New arrival

Many many thanks from myself, Dani and Noah for all the good wishes we have received since Noah arrived on Sunday.  For those who dont yet know he weighs 2.85kg (6lb 5oz), is 48 cm long and will have to suffer his entire life from having Croydon as his place of birth on his birth certificate

Dani and Noah are doing fine (I’m an emotional wreck but that doesnt really matter).

Noah has a Facebook group (thanks Duncan) but in case you are resisting the tide and not joining Facebook, here’s a photo.

East European politics and Paddy Ashdown

Ive recently discovered that my friend Sean Hanley has a blog.  It’s well worth a read if you are interested in East European politics.  He has a book coming out soon but I cant recommend it yet because I am still waiting to be sent a review copy (hint, hint).

 I note he says this about Paddy.  Whether it is an accurate assessment, I couldnt possibly comment…

“There’s a slightly know-all, even sanctimonious edge to Ashdown, but on he’s articulate, to the point and clearly a high calibre politician who knows what he’s talking about. Best Foreign or Defence Secretary we never had.”

It’s that time of year again

Gales; rain; cold, dark nights and live football on the radio - it must be August!

 I cant share Norfolk Blogger’s optimism that a 0-0 draw at Preston is a good start for City’s ‘injury ravaged’ squad - it’s the first day of the season for heaven’s sake, did they all trip over their sand castles or something?

But I will no doubt be drawn in again by peaks of excitement and despair and the thought of Jamie Cureton knocking in a hat trick at Portman Road.

 At least Rapid are off to a good start, thanks to a dodgy pitch and some woeful defending at Cluj where they came back from a goal down to finish the day 7 points from 9 and well placed in Romania’s fledgling first division.

Brian Paddick? Hmm, I’m not so sure…

Connecting Devonian strippers with a high profile former London policeman might seem like the sort of idea that could end you up in court if you put it in writing.  But, there is a connection between the fate of the Bideford One and the bandwagon that is building behind making Brian Paddick Lib Dem candidate for London Mayor.

I know almost nothing of the background to the story from last week that three Lib Dem councillors had resigned in response to the election of a stripper as a colleague of theirs.  But a clue seems to lie in the fact that one of the three was the town mayor, another was his brother and the third was the deputy mayor.  While the reaction of most liberals (this one included) appears to have been to side with Myrna Bushell, the three councillors who resigned perhaps did so because they saw their primary loyalty to the institution they were elected to rather than to liberal ideals. 

Politicians ‘going native’ once they get elected to something is not a new problem but it seems to be a greater danger if candidates are selected for their celebrity rather than for a track record of supporting a party’s platform and ideals.  That applies equally to local council candidates selected because they are local personalities with only a passing aquaintance with the Liberal Democrats as it does to candidates for high profile national roles (I know Mayor of London is just another local council job but it brings with it a whole national media circus that gives the role a relevance beyond City Hall).

Brian Paddick has an impressive track record of publicising himself and a single issue.  But what does he actually stand for?  Will he be loyal to the Liberal Democrats when the going gets tough?  If he loses will he still be there tramping around dark streets in the rain once the media spotlight has turned off?  Will he be more interested in promoting a set of issues that are relevant to police officers than in testing each issue against well formed liberal principles?

The daylight assasination of Jean Charles de Menezes, the subsequent failure of anyone in authority to take responsibility and the failure of politicians of all hues to challenge the powerful vested interests in the Met is one of the greatest scandals this country has faced in recent years.  Where will Brian Paddick’s loyalties lie if a similar event occurs?

We shall see, of course.  Celebrity politicians often find that they whither under intense exposure to the public.  Paddick might well convince me.  But if he does become Lib Dem candidate one thing at least will be clear - that the electors of the most diverse and cosmopolitan city in the world will face three middle class, male, middle aged and white candidates from the leading parties (and probably a fourth from the Greens too) - that will help a bundle to promote integration and wider participation (not!)

Grim Reaper Cat

I would not want this cat as a pet!

The elephant speaks

The world truly has gone mad when brainless self-publicists can puff themselves up to the point where the BBC and half the Liberal Democrats think they are the most insightful political commentator since Creation.

BUT cast that unpleasant and vacuous naked emperor aside and turn instead to our own fluffy Millenium Elephant because this is both the funniest and the most perceptive bit of political writing I have seen in a long while.

I’ve long said that the Tories problem is that their Militant Tendency is the majority of the party.  Now they have another problem - that their master strategists are all snotty nosed FCS types who think they are extremely clever and that politics is a game they can play without really understanding it - Mr Brown’s clunking fist has found them out and left them snivelling in their dorm at the first blow.  The speed with which the balloon has burst is truly astonishing. 

Grantham goes Labour

I reckon Alderman Roberts will be spinning in his grave at the news that Grantham is now represented by a Labour MP.  The town (which in the 1980s memorably had blue seats on its railway station when the rest of the country had red) is of course where the Blessed Margaret hails from.

I must admit I had occasionally wondered whether Davies might defect to the Lib Dems since he seemed a reasonably decent chap - albeit a bit “Guards Parade Ground” for my taste.  Checking his voting record on www.theyworkforyou.com, though, I am not sure why I thought he might be ‘one of us’.  Interestingly its difficult to see him as sitting comfortably in New Labour either given his record of voting against ID cards, foundation hospitals and tuition fees.  The balance is redressed by his support for the Iraq war of course…

Bill Newton Dunn had some interesting views on Davies, but since I didn’t say I would publish his comments, I wont do so. 

It will be interesting to see whether QD is rewarded with office in Brown’s first government.  It will also be interesting to see if he is planning to stand for Parliament in the future given the distance the chicken run would need to be to find a safe Labour berth.  Imagine Alan Simpson’s reaction if Nottingham South was on the list…

Buy this book if you want to win an election

I have just sent the following review through to Amazon for Putting Voters in their Place by Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie.

Johnston and Patties book is a gold mine for anyone trying to achieve elected office.  The ideas are presented clearly and straightforwardly but with substantial academic rigour being applied.

The book’s core thesis is that geography is a key determinant of voters’ political preferences.  This is not too surprising given that the authors are political geographers, but what is new is the clarity with which they present their case.  My most common reaction when reading the book was, “well, that’s so obvious why doesn’t everyone already know that?”

The chapter structure makes it an excellent choice for students of electoral politics since they take key issues in turn, summarise the existing arguments, present their data and then their conclusions without ever becoming impenetrable.  It’s like an eight week seminar programme in a single publication.

For me they make two core insights.  The first is that the vast majority of voters make the same political choices throughout their life.  So, an elector who chooses not to vote in their first election is likely to carry on being a non-voter thereafter.  The second is that if you take two otherwise identical voters and place one in a predominantly Labour area and the other in a predominantly Conservative area, they are each more likely to assume the voting preferences of their neighbours. 

These insights may not seem on a par with developing the theory of relativity but taken together they say something very important about how a party should approach an election.  If I were a Labour Party politician in a comfortable suburban neighbourhood I would be doing three things – I would be making great efforts to identify new arrivals in the area and convincing them that it was OK to vote Labour because most of my new neighbours do; I would make sure I had a big display of posters up come election time to reassure people of just that point; and I would be spending a lot of time talking to those who were coming up to age 18.

Johnston and Pattie identify the importance of conversation networks as the main contributor to this phenomenon.  Where I was slightly disappointed with the book was that they didn’t seem to fully follow through on the logic of their own argument to identify changing patterns of communication as a means of explaining partisan de-alignment.  In the British context there is a clear trend since the early 1970s for voters to be come less strongly attached to one particular party and for aggregate support for both major parties to fall.  Might it not be the case that this trend is fuelled by voters gaining access to a much wider range of social networks?  Changes in education (more people going to university); work patterns (the service economy is vertical in its organisational structure rather than the horizontally stratified factory); technology (just the TV for example, let alone the internet); and the economy (more firms and people having contact with an international customer and co-worker group) might all bring a greater range of political influences to bear on voters.  Given that partisan loyalty seems more persistent among Labour voters, this would seem to be borne out since relative poverty seems highly likely to be a factor in limiting access to a broader range of conversation networks.

My other slight disappointment is their apparent unwillingness to challenge what the academics would call ‘normative assumptions’ about voter turn-out.  There is widespread angst among the liberal elite about falling voter turn-out and possibly rightly so.  But there seems to be a lack of willingness to consider this as a factor of contentment – that individuals and groups mobilise when they feel their interests to be directly threatened.  Maybe in the UK (and the US) rising levels of aggregate wealth account for the lack of interest in voting – and maybe the final consequence of the triumph of liberal economics is the marginalisation of liberal democracy since government is increasingly irrelevant to people’s lives.  Maybe not, of course, someone will have to do the research…

Overall, this is a fine book that should be widely read by students and those with a wider interest in politics.

Of fast food and physics departments

Debate is raging at Sussex University over the possible closure of one of the on-campus food stores.  The cause of greatest ire seems to be the decision to replace it with a cafe. 

As far as I have ever been able to discover there is only one other ’supermarket’ on campus and that is pretty poorly stocked most of the time.  And there do seem to be a lot of cafes and fast food outlets.  And I realise that the University authorities are monopoly suppliers of space on campus (presumably) and that they might be equipped more with the skills of colonial administrators than thrusting entrepreneurs…

BUT, might it not be the case that simple market forces are at work here?  Presumably if the cafes werent popular they would be empty and the university would close them.  Or if the consumers (mostly students) preferred to buy dried lentils rather than ready cooked chips, there would be sufficient demand to prompt the university to open a whole-food store. 

I dont know much about university funding structures but it seems logical to suggest that the alternative is cross-subsidy which results in less money for things like, well, education.  There seem to be parrallels here with propping up departments that dont attract enough students…

 Of course, another solution might be for the Arts faculty to knock down the interior walls in their buildings, make their offices open-plan and then open up their own whole-food co-op in the extra space that would have been created! 

 On the other hand I have never quite figured out how Birmingham managed to run a travel agents and a hair-dressers on campus when Sussex seems barely able to keep a corner shop open.  And as for a second hand book-shop, well that’s just sooo 1980s.

Long lost memories

I consider myself to be something of a militant anti-sentimentalist but every now and then something comes along that just makes you smile.

A (long) while back my mum gave me a cylinder of ancient camera film and asked me to see if I could find somewhere that might have a go at developing it.  She thought the film was at least 30 years old and might not have even been used - so expectations about getting anything from it were pretty low.

 A quick search on the internet found Process C-22 who specialise in developing old films.  The ad stated that payment was required with the film roll and that there was no guarantee of success.  I sent off the film and heard nothing.  For months.  And then forgot all about it.

Then in April of this year, out of the blue (and more than a year after sending off the film) I got an email from Process C-22 saying they had managed to produce contacts from the film-  and asking if I was still interested in having it developed.  Too right I was - the single contact print they sent me (teased me with showed the pix would be worth it.

After a further impatient wait, the prints finally arrived.  I now have more than 30 grainy black and white photos taken almost 40 years ago.  Me when I was a toddler, my brother and sister, childhood friends who I am going to need some help identifying.  Star of the show is a pretty underwhelmed looking donkey on Sutton on Sea beach (it had to be Sutton or Mablethorpe - they were our regular holiday haunts).   Dad is there looking thinner than I remember (my dad died in 1984 but I am not going to get mawkish - he was almost 70 when I was born!)  No pictures of mum though which is a shame - I can only assume that she was the one behind the camera.

Now I am very much looking forward to visiting mum at the weekend with my treasure.  Thank you, Process C-22!

Here’s a sample:

That’s me on the left (looking very cute and for some reason sitting in a trailer) with my sister, Jane and a friend who has commandeered the tractor.

And that’s me (the sweet blonde one) and my brother Terry (the one on the right with a look on his face that says “everything was great until HE came along, if he hits me with that spade one more time…”)