I’ve got a new post up on LC. I don’t post enough on LC; I should post more on LC. See also: posts here.
I’ve had some positive comments on the LC post from people I respect, both over there and on Twitter. Given that unlike my usual LC work, this wasn’t a ‘using hard data to bust myths’ article but just a ‘thought-dump in something vaguely resembling readable English because we needed someone to write something quick-sharp’ article, this was quite pleasing. At least, until I remembered that “reasonable opinions in readable English” don’t win columnist gigs…
Anyway. In response to the comments on the LC piece, I came up with a couple of digressions that I thought were worth repeating here:
Not that the US is liberal, but there is a generally understood rights+votes model of governance called ‘liberal democracy’, which pretty much consists of (US + EU + might-as-well-be-EU-but-don’t-want-to-lose-their-fish/oil/gold + trying to be EU + Commonwealth), but which doesn’t encompass everywhere that has the occasional vote to choose which dictator will torture you on a whim.
(yes, South America is a mild exception, but ‘if you stop voting in right-wing dictators then secret agents from a Liberal Democracy will turn up and assassinate people until you start again’ deals with that one).
Also, why (ideological aims aside), even though the current crop of Labour MPs appear to be worse at Parliament’s legislative duties than their Tory and Lib Dem counterparts, this is structural more than anything else:
If you’re a Tory MP in the current parliament, you’ve either been there forever, or you’ve managed to land a safe seat by serious politicing in the wilderness years when others were busy management-consulting, PR-ing, etc. If you’re a Lib Dem MP in any parliament, you’ve either been a Liberal since Gladstone, you’ve managed to land an incumbent-if-hardly-safe LD seat through serious politicing throughout, or you’ve been selected for a by-election to show the nation that the Lib Dems are Serious People.
On the other hand, while a lot of long-serving Labour MPs live up to the duties expected of them (my MP, Jeremy Corbyn, is so good at this that I’m going to vote for him next time despite my utter distaste for the national party – because there is absolutely no way that anyone else standing in Islington North will be a greater asset to Parliament than him. This is how you, dear reader, should choose your MP. Similarly, when my MP was Beverly Hughes, I didn’t vote for her even though at the time I supported the national government), most of the 1997 intake were daft hacks who didn’t even expect they’d get in, and most of the subsequent intakes have been subservient hangers-on.
Hence, it’s pretty much certain that after the next election, in terms of general competence and respect for parliamentary procedure rather than sheer political allegiance, that there’ll be an awful lot more dreadful Tory MPs than now, and that there’ll be far fewer dreadful Labour MPs.