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Barnsley defects to Scotland

By Andy Mayer
March 4th, 2011 at 11:41 am | 23 Comments | Posted in Election, Labour, Liberal Democrats

Congratulations to Labour’s Dan Jarvis, who has beaten the nationalists into second place, to be coronated the next Labour MP in Barnsley Central. The Liberal Democrats came sixth. 

Were this a small town in Scotland it would not be an entirely unusual result, albeit still bad for the Liberal Democrats.

 The low turnout (37% versus 57% at the general election) was a factor. The 2nd place at the general election was only 17%, some 6 votes higher than the Conservatives.

The headline though is what matters, with echos of the SDP’s 7th place performance in Bootle 1990. The result that finally persuaded David Owen to dissolve the party.

It is hard though to draw any meaningful conclusion from the result beyond a sense that the UK like the USA is polarising. The US split is sometimes characterised as ‘the United States of Canada’ versus ‘Jesusland’, ours as ‘AngloSaxonia’ versus ‘Southern Scandinavia’.

Multi-party Scotland for example has proven curiously resilient to plural outcomes over the last 30 years with Labour regularly out-performing their national vote share, and widely predicted to return as the largest party in May’s Scottish elections.

Even in 2010 Labour secured 42% of the Scottish vote (versus 29% overall) with a swing away from the SNP. This after presiding over a financial disaster on a scale akin to the Scottish banking crisis that precipitated the Act of Union in 1707.

In that context it’s hard to see what trends or political winds it would take for a centrist or centre-right party to win big in Scotland.

Could some parts of the north of England be going the same way?

The North East has 25 Labour MPs and 4 from coalition parties. It’s hard to see that changing much, even with voting reform.

The South East conversely has 75 Conservatives, 4 Liberal Democrats, 4 Labour and 1 Green.

These are regions as divided on politics as Texas and New Jersey.

Such division is a problem for the Liberal Democrats. It means a centre-ground squeeze if we remain coherent, and (at least) two parties if we return to protest-vote opportunism.

Results like Barnsley Central, numerically irrelevant in themselves, will encourage defections and add fuel to the narrative of a liberal split.

There is a further problem in what to do about it. Ending the coalition or ditching Nick Clegg might appease typically Labour protest votes, but not win them back, whilst simultaneously alienating liberal conservatives and independents.

Reversing the tuition fees reversal would deepen tensions in the party (many MPs would be made to look ridiculous) and do nothing to restore public trust. That damage has been done.

Does it mean the party should always sit outside Government until it can win a majority? Maybe electorally, but this is unlikely to improve the party’s credibility as a future government, or make the case for electoral reform.

The unhappy advice surely then is that Nick Clegg must stick to his guns, do more to flesh out what his centre-ground liberal alternative looks like, and weather more Barnsley Centrals on the road to 2015 in the hope events and opponents will provide the opportunities for revival.

Whether or not the party let him do that remains to be seen.

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Polybius (200-118 BCE) The Histories

By Barry Stocker
March 3rd, 2011 at 10:37 pm | Comments Off on Polybius (200-118 BCE) The Histories | Posted in Uncategorized

POLYBIUS 200-118 BCE, THE HISTORIES

Polybius was born in Megalopolis in Greece and was the son of the leader of the Achaen League, a confederation of Greek city states which had some success in reducing the domination of the Macedonian monarchy in Greece.  This was a struggle for liberty, in the ancient sense of living in an independent state, in which citizens had equal rights and participated in government.  The Macedonian monarchy under Philip II and Alexander the Great had largely undermined that antique liberty, by subordinating those states and reducing the power of their institutions of self-government.

The Achaen League found itself caught between Macedonia and the rising power of Rome.  The solution for a while was to ally with Rome.  However, Rome did not trust the League and Polybius was one of those taken to Rome as a hostage.  In the end, all of Greece came under Roman rule and was no more free than under Macedonian hegemony.  Nevertheless Polybius was deeply impressed by the Roman constitution.  Even as a hostage, he befriended Scipio Africanus the Younger, a general who played a major role in the defeat of Carthage, the north African city which was Rome’s rival in the western Mediterranean.

Polybius’ histories largely discuss the wars of the time, and are particularly famous for the discussion of Hannibal’s war with Rome.  Hannibal was the Carthaginian general who led an army, including elephants, from Spain into Italy via the Alps.  Polybius walked through Hannibal’s route through the Alps.  The other, particularly famous aspect of The Histories, is the discussion of the Roman constitution in Book Five.  Some of the best ancient discussion of ideas of liberty can be found in the work of historians.  The main examples, apart from Polybius, are the Greek Thucydides; and the Romans Livy and Tacitus.

Polybius’ discussion of the Roman constitution, and comparisons of it with the constitutions of various Greek city states, was enormously influential in the Ancient world, particularly through Cicero.  Cicero’s On the Republic, includes Polybius’ friend Scipio Africanus the Younger as a speaker.   Polybius’ influence lasted into the Italian republics of the late medieval and early modern period, like Venice and Florence, which transmitted ideas of antique liberty and republicanism to the rest of Europe.  Polybius was very well known to seventeenth and eighteenth century British political thinkers, and was one of the major references in the discussions behind the American Constitution.

The key idea that all these people drew on was a of a ‘mixed constitution’, that is a constitution which shared power between people, aristocracy and monarchy.  For the founders of the American Republic, the President was the equivalent of the monarch, the Senate was an aristocratic body, and the House of Representatives was the people.  For ancient writers, the people meant a poor uneducated majority.  Polybius, like Aristotle before him, and Cicero after him, feared ‘democracy’ as the unrestrained power of such people.  In the language, which began to develop around the American Constitution, we can think of this of the fear of the power of unrestrained temporary majorities.  Polybius’ conception of senatorial and monarchical elements in the constitution does in part refer to the idea that some people are naturally better than others, but also refers to the idea that no one part of society, or of the constitutional structure, should have unlimited power.  Unlimited democracy leads to mob rule, unlimited aristocracy leads to oligarchy, unlimited monarchy leads to tyranny.

Polybius saw a model for restraint, in the way that the Roman republican constitution set up divisions and overlaps between popular, aristocratic, and monarchical power.  For ancient and early modern writers, it was normal to think of a republic, or the Greek word that was its equivalent, polity, as consistent with limited forms of monarchy.  The Roman Republic (that is the Roman system from the overthrow of the last ‘tyrannical’ king to the emergence of the Imperial system under Julius Caesar) took the idea of a limited form of monarchy to the extreme in the Consulship, which was two aristocrats elected to rule jointly for one year only.  The aristocracy participated as a whole through the Senate; and the people were represented through meetings of all citizens, and elected tribunes with veto powers.  Polybius saw this as a system, which produced enduring strength and harmony, through creative tension between the three elements, and which always found a compromise between them.

Polybius’ second best constitution was the Greek state of Sparta.  Sparta has acquired the image of a precursor of modern totalitarianism, but Sparta was taken as a possible model for republican liberty for a long time.  That small minority of the population, who were citizens, did rule themselves through a mixed constitution of the type favoured by Polybius, with city assemblies, a senate, and a dual monarchy, but also with Ephors who shared monarchical type powers for a year.  Polybius, like other ancient republicans thought of freedom in terms of promoting common virtue and strength in war, which may not seem like liberalism now.  However, these ideas of virtue are a precedent for modern ideas of civil society, in which humans flourish, through their individual energy, and moral responsibility, in voluntary activity, and associations.  The military strength was thought of as expressing individual pride and courage, and these are precedents for modern ideas of inner responsibility and independence.

Left Foot Forward expose anti-Christian myth

By Andy Mayer
March 2nd, 2011 at 11:40 am | 1 Comment | Posted in Opinion, Personal Freedom

It is rare for this blog to praise Left Foot Forward, a thinking-person’s alternative to Labour Party commentary, given a regular Spirit-Level-like disposition to draw erroneous conclusions from dodgy data analysis.

But in this article, their guest writer Symon Hill reveals the facts behind yesterday’s misreported Christians versus anti-discrimination law case.

“In reality, the judges had refused to rule even on the suitability of the Johnses to be foster carers; their comment on the suitability of Christians to be foster parents was almost exactly opposite to the view the CLC attributed to them.”

The ‘anti-Christian’ meme has become an important campaigning mission for social Conservatives. The CLC in this case for example is the Christian Legal Centre whose statement:

“In a landmark judgment, which will have a serious impact on the future of fostering and adoption in the UK, the High Court has suggested that Christians with traditional views on sexual ethics are unsuitable as foster carers.”

prompted much of the ‘Christians banned from adopting’ coverage. Tradition in this case means literalist ‘thou shalt not’ Bible-believing kind, rather than say the more pluralist liberal, Greco-Roman, or Judeo-Christian humanist traditions that influences our culture.

This and other evidence for the meme then is fairly thin; the last example being the Christian couple required not to discriminate against homosexuals in their B&B.

If that, and this case are the summit of anti-Christian prejudice in the United Kingdom, whilst homosexuals still risk being beaten to death by thugs, some sense of perspective is required.

The classical liberal view on the preferred treatment of religion by the law, and nuances of this case, is well articulated in this article, and it is worth repeating their summary:

[T]he state should adopt an entirely neutral stance towards religion, which involves permitting any form of belief or religion, but only to the extent that each is compatible with the law of the land. Thus there should be no religious exemptions to employment contracts (unless freely agreed between the contracting parties) or school uniforms (unless the school itself decides to permit it as part of its own policy on uniforms) or taxation. If a religion is undertaking charitable activities then those activities themselves should qualify for tax exemption, not the religious aspect. Nor should religious (or, equally, anti-religious) sensitivities be permitted to override freedom of speech, as in the Rushdie affair or any number of less extreme examples.”

Or as an influential Christian thinker is reported to have put it:

“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s”

To buy local is loco

By Tom Papworth
March 2nd, 2011 at 11:39 am | Comments Off on To buy local is loco | Posted in Economics, International Development

Over at Cafe Hayek, George Mason professor of economics Russ Roberts turns his guns on the ”buy local” fallacy.

Roberts is a far better economist than I am, and I have no doubt that he has a better understanding of the value of trade, but I am left feeling that somehow his article fails to get to the root of the issue.

I have therefore set out my own reasons why the Buy Local movement is actually harmful to human development and will reduce welfare. This boils down to the fact that it is anti-trade, preventing people from benefiting from the most effecient providers across the country or the world; that it undermines the principle of specialisation on which human development is based; and ignores Comparative Advantage, which makes it worthwhile for even the most and the least efficient producers to work together.

Please head over to the IEA website and take a look at the full article. I have closed the comments section below to encourage readers of this site to comment in the same place as readers of the IEA site.

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In Insurance, markets and equality collide

By Andy Mayer
March 1st, 2011 at 5:22 pm | 3 Comments | Posted in Economics, EU Politics

Insurance is a difficult, not widely understood industry, in which equal treatment and markets collide. Pensions are very specific form of income insurance.

What Insurance does is put a price on risk. It does that by assessing the different profiles of groups, across thousands of data points, and evaluates the likelihood of default.

By nature this work is discriminatory. If for example it is the case that women generally have fewer motor accidents than men, they pay less for their car insurance.

And this is usually a good thing. The differential pricing discourages higher risk groups from engaging in risky behaviour while benefitting the cautious.

It is not entirely fair. Cautious male drivers pay more than girl-racers, at least at first, until the weight of evidence of their actual behaviour cancels out the group assumption.

That though is largely unavoidable. Perfectly fair personal insurance would require perfect foresight and perfect information about an individual. Neither will ever exist. Even future health insurance based on genetic profiling is still a probabilities game. Insurance needs to make assumptions.

Today’s furore about an CJEU ruling that gender discrimination in insurance and pensions is illegal then removes one assumption they can make.

It is not as the press are reporting a particularly ‘bonkers’ judgement by the Daily Mail’s least favourite Euro-quango. More a direct consequence of the law agreed between Member States in the European Council in 2004, as this analysis makes clear.

If the decision is daft, it is direct consequence of a daft consensus between national governments.

Whether it is so daft is where economic and political liberalism offer conflicting advice. Purists from either tradition will reach opposite conclusions. Pointless intervention that will distort prices and create many examples of reverse discrimination, or a valuable protection against undue penalty.

In the muddy middle we tend to believe exemptions from discrimination prohibitions should be proporionate, evidence-based, and carry few unpleasant unintended consequences. You might consistently believe that race discrimination in insurance was completely unacceptable (it creates a poverty trap), whilst welcoming post-code discrimination (you can move), and gender discrimination (men die younger and should have cheaper pension annuities).

The data on this specific change though would tend to suggest the status quo is pretty reasonable. It’s not clear what problem this change is trying to solve or what benefit it brings. 

Discouraging testerone-fuelled video games fanatics from competing for the M40 title strikes me as generally more beneficial than the resolving the injustice it imposes on Kid Cautious in his lonely struggle to achieve perfect cruise control sensitive to the conditions of the road.

The Council of Ministers need to think again…