In terms of logistics, I would make three suggestions. Given the layout, it’s important that each table isn’t talking amongst itself thereby making so much noise that you can’t hear the speaker. Secondly, there are two breakout rooms. I would like to see the two used for an hour each for anyone to stand up a present an idea for five minutes. Thirdly, I’d like to see it recorded and ideally live streamed. Certainly, the plenary sessions could be on uStream or BlogTV.

—fold—

I start with some of the themes Sunny suggests, and add in some more. This is by no means exhaustive; just some things that interest me.

London

Firstly, I don’t think anyone who can’t beat Ken for the Labour nomination will be able to beat Boris. However, I’m not convinced that Boris will run again; it’s certainly not a foregone conclusion and it seems the main reason he would stay on is that there is no obvious heir apparent from the Conservative ranks, certainly not with with any significant profile. If the competition is between Ken and Oona, I would favour the former on the basis that he stands a better chance of building a broad coalition that goes beyond the Labour party. We will need to develop a narrative on the Conservative administration of City Hall, and I would suggest that it should focus on a lack of big ideas and not making the case for London in Whitehall and Westminster. Boris has also had a few bizarre flights of fancy – Boris Island Airport and the Boris Bus (especially its cost) – while scrapping ideas like Cross-River Tram that would have been beneficial to London.

When it comes to the Mayoralty, I have no idea who the LibDem candidate will be (although Susan Kramer is available). The choice of LibDem candidate may well indicate how London LibDems feel about the ménage à deux and whether they feel the Orange Book tendency has moved their party in a way with which they feel uncomfortable. We will have to determine whether attacking the LibDems for their coalition with the Tories is sensible, responsible and effective, and that may well depend on who the candidate is.

I am plotting an idea to set up a London political podcast. I will do a separate post on that as and when I have settled my ideas, but some of the ideas that have come out on that are important. We will need to look to the growth in Labour councillors and councils to be the starting point of a fightback against the Tories in the capital.

Wales and Scotland

We must avoid making this project too London-centric. Yes, it is being hosted in the capital and London has many millions, but we should look at the other devolved areas in Britain: Wales and Scotland. All three could learn from each other, but they may be particularly useful in working out a tack to take with regard to the LibDems. We also have to work out how we strengthen the progressive position at Holyrood and the Senedd, given that the former has extensive powers and it seems likely that the latter will be gaining similar powers. Alternate centres of power in Wales, Scotland and London may well be able to slow at least some of the damage I fear the current administration will bring.

The West Lothian Question

I think that progressives need to seriously consider the idea of English regions.

There is a lot of talk about devolution, giving power to the people and so on. We need to work out what that actually means. If we regionalised, we would see alternate centres of power. To give them meaning, they need powers substantial powers and we should consider the inclusion of policing, transport, housing, spatial planning and, potentially, health. I feel that counties are too small and too easily controlled by the centre to be able to effectively devise and implement policy.

Regions would mean the main parties would have to have some sort of meaningful regional structure. Much as I hope the regions would be able to stand up to Whitehall, I hope that meaningful regional structures within political parties would weaken the wearisome control from the centre to which so many people object.

I would hope that this would lead to the economic weight of the country shifting away from London and away from financial services and giving parts of England outside of London the opportunity to be something more than vassals.

We have spoken much about the sad state of local media. I merely raise the question as to whether regions would cause a re-alignment of newspapers, radio and television so that there could be meaningful coverage and scrutiny of politics and competition between outlets.

I reject the idea of and English Parliament as an answer to the West Lothian question out of hand (a Parliament for forty-eight million people isn’t much less unitary than one for sixty-one million).

We should emphasise that this would not create an extra layer of bureaucracy. There are already Government Offices for all the English regions along with Regional Development Agencies and Local Authorities Leaders’ Boards. This is about democratising those structures.

Ultimately, I think we have seen a flourishing of the London, Welsh and Scottish blogospheres that is indicative of better relations between citizen and state in those three areas and I want the same for the rest of England. This will mean addressing some of the mistakes and lack of ambition from the failed north-east referendum.

The LibDems

We should pursue a strategy of splitting the Social Democrats from the Liberals/Orange Book in the Lib Dems with a view to one side joining the Tories and the other Labour. We should make it clear that you cannot go into coalition with the Tories and call yourself progressive.

I think we should advocate that the cuts are being implemented too soon; that if they are going to do a zero-budget process, it has to be zero-budget across everything¹; that these cuts are also the political desire of the Orange Book and Tories; ensure efficiency where they are made; oppose the most egregiously unfair cuts; maintain support for industry.

That having been said, we need to work out how we can use social democratically-minded LibDems to control the excesses of the coalition.

Others

• Low pay. We must continue to support the living wage, consider the benefits of a citizen’s wage and ensure that the minimum wage is increased appropriately.
• Europe. As people will know, I am pretty pro-European. However, we should explicitly say that there should be no further integration for a couple of Parliaments to give the Lisbon changes and expansion time to bed down. We could expand to the relatively small countries of the Balkans when the time is right, but we will need to be in an economically strong position to welcome Turkey to the EU when the time is right. It should be made clear that member state of the EU have the right to nationalise, municipalise and deprivatise and that the principles of the free market should not prevent this (although I would retain the state aid prohibitions as they are).
• Co-ops. It strikes me that this is a movement to which we should reach out; surprisingly large, but often very local and potentially powerful for community organising.
• The BNP. We need to consider what’s going to happen next with the BNP and their fellow-travellers. I welcome their thorough trouncing at the recent election and I look forward to Richard Barnbrook being invited to pursue interests of his own choosing by the good people of Barking and Dagenham. However, I have three concerns. One is that we will become complacent about the BNP et al. and that they will be able to regroup. We must keep the pressure on them. A second is that the BNP’s problems may lead to more support for the EDL; while they are clearly not going to get anywhere electorally, they are violent. Thirdly, we need to explicitly oppose and combat the rising populist nationalism that we see in UKIP, sections of the Conservative party, sections of the media and, frankly, amongst people who should know better.
• Women’s rights. We must defend the right to abortion. I feel the likelihood of an attempt at restricting it in this Parliament is high and I feel there is a good chance it could be successful. I feel that we should also be looking at Norwegian-style rules for gender-balance in the boardroom. We should discuss the sex industry and the objectification of women.
• Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t want to belabour these subjects. For the moment, I want to set aside whether they were a good idea or not, and just look at the conduct of the campaigns. It is clear that there were mistakes and shortcomings. We should look at what they were, how they happened and how we stop them happening again. In order to do it properly, we must be able to do it without always going back to the morality of the conflicts. I’m not saying we shouldn’t consider the morality of the conflicts; I’m saying it’s not the only issue.

I’ll probably do something on electoral reform in the coming days.

xD.

1 – Including the NHS and Trident. I am prepared to at least consider that (for instance) industrial promotion is currently more important than (for instance) fertility treatment. I am not saying that is the case, but that we should be prepared to consider it.

I’d just like to add one thing:

The British Chiropractic Association happily promotes bogus treatments without a jot of evidence.

I’m tempted to put that on the nearest billboard to the BCA’s offices.

xD.

“I have sat among their learned men, for that honour I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning among them was brought; …. that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old a prisoner of the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.”

John Milton, Areopagitica, cited by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Judge, in his judgement allowing an appeal in the BCA v Singh case. The full title of Milton’s work is “Areopagitica: A speech of Mr. John Milton for the liberty of unlicensed printing to the Parliament of England” and was published in 1644. The full text of the judgement is at Bailii and the full text of the Areopagitica is available courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

When a judgement against you includes the word ‘Orwellian’, it’s time to consider the words ‘epic’ and ‘fail.

xD.

xD.

PS – a little while ago, I celebrated my fifth anniversary of blogging. This is my one thousandth post.

I want to quote something quoted by Jack from Simon’s defence QC:

“Scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by the methods of litigation…More papers, more discussion, better data, and more satisfactory models-not larger awards of damages-mark the path toward superior understanding of the world around us.”

Underwager v Salter, 22 F.3d 730

A slightly shorter version is Professor Frizzelle’s Instant Classic:

Let’s hear your evidence not your legal muscle

Quite.

xD.

Quite.

The main link to which I refer is censortube.eu; Thunderf00t is on YouTube at youtube.com/thunderf00t; the Electronic Frontier Foundation is at eff.org; the Google spring clean is at productideas.appspot.com.

xD.

Jack of Kent does something very interesting in this lucid explanation of the situation. He shows that it is possible to agree with the initial reaction of the masses, even so the masses are so uninformed that their opinions are of little to no value. He also shows how complicated the operation of the state is.

xD.

The first objection is this – not only was the question wrong for anyone in a polling place to ask because it presupposed that the wrong answer would impact on the person’s right to vote, something not provided for by the constitution but if it did not prevent the man from voting, then why was the question there in the first place?

If the question was asked actually inside the polling place, where people are actually putting the cross in a box, or whatever the local variant is, that would be a problem. I suspect that this was just as Mr Spooner was going into or coming out of the polling place. I’m not familiar with the procedures in Massachusetts, but the election officials in the UK would come down on you like a ton of bricks if you did that. There is no restriction, though, on speaking to people near the polling place (so long as it isn’t intimidatory). Secondly, the fact that something is not provided for in the Constitution is irrelevant. The Constitution is based on negative liberties – unless it says you must do or refrain from doing something, you can do what you want. Indeed, the tenth amendment reads

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

.

There is nothing in the US Constitution that prevents two people, on the way to vote, from discussing how they will cast their ballot.

The second objection is that it is a false question. You and I know full well that to just drop in the word “equality” and ask people to say whether they favour it or not will always produce a majority opinion in favour. That, however, is not what was really being asked. What was being asked was whether the person was in favour of gay marriage or not.

This becomes a semantic question. Does gay equality mean that we must allow gay marriage? I answer in the affirmative; James in the negative. James acknowledged this, and goes on to say

This is a blurring of two separate issues:

1. Do you believe that adult gays and lesbians should be able to pursue their lifestyle, insofar as they conform to the law, without fear or prejudice being shown towards them?

Most would say yes to that.

2. Do you agree that gays and lesbians have an equal right to marry as much as any heterosexual?

I think there is a real problem with that division. Let us substitute the term ‘people with blue eyes’ for ‘gays and lesbians’, mutatis mutandur, and see what happens.

1. Do you believe that adult people with blue eyes should be able to pursue their lifestyle, insofar as they conform to the law, without fear or prejudice being shown towards them?

2. Do you agree that people with blue eyes have an equal right to marry as much as any person with brown eyes?

In the second case, it’s very obvious that the law has been constructed to favour those with brown eyes against those with blue eyes. People with blue eyes can do whatever they want so long as they conform to the law and it is that law which prevents them from doing what they want to do. The law is cast unfairly.

Moving on, James says:

Here’s the logical fallacy. Same sex cannot marry, by definition. Here is the Merriam-Webster definition [until 2003, when the PCists got in and forced it to be changed]:

Main Entry: marriage
Pronunciation: ‘mar-ij also ‘mer-
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English mariage, from Old French, from marier to marry
Date: 14th century
1 a : the state of being married b : the mutual relation of husband and wife : WEDLOCK c : the institution whereby men and women are joined in a special kind of social and legal dependence for the purpose of founding and maintaining a family
2 : an act of marrying or the rite by which the married status is effected; especially : the wedding ceremony and attendant festivities or formalities
3 : an intimate or close union

To which I say nonsense. All James has done is chosen a definition of marriage that he likes. I could simply choose a different one, or say that a family does not necessarily include children, or say that the definition was changed in 2003 to reflect changes in how the term is used.

Not only that but polls such as this one show that the majority do not accept that what gays have is a marriage – it’s a civil partnership. Even if they did achieve a majority that way, it is still pointless because it is like changing a science text to say that the sun rises in the west, just because a concerted propaganda campaign has convinced people of it.

In classical Greece, the household included slaves; in mediaeval Europe, servants. It can be extended or nuclear. The way in which we live changes; terms like ‘family’ are subjective in meaning.

The third objection is that not only are they blurring the question and presenting a false construct as a valid alternative but they are also lying about history. On the Meriam-Webster page, a commentator said that the only reason for that definition of marriage was that the man who wrote it was a fundamentalist Christian.

James then goes on to detail how marriage was seen as between a man and a woman in classical Greece, pharaoic Egypt and so on. Certainly, marriage was conceived of as between a man and a woman before Christianity appeared. I’m not sure that the construct is false – morality in the west is at least based on Judaeo-Christian values, and so, as marriage in those value is generally conceived of as being between a man and a woman, that it persists is no surprise. Judaeo-Christian values may be based on other values, or incorporate features of them, but the absence of many temples to Osiris in central London would suggest that the Egyptian mythos is not a major force. Marriage as described pre-dates Christianity, but it could have died out and Christianity was implemental in seeing that it did not die out. The inflexibility can be attributed to the fundamentalism.

In any case, I don’t really care what the ancients considered moral. Quite apart from their genocide, slavery and credulousness, to define one’s morality by any other’s actions, past or present, is to give up your rationality.

James then goes off on something of a flight of fancy, suggesting that ‘socialists’ are trying to rewrite history. Er… no. As I’ve tried to show, past definition does not apply today to a subjective term. Apparently, we are aiming for

1) Abolition of all ordered governments
2) Abolition of private property
3) Abolition of inheritance
4) Abolition of patriotism
5) Abolition of the family
6) Abolition of religion
7) Creation of a world government

I’m not sure where this came from – no link provided that I can see, but it is a load of garbage. (1) and (7) cancel each other out, the Christian Socialist Movement would have something to say about (6). (3) is a subset of (2), and that’s something than could be attributed to communists, not socialists or social democrats. Quite how we would go about abolishing feelings of kinship – (4) and (5) is beyond me. They survived the USSR, after all.

Ultimately, I see marriage as a contract between two adults. It’s no-one’s business how or why they enter into that contract. The only arguments other than ‘we don’t like gays’ against gay marriage have to do with marriage necessarily being a vehicle for procreation. That is a stupid thing to say – many couples can’t have children, many don’t want children.

xD.

xD.

In Tangipahoa Country, Louisiana, a justice of the peace, Keith Bardwell, refuses to give marriage licenses for mixed-race couples. Yes, you read that correctly.

The story first surfaced in the Hammond Daily Star. Mr Bardwell says he will not perform mixed-race marriages because the children will suffer as neither black nor white society will accept them.

I don’t want to get into a semantic discussion about whether this is racism. I would say that it is and, even if it isn’t, it’s simply flat wrong. I would like to point out some of the other screaming idiocies that this puisne justice has committed by his actions.

Firstly, he has awarded the state the right to choose those fit to breed.

Secondly, he has misapplied this principle in choosing a single category and not looking at others.

Thirdly, he has made childbearing a necessary consequence of marriage.

Fourthly, he has made the ability to contract marriage contingent on the approval of the state.

Fifthly, he has ignored the ruling of the Supreme Court in Loving v Virginia, where the unanimous opinion said, inter alia

There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy.

Sixthly, in so doing he has violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (emphasis added)

Seventhly, he has legalised the tyranny of the majority by making social acceptance a condition of action

Eighthly, he has confused correlation with causation and taken his small number of instances to be indicative of the bigger picture

Ninethly, he has done what he thinks is just; his role is to enforce justice. That may or not be just, but it is not his place to second guess the law in this way.

Tenthly, he has not realised that the election of a biracial president suggests, at the least, that the mood is changing.

His actions, or rather inactions, are a travesty of justice. He apparently intends not to restand for the office of justice of the peace when his term expires on the last day of 2014. I hope we do not have to wait that long for him to be removed from office.

xD.