1. Clegg has no choice but to talk with Cameron. “The coalition of the defeated” is a powerful framing narrative, which would be bad enough on its own. But Brown is also widely hated in England, and installing a Labour PM who isn’t Brown couldn’t be sold to an electorate pre-primed with that “unelected PM” line. (And 23% isn’t a mandate for Clegg to head any Lib-Lab coalition.)

Worse: a Clegg/Labour alliance would be 100% reliant on 9 nationalists and plagued by an extreme version of the West Lothian Question. It would fall and Labour and the LibDems would be annihilated at the subsequent election. It’s a non-starter.

2. However, lefties, anti-Tories and “progressives” who voted tactically to keep the Conservatives out needn’t feel betrayed. We succeeded; this is about as well as the strategy could have gone given the state of the parties’ popularities a year ago.

All those hard-right Tories trying to scupper the Cameron/Clegg deal right now would have been calling the shots in government if we hadn’t voted tactically. They can be neutralized to some extent: dare them to bring a deal down.

3. Those shouting from the sidelines about betrayal need to ask themselves: how did we get here? The answer is that Labour got us here. There’s no appetite in this country for a Tory government, clearly; the vote was an anti-Labour/anti-Brown plebiscite. New Labour betrayed the “progressive cause”, and Clegg is left in the unenviable position of salvaging what he can from the wreck. Almost anything he can secure this weekend is more than we could have expected 6 months ago.

4. It pains me to write this, but Clegg has little mandate for brinksmanship on electoral reform. He polled 23%, Cameron got 36%; and the numbers for England are even worse. A parliamentary commission is a dead-end, obviously, but what if he could kick the Tories’ gerrymandering “reforms” into touch and secure fixed parliamentary terms plus a binding, BC-style Citizen’s Assembly for the Commons and Lords reform based on PR?

Again, that’s more than we could have expected 6 month ago, and might be possible *– especially if backed up by popular calls for major change. Of course, the real culprits on Commons reform are Labour. They held power for 13 years and showed no interest until it became their last lifeline.

5. Like it or not, the British pubic is going to form its opinion about coalitions based on what happens now. For the long-term prize, it’s better that Clegg succeeds in building more than a Minority Government deal with Cameron. Such an unstable deal would put him permanently in the position of being able to bring Cameron down, and then taking the blame from the Tories’ media friends.

Alternatively, it would leave Cameron with the power to time a dissolution to suit him. Clegg should agree a stable governing coalition with a fixed lifetime (of, say, 3 years) and a pre-determined program that, among other things, secures tax cuts for the poor rather than the rich, increases education spending on disadvantaged children, and scraps ID cards, alongside political reform and stymying the Tory hard-right’s culture war.

The alternate scenario could be much worse – anyone fancy a quick election with many more seats within Conservative reach, Ashcroft’s cash, and a Labour Party at civil war, for example?

Major political reform, and the end of FPTP, is going to be a long game. Dealing with the Tories can be the first act, and Clegg and his party should play their role. It might not work, Cameron might not even want it to work, but right now there’s no other show in town.

Once elected, your MP has an incentive to work hard for the community, knowing that s/he can’t rely on even mindless partisan support next time around. There remains plenty of political space for mavericks like Peter Law and Richard Taylor to thrive: 13 independent candidates were elected in Ireland in 2002. (The Citizens’ Assembly in British Columbia, Canada, agreed.)

The pernicious, common myth about proportional representation, that it takes away your power to unseat a scoundrel, is based on just one extreme form, the national (closed) list.

Voters tick a box for a party, that party gets corresponding strength in parliament, perfect or near-perfect proportionality is the result. Centralized parties under this system wield the power; whether you get elected or not depends on how far down the party list you are. Not so with STV. We won’t lose our Portillo and Hamilton moments.

STV could spell the end of candidates parachuted in from HQ (a practice that’s nurtured MPs of the quality of Nadine Dorries). No more voting for the party drone. No more exclusive selection power to a local party machine. Because voters are faced with a choice of multiple candidates from the same party, STV strengthens the personal vote. Recent studies estimate that the personal qualities of an MP are a factor in only 1–2% of our votes right now.

The question is: are the LibDems, the party of voting reform, the ones to rally behind? They’ve shown themselves incapable of understanding the basics of preference voting and prone to misrepresentation and lies about proportional systems. The expenses mess is a distinctly tri-partisan one, after all, and the solution ought to come independently of party allegiance. The mess is also seemingly correlated with the way we elect most of our MPs into predictably safe seats. STV calls time on the ‘safe seat’, too.

Voters might not grasp the mathematics of d’Hondt or Droop quotas, but they sure as hell grasp the notion of preference. Only 22% of them preferred this Labour government in the first place. And right now millions would prefer they didn’t have their current MP. STV gives them alone the power to fix both nicely. It’s time for the referendum we were promised twelve years ago. I promise not to spoil my ballot if we get one.

There is clearly a balancing act between allowing Worldwide to expand and potentially generate greater returns for the BBC, and limiting its operations in order to ensure it upholds the BBC’s reputation and does not unfairly distort the market… We recommend that the commercial criteria and fair trading guidelines should be returned to the pre-2007 position, whereby all commercial activity must have a clear link with core BBC programming.

Not only that. The Committee was also critical of how the BBC handled the purchase itself (pdf, p. 14, paras. 36, 38):

In evidence, competitors including Time Out and Wanderlust complained that it was difficult to establish and comprehend the price the BBC had paid, and therefore whether it was distorting the market. Their concerns are justified… To say, therefore, that the BBC has been less than forthcoming, in a timely fashion, about the Lonely Planet deal is an understatement.

And on the launch of Lonely Planet Magazine specifically (pdf, p. 30, para. 91):

…the BBC must take due care not to distort the market, and it should not buy new brands—as it did with Lonely Planet—to enter new markets. Rather than benefiting commercial competitors, the inherent advantages that BBC Magazines has over its rivals means that it can dominate markets at the expense of others.

In conclusion (pdf, pp. 30, 36, paras. 93, 113):

This Report is critical of the acquisition of the Lonely Planet brand, its exploitation through the recent launch of Lonely Planet magazine and the market-distorting effects of those initiatives… We believe it is in the interests of the UK’s creative economy as a whole that BBC Worldwide’s activities are reined back.

All of which, funnily enough, is exactly what I argued previously (and last year). The accusation of market distortion was the most serious aimed at the LP acquisition, and it has been upheld. The only down-side is that the Committee fell short of recommending the immediate sale of Lonely Planet. The MPs’ concern is that such a sale would incur losses for the taxpayer (because the BBC over-paid by any chance?), something that has disappointed other travel publishers. (Though it won’t surprise me if Olive Magazine is looked at again.)

It’s a pity that MPs essentially recommended inaction, but at least BBC Worldwide won’t be allowed to bulldoze a thriving, creative sector again any time soon. Lonely Planet, like its competitors in the travel information market, was able to survive and thrive without state ownership. The Committee agrees with me: this isn’t what our BBC is for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image courtesy of Steve Cadman’s flickr set.

The Agreement requires all commercial activities undertaken by the BBC to comply with four criteria. …

4. comply with BBC fair trading guidelines and in particular avoid distorting the market.

Of course, that begs a whole series of questions, but this much is plain: BBC Worldwide activities that distort a domestic market in which the corporation is a player are forbidden. This, essentially, was the basis for the decision to disallow BBC investment in ultra-local video last year. It’s the reason that the BBC’s acquisition (through BBC Worldwide) of Lonely Planet should be reversed at the first opportunity.

The opportunities for LP–BBC print cross-promotion are blatant enough. Shiny new Lonely Planet Magazine‘s launch issue featured a story by Stephen Fry, that tied in with his fine …in America book and series. The second issue has David Attenborough in “The land that time forgot“, the Galapagos. I wonder how easy a non-BBC subsidiary would find it to commission a travel feature from either of those two. Unlike, say, Top Gear Magazine, this is a market segment in which the BBC had zero presence until November 2007.

As I predicted in my previous piece, both issues have been light on advertising. In rotten market conditions, Lonely Planet Magazine has an ace up its sleeve: BBC magazines are able to buy market share by taking a hit on profitability, in the short term at least. Strategies like that aren’t so readily available to small commercial players like Wanderlust.

But these advantages are trivial compared to the online expertise that Lonely Planet has bought into. The BBC runs the best news website in the world, at our expense. Three BBC Online experts were sent to LP’s Melbourne HQ immediately after that 2007 acquisition. The latest marketing wheeze, launched yesterday, is a travel module integrated inside BBC.com that provides access directly and exclusively into Lonely Planet hosted content (via). When it comes to social media, these digital marketeers know where the online travel information market is going:

Users will also be able to click through to the Lonely Planet site to discover a range of content and tools to plan, book and share travel experiences.

The feature is geo-coded, of course, and so only visible to overseas viewers. Oh, and any UK nationals who check BBC.com for the footie results when they’re on holiday. In any case, the idea that growing the worldwide brand power of Lonely Planet could fail to distort the domestic travel information market is naive. The 26m readers of BBC.com are being corralled into  Lonely Planet for their travel information, at the expense of other UK-owned and -sited travel portals, among them struggling startups.

The travel guidebook market is worth something like £100m in UK retail book sales alone. Quite where the online market for travel information is going, nobody quite knows. But it’s safe to assume it can only grow. And with the massive, unfair advantage of BBC Online know-how behind it, taxpayers’ help in effect, it’s likely that Lonely Planet will shout so loud that other UK players barely get heard. Innovators with shallower pockets will be trampled or deterred from entering in the first place. Is this really what the BBC is for?

[I]f we know that when we post something we risk causing brand damage, should we self censor and only post positive things?

It’s the kind of question they might chew over while they’re brandstorming for Derek Draper’s new BlogDominanceUnit. Of course, Alex “fully rejects” posting only good news. But party flacks aside, it’s also the kind of question no political blogger would even bother asking, isn’t it? Perhaps not.

Via Jay Rosen’s mighty twitter stream, I come across this fraternal spat.

Act 1. In which Center for American Progress (CAP) paid blogger Matthew Yglesias posts (ahem) forthright opinion on fellow “progressives”, Third Way.
Act 2. In which acting CAP CEO pulls rank pops up on Yglesias’ blog to disown said opinion, and generally toss out a bit of flaky PR.
Act 3. In which 477 comments appear along the lines of… well, I’m too polite to give you the unedited flavour of what most of them say. It’s one mighty social media cockup, without an easy face-saving solution, to say the least. Go read (and chuckle) for yourselves.

Maybe this is a little peek into the battle for the future of the netroots? Kinda looks like hierarchy came out of this one with egg all over his face. Stilll, what’s the odds that the whole Obamaland love-in goes all New Labour by the time I’ve worked out what to do with my old T-shirt?

Time Out founder Tony Elliott says he fears that the BBC will provide Lonely Planet with “an inexhaustible fund of factual, technical and editorial information and expertise quite beyond the resources of any privately funded organisation such as Time Out”.

Complaints along these lines haven’t gone away. This week Lyn Hughes, publisher of Wanderlust, accused the BBC of deliberately targeting her long-running, independent travel magazine, undercutting ad rates and planning a launch issue of Lonely Planet Magazine to coincide with Wanderlust’s 100th:

I would question why any travel magazine would be launching at this time. Our advertisers are finding it tough. … No other magazine publisher would be launching a travel magazine at this time. They’d be completely daft. … Why is the BBC launching one at the worst possible time? I can only think they’re smug. They don’t need to make money.

She’s right at least on the emboldened point. The predictable consensus at this year’s World Travel Market, which ended yesterday, was that 2009 would be tough for the business. No sane publisher would launch a print travel mag right now. But as its 2007/8 results showed, the BBC can afford to buy increased top-line magazine sales in return for decreased profits. Further, the recently relaunched (and rather lovely) Lonely Planet website is very much a commercial concern, with click-through sales, destination advertising, custom-publishing client solutions and plenty else on offer. They announced plans yesterday to pay amateur travel bloggers for content, from February 2009, on a revenue-sharing basis using Google AdWords. There’s no doubt, surely, that BBC experience in running the world’s best news website has given LP an edge here. (Three BBC online experts were sent to LP’s Melbourne HQ immediately after the acquisition.) So, expertise gained at our expense is being used to give LP a competitive edge in the domestic market. This is the very essence of distorting that market, and dangerous territory for the BBC. So, who is it that wants to “privatize” the BBC now? Cameron and the Conservatives? Or the BBC itself? Our state-funded monolith has the freedom, via its effective sub-brand Lonely Planet, to also operate as a 100% commercial entity in the UK. Not only can’t that be right; it ultimately can’t be good for the BBC.

Also published here.

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

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

Also published here.

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

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

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

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

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

Also published here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also published here.

And I’ve missed one off that list, haven’t I? It’s inconceivable that this victory would have happened without BoJo’s almost unqualified support from London’s only real paper, the Evening Standard. Media ownership has never been so decisive. But where’s the evidence that media consumption affects our vote? Sunny isn’t convinced.

This recent study (pdf) by three leading political science methodologists from Yale University offers some clues. They constructed a field experiment to examine changes in the voting behaviour of new Washington Times (conservative) and Post (“liberal”) subscribers prior to state elections in Virginia in 2005. The money quotes, p. 14:

The newspapers did have an important effect on which candidate the subject supports. The Washington Post endorsed the Democrat and the Washington Times endorsed the Republican. Among those subjects who reported voting, getting the Post is estimated to increase the probability of selecting the Democrat by between 7.9 percentage points … and 11.4 percentage points.

And, p. 18:

Our investigation of the effect of newspapers on political attitudes, behavior, and subject knowledge of news events found that even a short exposure to a daily newspaper influences voting behavior as well as some public opinions.

While the authors specifically caution against over-generalizing from one specific case, and one 10-week period, their results suggest a powerful role for heavily biased media.

So, it was partly the media. Partly a (thoroughly justified) national “Brown effect”. Partly, too, that Londoners became fed up with Ken’s antics and warmed to the affable toff; and that turnout was higher in Tory Zone 5 haunts that aren’t even in “London”.

I also think – and this won’t be popular here – that the LibDems’ refusal to play the grown-up second-preference game to stop a candidate none of us wanted played a part. This obviously complex feat was managed comfortably by the Greens, the Trots and even the BNP. The party that favours STV electoral reform appears not to want to play preference voting. Paddick, whom I respected, and his team ought to feel a stab of guilt. He’s quickly disowned Johnson – a week too late to be of any use.

The big winners, of course, are the Standard, and Associated Newspapers generally. They’re doubtless feeling rather pleased with themselves as they blue-wash next week’s commemorative editions. I only hope they’re still smiling when the Tube’s Metro distribution contract comes up for renegotiation mid-way through Johnson’s administration. May they get the price they deserve.

In that spirit, might I suggest you get yourself down to your local library (even in neo-liberal Britain, they still exist). Not only can you borrow books and DVDs for free, you might even find a trolley with overstocks going for a song. Just yesterday I picked up a copy of the hack’s bible for 10p.

(Okay, so it was the 2006 edition. But, hey, last time I checked I was writing unpaid for a wonk-site almost no one (?) reads, so it’s all up from here. And Zoo hadn’t gone ex-directory; or bust, alas; in the last 2 years.)

If you have any similar tales of Credit Crunch privation, or budget home-making tips you haven’t yet sold to the Express, do share. It’s a long old weekend.

RE: Proposed Removal of Recycling Bins on [road]

I am writing to inform you that we have received several complaints regarding the misuse of recycling bins on [estate]; due to the area round the bins becoming an eyesore. Currently we have placed this area on our weekend hot spot list and therefore a lorry removes all items round the bins on a Saturday morning. During the week the cleaner also has been instructed to ensure this area is tidy. Despite these efforts users of the recycling bins are constantly leaving recycling items outside the bins causing an eyesore.

We would like to offer an opportunity for residents who live near where the bins are situated to voice their opinion on this issue of whether they will be in favour of the bins being removed.

Yours faithfully

I live about 5 houses away, less than fifty yards. Overleaf there’s a few lines of space for me to fill in my views (and it would appear that I may not continue on a separate sheet…). It would be a waste of space, I guess, to use them to comment on the death of the comma in local govermnent communications. So,

I am not in favour of their removal. My 4-year-old puts her rubbish in the bin. Are we now outsourcing recycling policy in Hackney to a few slobs who can’t even manage that?

But maybe I’m just an old idealist. Can you come up with something better? You’ve got 2 sentences, 3 short ones tops, and an impeccably left-liberal brief.  I may even nick yours; the posting deadline is Monday.

One word absolutely not on the lips of political hacks, not even Tory political hacks, is… Abortion. Not this week, not any week. It’s impolite conversation inside the beltway.

But a post here last year (picked apart here) attracted over 250 comments. Just publishing the word is pure Google-juice. Everyone in the real world has an opinion, so why does nobody in political Britain want to discuss abortion in public? It can’t be that 186,274 (2001 data; pdf) annual terminations don’t warrant justification or inquiry.

My own theory on the silence is this: nobody talks in public because it’s too easy to get drawn into dark places, or to find yourself with idiotic allies. You could play the God card; but there’s no debating with faith, and polite society considers the faithful ever so slightly simple.

Religion aside, “pro-lifers” (who isn’t?) offer other weak arguments. One claims the foetus has rights because of its potential for humanity (fully realised in a way that an egg isn’t). This is nonsense: nobody has the rights of what they might become, only for what they are. Neither I, nor the inhabitants of Guatemala City, have the rights of a US citizen, though we have the potential to become one. (I suspect that some Americans making arguments based in potential wouldn’t fancy us having those rights, either. Not the Guatemalans, anyway.)

A second argument claims a right to life for the foetus as soon as it’s “viable” – able to survive outside the body. Owen replies:

Whether or not a foetus has moral worth cannot possibly depend on whether scientists have yet developed an effective artificial incubator. Whether or not a foetus is a bearer of rights does not change over time with scientific progress, nor does it vary between countries according to the state of the health care system.

Quite. It’s often a dishonest, spineless line of reasoning, rightly skewered.

But “pro-choicers” aren’t short of poor arguments themselves. One goes a bit like this: “Male control over birth rights, over women’s bodies, has been a tool of patriarchal oppression for centuries.” True, but any reasonable ethics only allows remedial action against the oppressor. Most of them are long dead, none of them are foetal – so what’s the relevance to an abortion in 2006? Even if the medicalization of terminations in America involved (male) doctors claiming power over (female) midwives, this is irrelevant. History should only carefully be a guide to justice – and only if it suggests a just remedy. Thin-end-of-the-wedge arguments are usually weak, and this is no exception.

There’s an instrumental pro-choice argument, too: “I couldn’t give the child a good life. Why bring it into the world if it will never be fulfilled?” It’s a version of the Freakonomics guide to abortion. For this to be valid, two things need to be true: that there is a shortage of couples willing to adopt newborns, and that death is preferable to a sub-optimal life. The first is demonstrably false; the second is repellent to (most of) the living, just a short hop from eugenics.

Another solution was proposed by a commenter:

…you don’t have to be an out-and-out libertarian to think that there should be some boundaries to the state, and the cervix seems like as good a start as any.

Which is fine, and perfectly consistent if you permit abortions right up to birth. This might appear a “liberal” position, but only if you assign no rights at all to a fully developed foetus, only physically distinguishable from a “baby” by its home address. This is a position most people would reject as tyrannical (which doesn’t mean it’s wrong).

So, what’s left? It’s messy. Both a foetus and the mother must have rights. The mother has the right to bodily autonomy, and the foetus, from some point in pregnancy, a right to life. If we’re going to have time restrictions on abortion, then a foetal right to life somehow trumps a woman’s right to autonomy. (But this argument has its own dark place: we’re allowing the right to use another’s organs against their will. So, could we force someone to give up a kidney against their will, if they were the only person able to help? Perhaps, if kidney donation was as safe as normal pregnancy, which it isn’t. Giving blood is, though: see this great book for more.)

The question is: when does this right to foetal life trump a human being’s right to autonomy? Not from when it can survive outside the womb (“viability”). Not surely at the point of “independence”: that would permit post-birth, involuntary euthanasia. Not either at full self-awareness; some children never get there. Perhaps when it can feel pain? When it becomes conscious? When it develops the capacity for abstract thought or experience, and therefore humanity? All these are coherent positions, intuitively ethical, based in science, subject to change as knowledge progresses, explicit in limiting female abortion rights. None seems to suggest moving the current 24-week limit very far in either direction, as far as I can tell.

The corollary to a policy of forced childbirth (for that’s what abortion time limits are) is that legal terminations should never be interrogated. If we base our laws on the undeveloped foetus lacking (before acquiring) rights, then the only medical concern is the woman’s physical and mental health. Access to early abortion should be free and easy. Pragmatism also suggests that sex education (like maths and English) should be compulsory, and contraception (through schemes like the c:card) accessible. Prevention is better than cure, sure; it’s also cheaper.

None of this is simple for politicians to discuss. Arguments have to be clear and careful. None readily tabloidize. But if party hacks are wondering about electoral disaffection, they could start by interrogating their own eagerness to abdicate. While they’re happy to confine health debates to PCTs and the small print of dentistry contracts, the politics of abortion is happening without them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So –

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

Q2: Should we fund the arts?

A: It depends.

Also published here.

The reason’s simple: whoever changes the signs doesn’t have the incentive to bother. Nobody’s checking every little detail of his job – nobody could. And these little extras – what we used to call public service – aren’t Big Picture stuff. (You could have said the same about clean hospital toilets until a couple of years back.) By turning my postman from a public servant into a rational economic actor, we’ve destroyed the small parts of his job that used to connect him with our lives in all their complexity. Marketization can only put incentives (targets, bonuses, competition) in place for a proportion of what he does, or did. The rest is deemed worthless, history. Or it’s left up to his own integrity, which we still expect him to display in his new daily life being pushed around by capitalists.

Now I’m not saying that I oppose the market running public goods; nor do I know whether this ‘public servant’ ever really existed, or even if s/he did, whether we could re-energize the corpse. But deciding where markets can be successful needs to be an empirical judgement: they appear to be better at running airlines than train networks; better at holiday camps than prisons.

And marketization isn’t a process we should be celebrating. When markets need to take over, it’s a sign of human failure, a necessary second-best option, not something anyone should be proud of, Left or Right. Smith, like Worstall on a good day, teaches us that self-interest can be useful, not admirable.

Also published here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas.

Also published here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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