding of unemployment, how are you to do it?

Again, it seems that either you let anyone claim disability-related benefits and accept that the benefit will be spread so thin that it helps no one, or you accept that at some point there's going to be some kind of medical testing involved.

At which point we're down to a question of degree.

So, the proposed tests sound to be too intrusive and too impersonal. And they sound like they are FRIGHTENING people (which I have to say language of "eugenics" exacerbates, which if you think about it puts you on the same side as the scary people - even though the LabCon author is clearly also one of the ones who are scared). Surely the useful question then is: "how do we conduct any testing that we have to in the most sympathetic and dignified manner?"

Clearly there ARE problems on the Coalition side here, almost certainly stemming from a terror at the department of benefits of seeing a huge spike in unemployment claims. So clearly they want to do the undoing by not jumping people from disability benefits to unemployment benefits, but by jumping them straight from disability to work, and that's just impractical. Equally, this is clearly a terrible time to be doing any forward thinking reform because the overriding need for spending cuts will at best muddle your thinking. Like, WHICH target is your main aim? Making sure that sickness benefits go to the sick? Making sure that work actually rewards the worker? Or cutting the overall benefits bill? (And your opponents are ALWAYS going to come back at you with "it's about the cuts" "it's ideological" (yawn)!)

Wouldn't it be better to think about OUTCOMES rather than INTENTIONS? The road to the toasty place being notoriously paved with the latter (as anyone who experienced the last government can testify), saying that a policy is wrong because it does this, or because it fails to do that is both more PRACTICAL and more HONEST than saying that it is just "evil".


The biggest false dichotomies, of course, are on the ECONOMY. And BOTH SIDES are guilty of using 'em.

"We must do this or the economy will fall over!"/"We must not do this or the economy will never recover!" is the now too-familiar battleline between the Coalition and Opposition, and this obfusticates the fact that the policies of both sides are REALLY VERY SIMILAR.

"It was the fault of the last Labour government"/"it was the fault of the bankers", is another.

OF COURSE it is in the Coalition's political interest to portray the Labour Party as credit-crazed spendthrifts, ruinous wastrels who would have us in penury and our children in hock forever. We, after all, are the ones who have to be in power while the agonisingly painful policies of deficit reduction are enacted.

But equally, the Coalition has to have an answer to Hard Labour's naked political opportunism when they seek to pin every scintilla of economic agony to Master Gideon's incompetence at the reins (a "bad news" policy by the Shadow Pocket Money Thief that leads to some frankly bizarre doublethink: for example, when there is a fall in unemployment, apparently, it's because unemployment is a "lagging indicator" when it goes down but "evidence of why we need a plan B" when it goes up).

(This of course was Mr Balls recent interview with Mr Marrmite, the one where he said that "the trade unions must not walk into the trap of giving George Osborne the confrontation he wants" because he spotted that choosing between supporting strikes or supporting the government was a trap for HIM!)

Any half-way decent economist (I do NOT include Mr Bully Balls in that category) will tell you that the cuts have neither begun to bite nor had nearly enough time to change the direction of the economy. The two main things affecting the economy are that MASSIVE RECESSION that happened in 2008 (in case you somehow missed it) and the fact that the government printed like a GAZILLION POUNDS leading to inflation and devaluation. (Though neither of these things are NECESSARILY as bad as they are painted either – another false dichotomy. E.g. inflation reduces the national debt as a share of GDP – as any property owner who survived the Seventies will tell you, it didn't half make their mortgages a doddle; though, flipside again, long term it started the inexorable house price inflation that leaves us now so overburdened.)


The truth is, the policies of Labour and Conservatories (and Liberal Democrats!) are not that different – in fact, given for example the discovery that Mr Alistair Dalek was secretly planning a VAT rise, you can bet your bottom dollar (which may be the only one you have left by now) that had they been returned to power, Hard Labour would have conducted a swift spending review and said "oops, it's worse than we thought, guys, have you SEEN what's happed in Greece? We have to cut faster and deeper!", and done EXACTLY what the Coalition is doing.

The MYTH of Labour's "pain free" cuts… their airy assertion that they would cut 80% of the deficit that we would but their tactical oppositionalism against every single £ reduction in spending… their repeated false dichotomy of "our way or the evil, ideological inflicting of pain on the poor"… it makes it VERY DIFFICULT to have anything approaching a RATIONAL DEBATE.

"We'd like to cut this."

"EVIL!"

"Well, maybe if we only cut it by half."

"INFINITE EVIL!"

I'm sure it plays well to the Labour Chorus, but it gets the country nowhere.

Regrettably, Mr Millipede's response to talk of a leadership crisis is a power grab for control of Shadow Cabinet appointments showing that Hard Labour are turning more INWARDS than looking outwards. While Mr Bully Balls, apparently, no longer even sees the need to run policies by the Shadow Cabinet before launching them. And sofa government worked so WELL for Lord Blairimort, after all.

In an equation where it is EITHER the Coalition OR the Labour Party, Labour seem intent on making themselves IRRELEVANT.

But even THAT is a false dichotomy. The Coalition of course consists of TWO Parties, and the true clash of ideas is now between Conservatories and LIBERAL DEMOCRATS.

You see, the ULTIMATE "either/or" is the MEEJA's HEADS WE WIN-TAILS YOU LOSE game of EITHER "on message" OR "gaffe". If you're "on message" you're a ROBOT, no to be trusted, only lying when your lips move, enemy of the people. If you" gaffe" it's even worse. Hence all this recent fuss over "U-Turns", as though LISTENING to people, DEBATING policy even, shock, CHANGING YOUR MIND were BAD THINGS for a government in what we still LAUGHINGLY describe as a DEMOCRACY (leading to the UTTERLY INSANE suggestion from a Questionable Time panellist that governments should do what is in their manifesto and only what is in their manifesto and the people should shut up for five years and only judge them at election time). DEBATING policy – in CABINET as well as in PARLIAMENT rather than at intimate tête-a-têtes with Fleet Street Editors – reduces the meeja's POWER to dictate the agenda. That's why, for them, a thinking government is a "weak" government and one that does what it's told (by a Prime Monster who does what she or he is told) is a "strong" one.

Obviously the REAL truth is the reverse, and that is why the Liberal Democrats bring real STRENGTH to this Coalition.

We are used to having Government and Opposition. In the Coalition, the Liberal Democrats are BOTH.

And how LIBERAL is that? Liberalism has NEVER been an EITHER/OR; it's always been BOTH: one and many; individual and community; local and global.

That is how I can write a big old self-important diary about "great big, important-y things" like the ECONOMY and SPACE and STUFF, and Auntie Caron, bless her heart, can read it and bring it right down to the REALLY important and PERSONAL with a post about the need for a real Liberal Voice. And they are BOTH what Liberalism is ABOUT.
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Day 3148: Pillock's Progress aka Mandy v Gideon round deux

Friday:


This week Master Gideon dabbled with a new philosophy: he said that the Conservatories are the "progressive party" now.

"Progressive" means "wanting things to CHANGE", but I'm sorry, Mr Oboe, just wanting "a change from the current lot" doesn't really count.

"Progressive" is the OPPOSITE of "conservative", wanting things to stay as they ARE or HOW THEY USED TO BE.

So "Progressive Conservatives" OUGHT to be the very definition of an OXYMORON. An OXYMORON is, of course, an IDIOT from one of THOSE universities. Which, come to think of it, ought to be the very definition of Master Gideon…



In POLITICS "progressive" usually means wanting the GOVERNMENT to effect change while "conservative" means wanting the Government to impede or reverse change.

Look how much of the LANGUAGE of Conservatories harks BACKWARDS to some (usually-imaginary) Golden Age, whether it's the 'Fifties (before all that "permissiveness"), or the Age of Empire (before all that "European Union") or from "bring back Matron" to good old Victorian Values.

The notion that Master Gideon and the Conservatories are "conservative" goes back even further to the idea of what they are FOR, namely: to preserve, defend, entrench and generally stop anyone else getting their hands on the POWER and PRIVILEGE of those who are already very, very RICH, starting with the King (specifically Charles II).

Bringing this right up to date, Master Gideon's ONLY tax policy (that we know of) is the tax cut for dead millionaires. This is "preserving the privilege of the already-haves 101" and people are QUITE RIGHT to call him on it.

So far so very mildly-amusing: look how the young Oboe makes a fool of himself AGAIN.

But there is clearly something about Master Gideon that brings Lord Mandelmort out of the woodwork; he just can't help rising to the bait. And so it was this week, as the First Prince of Darkness felt compelled to respond in the Grauniad.

"Crass political cross-dressing", he called it – and remember, Lord Mandelmort has seen Master Oboe in the cabaret on board Russian Billionaire Oleg Deeply-Suspect's yacht.

Lord Mandelmort and Master Gideon.

You know that bit in King Kong, where the giant ape fights a T-Rex? Sinister pre-historic reptile versus heroic gorilla? This isn't like that at all.

It's more like the bit in Jurassic Park where the T-Rex finds the rubbishy lawyer quivering on the loo and swallows him whole.

(Credit, in passing, to Mr Evan Davis of the The Today Programme, for trying gamely to get Lord Mandy to answer the question during their interview on Wednesday. Unlike some of his co-presenters, Mr Evan was not trying to get his interviewee to say some "thing that he wanted them to say" – presumably to then spring an "ah ha!" gotcha – but instead he had a genuine question and wanted a proper answer. And since the question was "now that you've got us a trillion pounds in debt, how are Hard Labour going to pay it off?", which is quite a GOOD question, it was certainly one deserving of an answer. Not that he got one. Lord Mandy is just as frustrating to interview as Master Oboe, only much, much cleverer at not looking like a total spork.)

But just how "progressive" are Hard Labour, anyway? Saying that they've poured billions into schools and the National Health Service isn't actually "progressive": we HAD those things under Queen Maggie too. Hard Labour is just doing the same but paying for it.

So what have they actually CHANGED?

Well in the PLUS column, there has been genuine devolution to the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland. We've had the Human Rights Act, which more people ought to say is a GOOD thing. At the point of a European Union gun we've had some equal rights for gay daddies.

But, in the MINUS column, we've had special rights for RELIGIONS and a huge increase in FAITH schools: that's handing a lot of power BACK to one of the OLDEST PRIVILEGES in town, divine right and never mind the king!

The power of a TINY minority in the PRESS, in particular the Emperor of the Airwaves, Mr Roger Stavro Moredick, has been amplified more than ever before, and the ITV companies have been allowed to merge Shoggoth-like into a single massive loss-making entity, while the only institution standing between us and the full Faux News – the BBC, yes I get the irony – gets SPANKED at every opportunity.

We've seen a freezing of social mobility thanks to an education policy biased to the privileged and a yanking up of the ladder after all those cabinet ministers who benefitted from a free university place.

We've seen some very, very highly overpaid bankers have their jobs saved at the cost of trillions of pounds, and we've seen some very, very averagely paid workers made redundant rather than save their electric van plant or windmill factory.

And by far the BIGGEST change they've effected, from section 44 of the Terrorism Act to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and all the rest, is a MASSIVE entrenchment of the powers of the state to spy on, arrest, abuse and generally intimidate its citizens. That's a really, REALLY big "preserving powers of the already powerful".

Oh, and of course we fought an illegal war that reduced a Middle Eastern country to the Stone Age at the whim of a pampered billionaire playboy who just happened to have bought and cheated his way into the Presidency of the richest nation on the face of the Earth. Well done on sticking to the progressive principles there, boys.


The old left-right axis has always been about "privileges for the privileged". The "right" believe that the privileged few who control the usually-inherited wealth know best and should be in charge. The "left" believe that the privileged few who control the State's central committee know best and should be in charge…


…which – daytime TV link – reminds me, Lawrence Miles (read it before he deletes it) has an actually-positive review of the recent series of Torchwood, though in his usual style he finds a way to be abrasively confrontational about saying so.

However, in the middle he goes into a MIND-SHATTERINGLY ill-informed rant about what he perceives as the "evils of Liberalism"©theLarryverse:

"…there's a difference between "left-wing" and "liberal". To be a liberal means to believe that tolerance is good and global warming is bad, but also to believe that you can save the world simply by not using the word "poof". S/he may have good intentions, but doesn't seem to appreciate that all the things s/he considers to be civilised - democracy, universal suffrage, the right to exist without having the shit kicked out of you for having long hair or skin that's a bit on the dark side - were achieved through the effort of rather more pro-active people, who fought and occasionally died in order to create a less appalling version of humanity. To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that's wholly founded on exploitation. Tennant-era Doctor Who is liberal."

It's difficult to grasp how someone normally so well-informed and erudite can be so gob-smackingly wide of the mark here.

Yes, there IS a difference between "left-wing" and "liberal", it's just that you have absolutely no idea what it is, or indeed what you are talking about or, for that matter, the history of the country you are living in.

"Left wing" means a belief that capital should be controlled by a (presumed benign) central state. "Liberal" means a rejection of arbitrary authority, whether based on heredity, religious mandate, inherited wealth, or "happening to be in government".

Scary Charlotte (now with even scarier kittens!) could NEVER be described as "left-wing", but she is CLEARLY a Liberal.

But to fisk this clause by clause:

"to believe that you can save the world simply by not using the word "poof". "

– that would be "political correctness" a not-actually-bad notion (assuming such a thing was not wholly made up by the Hate Mail just so that people could claim "it's political correctness gone mad") that being POLITE to people would result in a "less appalling version of humanity", but definitely a "leftist" notion rooted mainly the alternative comedy of the early 'Eighties (who, ironically, felt that racism was beyond the, pardon me, pale and so had to make jokes about homosexuality instead – if you don't believe me, try watching the terribly "right on" first episode of "Black Adder II" again).

"democracy, universal suffrage, the right to exist etc, etc, unlimited rice-pudding…"

– well bless my muffins, who was it who brought in all those great Reform Acts in the nineteenth century? Who campaigned for religious tolerance for Catholics and Jews? Who invented the pension? Who wrote the People's Budget? Who came up with the idea of the NHS?

And if it comes to "fighting and dying" for a better kind of humans you can only possibly mean World War Part Two, and frankly that was ALL of us in it together, Liberal, Conservatory, Labour, probably not Sir Oswald's lot, I certainly don't recall that War being a "leftists only" affair.

Or perhaps you think that the Marches against Fascism in the East End were only leftists? That the campaign against Apartheid wasn't led by the Young Liberals (yes, even Mr Vain)? That the Stonewall Riots were fought by Marxists and not a bunch of drag queens?

Basically HOW DARE YOU, how dare you deny the others who fight and die and then condemn them because you claim they weren't there. They were there. And you were not.


"To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that's wholly founded on exploitation"

– whereas to be a "leftist" is to claim credit for all the advances ever made while denying any responsibility for the actions of your party, the Labour Party, and whine on the sidelines doing nothing, claiming that you are being a realist about the system while still fully taking advantage of it. It is to be a hypocrite.

All of us in this country are part of the "system" that at least in part contributes to exploitation in other countries. It's not just shopping at Primark – how easy it is to scorn the poor in this country for their impact on the far more poor abroad – your bank, your telephone company, your local council, any of them may have shifted call centres or supply offices overseas to take advantage of cheaper labour. The only people who can truly afford to step out of "the system", grow their own food, make their own clothes, generate their own electricity for the computer on which they post their blogs (and by the way, do you refine your own oil to make the plastic and semi-conductor components?) the only people who can do that are the independently wealthy – i.e. the ones who inherited a fortune and are therefore screwing the rest of us from birth.

Seriously, which philosophy will actually one day help people out of Third World poverty? "Leftist" "don't you worry your pretty little head about it, the State knows best" or Liberal free trade and opportunity? Because every single example everywhere of countries escaping poverty is thanks to Free Trade and not State Intervention.

"Tennant-era Doctor Who is liberal."

– this is supposed to be an insult???

News for you, Larry: HARTNELL era Doctor Who is Liberal: the Sensorites are people, the Rills are the nice ones (crass as that message is), religious intolerance leads to "The Massacre"; Troughton Era Doctor Who is Liberal: "why?" is the unanswerable question for Daleks; Pertwee-era – yes, Lord help us, even the Twepee Era is Liberal: green scaly people are people too; the Baker-era is Liberal; the Davison-era, Liberal; the Baker, McCoy, McGann and Eccleston-era Doctor Who IS ALL Liberal.

You cannot get away from it: the series is ABOUT a person who opposes the arbitrary power of bullies.

He's not ever a "leftist": he doesn't believe in the centralised state. He's not a Conservatory: he RAN AWAY FROM traditional inherited power. Time and time again he is FOR the individual, for science and discovery, for freedom. He's the OPPOSITE of the DALEKS for fluffy's sake. DOCTOR WHO IS A LIBERAL.


Hang on, Larry's got a caveat:

"…much of the previous paragraph was informed by various encounters with Doctor Who authors over the years. Most particularly, an argument with Paul Cornell - Grand Poobah of Liberals and unapologetic Blairite…"

Sorry? You think supporting New Labour makes you a LIBERAL???????????

This can only be the cognitive dissonance speaking: "I am a leftist. Leftist must be GOOD. Labour is EVIL. Labour cannot be leftist. DOESNOTCOMPUTE DOESNOTCOMPUTE Must… pick… term… at… random… Labour are Liberals. Ahhhhhh, brain feel better now."

Words MEAN things, and being in denial about the Labour Party being "of the left" does not give you an excuse to go all Humpty Dumpty on us.


Which, to cut a long story short, brings me back to Master Gideon.

Who would have expected the Shadow Tuck Shop Monitor and the author of "Alien Bodies" to have anything in common, and yet here they both are redefining away to let them feel good about themselves.

"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They change the facts to fit their opinions."

That's a quote from Doctor Who. Being a Liberal.



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Day 2275: Shut Your Trap

Sunday:



This was RUBBISH.

What, you want MORE?


OK: Mr Charlie Brooker does not often make mistakes, but when he advised us to watch a TV series by Mr Madam Adam Curtis called "The Trap: How We Learned to Stop Worrying About Freedom and Love the no that's not right…" it was a STINKER.

Madam Adam's technique is to tell you what to think whilst playing a MONTAGE of clips and LOTS of SCARY music so that you know that it is all REALLY TERRIFYING STUFF. And then say: "It's all true – now you have to do what I say!"

So it was a sort of HORROR ANTHOLOGY in three parts, a series of MADE UP STORIES to frighten you! Goodness knows why it was billed as a DOCUMENTARY though; probably some sort of mix up at the RadioTimes!


The first part was called "BAD WORD you, Buddy!", though it might as well have been called "The Ghost of Freedom Past".

It was set in the Nineteen Seventies, and it told two stories about two DUMB ideas and how they took hold of two institutions.

The first idea was GAME THEORY: the idea that you can fight a war by treating it like a game of BATTLESHIPS. This idea so impressed the Pentagon that they used it extensively in order to LOSE the VIETNAM WAR. The problem with Game Theory being that you have to ASSUME what the other side's winning conditions actually are. If you measure winning by "how many body bags we have filled" and the other side measures winning by "are the American public so SICKENED by this slaughter that they make the army give up and go home" you may find that your sums do not add up. Computer says "No", as they say.

On the DOWN SIDE, it turned out that Game Theory was invented by a man called Mr John Nash who was unfortunately MAD.

This, however, segued nicely into the second story!

The second idea was that you could measure whether someone was BONKERS or not by getting them to fill in a questionnaire.

Here is an example of one such questionnaire:

"Question One: Are you Lord Blairimort?"

If you answer "yes" then it is off to the Soft-Wall Hilton for you, you LOONY!

Now, to be fair to the head-shrinkers that came up with this idea, psychology had gone a bit WRONG, because psychologists could not tell the difference between people who were mad and people who just SAID that they were mad. This was PROVED by Mr R D Laing and his Rosenhan Experiment where he successfully got himself and a dozen other people incarcerated in a MENTAL INSTITUTION and then found he could not get out again. What a NUTTER. Which is what the people running the mental institution had said.

So at least they were at least tying to make things BETTER, which is more than can be said of the pinheads and the Pentagon, who already had a pretty successful technique for EXPLODING PEOPLE.

Of course, the problem should have been obvious. And certainly, SOMEONE should have spotted it the moment that they tested the whole of America and found that 51% of Americans were clinically CRACKERS.

The tests did not test whether you were mentally ill or not – they only tested whether you conformed to a pre-determined definition of "normal" or not. And all abnormals were declared "ill".

(Funnily enough, we say that the SOVIET UNION was BAD for saying that people who didn't fit in were mental cases.)

It should not take a fluffy elephant to point out that the attempt to take the FALLIBLE human psychologist out of the diagnosis process was DOOMED to failure. Because OBVIOUSLY the tests were still being written by FALLIBLE human psychologists. Mechanising the process did not AVOID misdiagnosis; it merely enabled the person writing the test to misdiagnose THOUSANDS of people ALL AT ONCE!

So what linked these two ideas and their TERRIFYING consequences?

Well, says Madam Curtis, it is the idea that you can stop thinking about people AS people and reduce their behaviour to simple, easy to predict, numerical models, based on the assumption that everyone will behave in the way that is best for themselves.

Or, to put it bluntly, everyone is totally SELFISH.


The title for the second part was "The Ghost of Christmas Prozac". In this episode, Madam Adam told us that all the SCARY things that he had told us about in part one were now being applied to the way that the government ran the country.

This started with another idea, called "Public Choice Theory" or "Yes, Prime Minister," when it was made for television. This was the idea that there is no such thing as the PUBLIC INTEREST. No wonder it was Lady Thatcher's favourite TV show!

This idea, said Madam Curtis, came out of the OTHER ideas of Game Theory and treating people as checklists of behaviours. The Game Theory idea says that civil servants do not try to do good things for other people but instead act in their own interests, building little empires, defending their right to count the paper-clips, that sort of thing.

It is not a very NICE view of people, but it appeared to explain the almighty bureaucratic cock-up that we had made of government since the end of World War Part Two.

Of course, another explanation would be that bureaucracies tend to get bigger – it is always easier to hire new people to try and get a job done than to fire the existing people who are not doing it.

And the larger an organisation gets, the more BYZANTINE (isn't THAT a good word!) the more BYZANTINE its internal processes become. People still JOIN the civil service because they want to do GOOD, but they get trapped in the labyrinth of PROCEDURE and CUSTOM.

Still, if you have an authoritarian viewpoint and do not really trust people, it would be easy to see MUDDLE and CONFUSION as deliberate obfuscation and selfishness.

Did I mention it was Lady Thatcher's favourite TV show?

The governments of Britain and America came up with two different policy approaches in response to this idea. In Britain, Mr Minor, the caretaker Prime Monster while Lady Thatcher was REGENERATING into Lord Blairimort, came up with the Citizens' Charter, the Internal Market for the NHS and the Cones Hotline. In America, President Billary-Hillary came up with the idea of doing NOTHING and letting the market sort itself out.

Obviously Mr Minor's idea of coming up with a whole load of completely arbitrary targets completely failed to deliver what people WANTED. Instead it rewarded the service providers for ticking the right boxes. Just like the psychologists' checklists, the targets set were not based on any real measure of anything, and so only multiplied the random errors of the people in the centre setting them. And meanwhile, those psychologists' checklists that had proved half the world was potty, led the psychologists to dose half of everyone with Prozac and blitz them into blissed-out zombiedom.

America, on the other fluffy foot, had the biggest economic boom in history.

Obviously, said Madam Curtis, something was going wrong… in America.

Stepping back a moment, in order to provide evidence, the advocates of the idea looked to the work of an ANTHROPOLOGIST who had studied the BIG FIGHTS of the Yanomamo tribes-people. He said that if you looked carefully, the people in the fights always worked with the other tribes-people that they were closest related to. This, he said, proved that people always behave selfishly.

Madam Curtis even linked this to the work of my FAVOURITE time travelling scientist, Professor Richard Dawkins. Or possibly Madam Curtis said that the psychologists OF THE TIME linked their idea to the work of Professor Richard. It was not clear when he was making an argument and when he was reporting someone else's.

In either case, I think that this is UNFAIR. The title of Professor Richard's book "The Selfish Gene" does NOT mean that the gene makes PEOPLE be selfish! In fact it does not even mean that the genes themselves behave SELFISHLY; it is about looking at the process that selects genes on the basis of the gene acting in its own SELF-INTEREST because they cause animals to have the best strategies for survival. In fact cooperation is often the BEST STRATEGY so that is the strategy that promotes survival in the great game of Darwinian Evolution for the genes that cause it.

Anyway, some OTHER anthropologist then said, if you look at the fight EVEN MORE CLOSELY you will see that the fight is ACTUALLY between the tribes-people that the first anthropologist has given axes to and the ones that he hasn't who are trying to get some. The first anthropologist was asked about this in an interview… at which point he stormed out.

This is called OBSERVING ANTHROPOLOGICAL BEHAVIOUR.

Back in the REAL WORLD – or rather, the bit of CRAZY-TOWN inhabited by Lord Blairimort – 1997 came around and Mr Minor was dumped out of Number Ten in favour of the Labour. Things could only get better. At least if you were an out-of-control meme with a plan to ruin the world.

The Labour's obsession with DELIVERY, said Madam Adam, led to them setting EVEN MORE TARGETS – targets for everything from achieving Wold Peace 5% sooner to increasing the joy of birdsong by ten points on a scale of Dawn Chorus to Dawn Primarolo.

Guess how THIS worked out!

In fact, rather than spreading good things to everybody, the Labour made it easier for people who already had good things – or at least lots of money – to make sure that they got all the better things: school league tables made it easier to find the good schools so rich parents could move there and ensure that their children had the best education; poor people were squeezed out so less of a chance for their kids to escape poverty. Social mobility in Britain ground to a halt under EGALITARIAN Lord Blairimort.

Meanwhile, in America, the Monkey-in-Chief was elected and decided to blow the whole of Billary-Hillary's budget surplus on CRAZY ARMS SPENDING. And the value of shares on Wall Street was blown to bits by the collapse of the Dot-Com bubble and a series of SCANDALS from Enron to WorldCom that the accountants had been covering up for years.

Look, cried Madam Adam, look: the free market it’s SOOOOO evil.

Now, my daddies had been becoming increasingly SUSPICIOUS of this series already, mostly because it was using so much INCIDENTAL MUSIC to MANIPULATE the emotions that they were feeling. An HONEST documentary should not need SINISTER music to make you feel that certain events are SINISTER. Nor should it need to JUXTAPOSE disparate events from around the world in order to try and present them as a pattern of BADNESS.

My daddies' suspicions were that Madam Adam may have AN AGENDA.

But it took Mr Tom Papworth – who has taken this series to pieces in some considerable detail – to be first to point out the CON TRICK that Madam Curtis is perpetrating here.

The American ECONOMY, vigorously free market, bounced back even when the STOCK MARKET was taking a pummelling.

And the Labour's insane target culture of total control from the centre has NOTHING TO DO with a Free Market Economy.

In fact, what Madam Adam is doing is TURNING LOGIC on its head.

Because the Labour CLAIM to be a Free Market party, when they do COMMAND ECONOMY things (and CALL it "market solutions") then Madam Adam BLAMES the Free Market.

More of this, and LESS SUBTLE, was to follow.

The third and final part was "The Ghost of Christmas Future, Back to the Past and Mostly the Present Again and Sideways into Bizarro World". In this, Madam Adam took and TOTALLY DISTORTED the ideas of famous LIBERAL PHILOSOPHER and MUSICAL COMPOSER Mr Irving Berlin (not to be confused with that OTHER famous Berlin – the capital of Germany).

Mr Berlin had looked at the concept of LIBERTY and decided that there were TWO sorts: he called them Positive Freedom and Negative Freedom.

Positive Freedom is the sort that espouses BIG IDEAS: let us overthrown the monarchy! Let us make all citizens equal! Let us have free sticky buns on Tuesdays!

The PROBLEM with Positive Freedom, saw Mr Berlin, is that it is about having ANSWERS. "TRUTH" with a capital "TRUTH"! Which means, if you have the absolute "TRUTH!", then you are justified in doing ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING to impose that Freedom on everybody else. Even if that means imposing that Freedom on them TO DEATH!

This is why, said Mr Berlin, revolutions like the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution that begin with such high-minded ideals end up in such a shoddy, bloody, corrupt, mess. If you think that the ends justify the means then you are wrong.

Madam Curtis calls this a PROPHECY that Positive Freedom WILL go wrong – but people who believe in ETERNAL TRUTHS tend to talk about stuff like PROPHECIES. Really it is a WARNING that it COULD go wrong, that you need to keep a beady eye on anyone who starts spouting Positive Freedom ideas and not let them start IMPOSING on people.

Instead, he said, there is ANOTHER kind of Freedom, which he called Negative Freedom, the freedom to do what you want without let or hindrance from the government or anybody else so long as you are not imposing on THEIR freedom either.

So if you WANT to have sticky buns on Tuesdays, NOBODY should stop you.

This idea is the basis of Western Democracy, and of our WAY OF LIFE here in the United Kingdom. It is a GOOD idea, and there is nothing wrong with ENCOURAGING other people to think so. If they decide to try it out for themselves then they might find that they enjoy it too.

But it is not an idea that you can EXPLODE people into adopting. Not least because then it becomes the OPPOSITE thing: you think that you have an absolute answer and it has become Positive Freedom.

Remember that for later.

Anyway, Madam Adam starts his last part by telling us about this, and by playing a clip of Mr Berlin warning against just such a possibility of imposing freedom.

Then he tells us all about the horror stories that can arise from Positive Freedom, starting with the French Philosopher and nutter Jean-Paul Sartre who thought it would be a good idea to have a violent revolution to IMPROVE people. His ideas were taken up by all sorts of baddies from all over the world, including Che Guevara in Latin American and Islamic Revolutionaries in Iran. They were taken to the extreme though by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot who thoroughly trashed Cambodia with their evil ideas.

All of this revolutionary violence led to America taking action in return. Herald of the Death of Satire, Henry Kissinger instigated a policy of supporting anyone who was on "their side" even if they were horrible dictators. These were people like President Marcos of the Philippines, President Pinochet of Chile and President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Remember him?

Unfortunately, in the end this just didn't work as was shown when America's man in Persia, the Shah of Iran, was toppled by the Islamic Revolution. This led to something of a RETHINK in the US and the result was "Project Democracy", led by – yes I was ASTONISHED TOO – the NEO-CONSERVATORIES!

They realised that DICTATORSHIPS were essentially a BAD idea. People would be better off if they could make up their own minds without being bossed around – have a bit of the negative freedom, Mr Berlin talked about.

So in the Philippines and in Chile, the old dictators were persuaded to give it a bit of a rest, retire and let the people have some democracy.

"Ah ah!" says Madam Adam, "but it was a LIMITED sort of democracy, an American sort of democracy, not the sort of democracy that I like AT ALL!"

Hmmm.

Democracy is a thing that just keeps growing and improving. Once it's started, people keep refining it, trying to work it out, get it right, make it better. Britain did not get it right all at once. It took AGES! Just look at the House of Lords Club! Actually, better not.

Look it REALLY takes something for my Daddy Richard to start being sympathetic to President Ray-gun. And yes, this WAS that something!

Chile and the Philippines may not be perfect places – yet – but neither have they fallen back into dictatorships. They are making their own faltering way, but it is THEIR way to make!

But "Project Democracy" went A BIT WRONG. The Neo-Cons stopped just letting the old dictators retire, they started trying to REPLACE the "wrong" kind of democracy with the "right" kind of democracy. The right-WING kind, that is. And it all ended up with the sort of mess that has you selling GUNS to the fruitloops in Iran and giving the profits to the fascist rebels in Nicaragua. And then, if you are President, FORGETTING everything that happened.

Maybe they got impatient. Maybe they weren't REALLY interested in democracy so much as what they are USUALLY interested in: American economic self-interest. American foreign policy hasn't changed in two hundred years – whatever is good for business is good for America.

Of course, Madam Curtis reads it ANOTHER WAY – he claims that giving people choice and freedom is JUST THE SAME as imposing your own ideas on them. He CONFLATES spreading the Negative Freedom with the new mutant form of Positive Freedom. Which is handy for his argument, but only if no one notices that it is NOT TRUE.

Rather fortunately – from almost everyone's point of view – at that point Communism IMPLODED and lots of people all across Eastern Europe discovered a whole lot of Negative Freedom all at once. People in the West started talking about the END OF HISTORY like they meant it and then – says Madam Curtis – a bunch of wunderkind rode in with all the same ideas of market reform.

Russia's new revolution involved giving away the entire Russian economy to the people, only doing it at JUST the point where they were all starving and would sell it on to some DODGY GEEZERS for a shot of vodka and some stale battenburg. This is what the advisors called shock tactics. And the DODGY GEEZERS were quickly rich enough to be called posh names like OLIGARCHS instead. Reacting against this, the Russian people elected scary Vladimir Putin who promised to bring back ORDER to the country.

Now what Madam Curtis FAILS to point out here is that Mr Putin's vision of order is yet another Positive Freedom: he will free the people from hunger and chaos… so long as they do EXACTLY what he says.

Where Madam Adam portrays this as a CONSEQUENCE of Negative Freedom, in fact it is a FAILURE to avoid the drift into Positive Freedom.

And, of course, he does ever so slightly OVERLOOK all of the OTHER countries from Eastern Europe that used to be Communist Satellites, but are now being welcomed into the European Union where they are pleased to enjoy as much Negative Freedom as they can get.

The FINAL FOLLY of America – so far, I am sorry to have to say – is Iraq. By now, the Monkey-in-Chief was convinced that GOD was talking to him. (Or "the Intercom" as most people today call it.) And what did GOD say? He said: "George? Dick here. Let's us try and spread some freedom and democracy to a Middle Eastern country by bombing it flat." Oddly enough this MAY not have worked. Oddly enough, the "voice of GOD" may not entirely CARE! Madam Curtis said that after the invasion, the same wunderkind arrived in Iraq with the same plan: shock tactics too, you might say. On the other fluffy foot, giving the entire county to Darth Cheney's old pals in HALLIBURTON was not ENTIRELY the same plan as happened in Russia. Still, it was SHOCKING, I will give you that.

How were the governments of America able to get away with all of these schemes to IMPOSE their will on innocent countries over the years? Well, Madam Curtis explains – playing some SCARY MUSIC – they did it by SCARING PEOPLE.

Oooh, PROPAGANDA. Like THAT'S never been used before! In fact, I can remember quite a few Positive Freedom people who were REALLY into the INSPIRATIONAL POSTER or the GOVERNMENT SPONSORED MOVIE.

Iraq, of course, reminds us of our very own SUPREME POODLE, Lord Blairimort. Finally, Madam Curtis turned his myopia on the New Labour project.

This was all the fault of Negative Freedom, he kept reminding us, Lord Blairimort's promises that he could free us from the fear of terrorism by imposing his new anti-elephant Glorification of Terrorism laws, detention without trial and without end, I.Diot cards and Big Brother surveillance on us.

Lord Blairimort is, in many ways, the End of Freedom altogether.

Hang on; I think I see a FLAW here.

Freedom from something by imposing something else, knowing all the answers… this is NOT Negative Freedom! This is not ANY kind of Freedom AT ALL! This is just another believer in POSITIVE FREEDOM gone BAD.

We should be LISTENING to Mr Berlin's warnings, not DISSING them!

This whole show is a FRAUD!

"No," cried Madman Curtis, "No, it is Negative Freedom, I tell you. Negative Freedom is the Evil! There are NO SUCH THING AS MACRA! Negative Freedom has failed! Crush the WRONG THINKERS! It is time to try positive freedom again. Obey me! Obey me! Obey MEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

And with that, the programme ended.

Goodnight children, everywhere.

PS

As I am only a FLUFFY ELEPHANT, it turns out that I am NOT the first person to spot that this was HOKUM.

Those who got there first include:

My Daddy Alex

Mr Tom of Liberal Polemic who has done an IN DEPTH look at Part One, Part Two and Part Three and done a Conclusion overall too

Mr Cicero of Ancient Greece

Mr Joe of the Extra Bold Political Blog

and Mr Jonathan of Liberal England

It turns out that you cannot fool ANY of the people ALL of the time, Madam Adam!

PPS

Six days to go!