BARTLET
[to Leo] I’m sleeping better. [beat] When I sleep, I dream about a great discussion
with experts and ideas and diction and energy and honesty. And when I wake up, I think,
“I can sell that.”
Just one of those times I wish The West Wing were really real.
Watching the ongoing negotiations to settle the hung parliament that was the result of the General Election has been really interesting. Not just because it’s been some kind of long-running political soap opera, but because it feels in a lot of ways like I’ve been watching my PhD thesis dance out of the Roman Republic and into modern political debate – and that’s simultaneously very exciting and quite terrifying. For those that don’t know, I work on the political and constitutional history of the Roman Republic and my thesis proposed the idea that the unwritten constitution of the Roman Republic wasn’t locked down but evolved and changed through what was said about it, the interpretations that were presented and (ultimately) accepted at Rome. I’m not going to go into the gory details of that here, since I’m working out how I want to get the thing published (I’m plotting for a book, but that’ll take a few years work, so there’s a potential article too, possibly) – but suffice it to say that the theoretical stuff started with Foucault’s arguments about the way that knowledge is formed through discourse, and picked up ideas about the negotiation of ideology and on the reproduction of social structures, and ending up somewhere near Sunstein’s argument that all constitutions are developed and implemented through a process of interpretation. Basically, the argument is that a society’s understanding of their unwritten constitution emerges through what is said about it – in politics, in the media, in pretty much every possible space where discourse takes place (though the knowledge builds up in a very complex way, obviously). Now, I deal with this idea in the Roman Republic – but obviously one of the points of working with theory is to think about a broader applicability. And I think you can see some of this, with various interpretations of the constitution, taking place in the public discourse about the British constitution over the last week as our MPs have been negotiating a new government and the media has been commentating on it, and we’ve all been responding to it (a lot my interest in this has spun of the responses to some of this discourse on Twitter).
So if we’re serious about making British government work and keep the British constitution functioning, then it’s probably worth thinking about the main issues and tropes in the discourse and how they’re being talked about as we try and work out where we go next. Otherwise the constitution’s going to change without us really being involved, and we might not like where it ends up – we might not like where it’s ended up right now. What follows are some of my ideas about some of the main strands of discourse that have come up a lot in the last week – the phrases ‘Unelected Prime Minister’, ‘Vote X, get Y’, ‘Behind Closed Doors’, plus Hung Parliaments, Electoral Reform and Fixed-Term Parliaments. As a disclaimer first, I am not by any means any kind of expert in the British Constitution (I just ordered a few books to help me improve my knowledge, but I managed to send them to the address where I can only pick them up in six weeks, and not the one I’ll be at in three weeks, which says something about the chaos of my brain in the last few days).
What crouton of substance did Clegg offer last Thursday, in the opaque minestrone of waffle? He wants to get rid of Trident. Great! So Lib Dem foreign policy means voluntarily resigning from the UN Security Council, abandoning all pretensions to world influence, and sub-contracting our nuclear deterrent to France! They are a bunch of euro-loving road-hump fetishists who are attempting like some defective vacuum cleaner to suck and blow at the same time; and the worst of it is that if you do vote Lib Dem in the demented belief that there could ever be such a thing as a Lib Dem government, you won’t get Prime Minister Clegg. You’ll get Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for five more holepunch-hurling years, because the Lib Dems almost always vote with Labour, and in my years in Parliament I can’t remember a single moment when they opposed a Labour measure to expand state spending or state control.
So, until recently I was registered to vote in North East Fife, where Sir Menzies Campbell is happily ensconced as LibDem MP. I like Sir Ming generally, and the LibDems generally, and if I’d stayed registered up there I would have merrily mailed in my vote for him, and it wouldn’t have made any difference in the world if I hadn’t because a blind monkey could see how safely seated he is in that part of the world (also, he is going to be graduating me this year, and you don’t want to not vote for that person, just in case they drop a medieval mace on your head rather than the bit of velvet they’re supposed to use). Anyway, since I don’t really live in St Andrews any more and have a better idea of the political issues in Cornwall than I do in Fife anyway, I thought I’d re-register at the ancestral home, where I would be living if I weren’t hiding out from the lack of Classics jobs at a research institute in Geneva. I figured my vote would matter more there (see, St Ives’ Voter Power stats as opposed to North East Fife’s) and I would be more engaged, which I think is generally a good thing. However. I am attempting to engage and failing on many fronts – notably the fact that I cannot decide who to vote for. So, please to offer me any advice or opinions that you think I should consider as I decide.
So, last night, the Digital Economy Bill – or #debill, as it’s known on twitter – passed its Third Reading in the House of Commons and goes to (in this case, back to) the House of Lord before becoming all Official. And I sit here not-so-quietly fuming. There are so many reasons to dislike this bill: it’s ill-thought out; in thrall to traditional music industries and lobbyists; fails to understand the difference between copyright abuse for finciancial gain and copyright ‘abuse’ for creativity that doesn’t make financial gain, and is consequently open to abuse by copyright holders and could stifle creativity; assumes that all digitial downloading is illegal, copyright abusing digitial downloading, thus making it harder for creatives to give away freebies online to give tasters to new fans/audiences/consumers; is likely to criminalise the young (who don’t have credit cards to use on iTunes, etc) and those who aren’t digitally adept but fail to really hit those who make serious money out of digitial piracy (hells bells, if the Secret Intelligence Services are concerned about the bill driving pirates/criminals to use greater encryption that is harder for SIS to break quickly enough you know there’s a problem, right?); will not try and convict those alleged to have broken the law but punish them first and then make them pay to appeal; will hold the account-holder accountable for the activity of anyone (known or unknown) using their internet connection, and threaten to disconnect whole households if *one* member of it is caught illegally downloading (imagine if your whole household was banned from going to WHSmiths because one member of it shoplifted a CD single, and then imagine that you ran business/filled tax returns/paid TV licences, council tax and other bills/carried out banking/kept in contact with relatives and many other things through WHSmiths to really think about the insanity of this), and finally – as a consequence of this, poses a very real threat to businesses and establishments that offer wifi connections to their customers and users (re. this, please see Fiona Campbell-Howes’ Open Letter posted to Network Cornwall).
I’m doing that thing you do when you realise you’re leaving a place soon – when you start noting that it’s probably going to be your last time at this place or that place, or eating here and drinking their, the last of this kind of Kölsch, and so on and so forth. And I thought, well, I’m probably going to want to make up a photobook of my time here, so I should probably grab some snaps of a few things. Not, like, the local supermarket or the chemist’s, but the trams, and my blue gate that squeaks horrendously and so on. So this is ‘my’ cinema. There are a couple of cinemas that primarily show films in the original version, with or without subtitles (OV, OmU) – and this is the one I’ve been to most. Aahhh, lovely Metropolis, where you accidentally started showing the German version of Where the Wild Things Are at the English showing, and couldn’t pull the curtains properly for the first 15 minutes of Shutter Island so the edges of Leo were all wrinkly, and where I had to sit in the same row as the whole of Team Jacob at New Moon and the whole row bounced at that moment where Jacob tries to kiss Bella but then the phone rings… (I know, I know, I just love how ludicrous and awful it is, ok). OK, so I’m emphasising it’s flaws. The truth is, that despite the fact I’ve had to wait a bit at times for films to arrive in Germany (A Single Man is *still* not here, and that makes me unhappy), Metropolis has showed a wider range of films that I’ve wanted to see, for longer periods of time than any other cinema that I’ve lived near. (And they sell beer – I *wish* I’d taken that option during New Moon).
The NYU Institute of Journalism have released the nominations list for their ‘Top Ten Works of Journalism of the Decade’. It’s a good list – but then I would say that, because I’ve read/watched a chunk of them. I read Andrew Sullivan and Nate Silver pretty much every day, I follow Ezra Klein on twitter and read his blog intermittently, I podcast This American Life – and Jon Stewart and David Foster Wallace are just flat out amongst my favourites of all time in pretty much any category. Clearly, the fact that they’re all included on this list (along with a bundle of things I’ve read or watched/been meaning to read or watch) makes me a very smart and engaged person. Right? The list is good because I would recommend stuff on it, and I’m good because the NYU Institute of Journalism have just validated my tastes.
It’s a fairly narcisstic approach to a nominations list – but c’mon, isn’t this probably most people’s response to any nomination list? People get cranky about the fact that their film of the year doesn’t win the Best Picture Oscar because they want the Establishment to validate their tastes and choices – and if they don’t then there is clearly something wrong in the Establishment, whose opinion is made ‘less valid’ than that of the individual by their refusal to endorse it. This may be especially true of people (admittedly, I am one of them) who roll their eyes every year at the Academy’s choice of Best Film not in the English Language and demand to know where City of God/Pan’s Labyrinth/Let the Right One In were, and hold forth about how they should have been on the Best Picture list as well. Of course, then you get to enjoy your superiority – and it’s a toss up as to which is more enjoyable.
I feel like I want to write something about this, because not only was it a pretty big deal in the big picture of British media and politics, it felt like a pretty big deal for me and my engagement shifting from interested and theoretical to faintly active (I mean, it’s not like twittering uses up many calories but it *is* still participating in a discourse). It was also a little sobering, because although I would normally count myself as pretty engaged in current affairs, I hadn’t heard anything about the incident in the Ivory Coast or about Trafigura (I mean, I might have seen a Trafigura logo on a board at a rugby match, but I hadn’t heard of them). Time to read more papers and watch more Newsnight, clearly.
BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson’s latest blog post is interesting. Turns out even politicians and party members don’t show up to listen to a roll of speeches at conventions. Colour me surprised. Even at academic conventions the best part of panels is often the Q & A session.
But here’s the problem – if even the above mentioned hacks aren’t engaged with the main substance of these conferences, why the hell would anyone else be? If, even when you join a party you’re not getting to discuss or debate the issues, because the leadership are too scared of being seen to be uncertain or disorganised, what is the point of joining at all?
If decisions are made by those who show up, and the number of people showing up is getting ever smaller, what happens to the quality of decision-making?
The BBC and other media cover all the conferences, so you get some sense of the broader debate between the parties, and in parliament, thank heavens, they all still yell at each other a lot. But how do the parties come to their decisions? Well, right now it seems like two or three guys in a room with a lot of polling data. Which is a pretty crappy way to decide anything, even with the wonders of modern statistical analysis and polling. Plus, what about the things they don’t poll on? John Zaller once asked, “If the public had an opinion and there was no pollster around to measure it, would public opinion exist?”(1) It might not as an entity, but it would as individual opinions; but would these actually ever get reflected in policy-making? Almost certainly not. And is that really representative democracy?
All this increasing the tax on alcohol and/or pay by the unit stuff it rubbish. Yes, it would be nice to move British drinking culture away from binges towards sensible, relaxed drinking where you can still walk in a straight line when you go home, and don’t vomit. However, is making people pay more really going to make them drink less, or is it just going to make them have less money?
Educating the younger generation of the problems of binge drinking = good. I can get behind that. I think it’s the job of parents as well as of schools. I don’t quite have clear ideas of how this can be done, but I’m pretty sure that charging more money for booze is going to be ineffective. As for those who are aware that epic amounts of drinking will gradually lead to epic fail on the part of the liver and other accompanying anatomical elements? Well, let us make up our own minds as to whether we do that or not. We are grown up enough to make up our own minds about self-destruction.
Clearly I am developing objections to the nanny-state.
