Category: Britain

The Lesson of Scotland: Give the People Something to Vote For

Nicola Sturgeon
Nicola Sturgeon, happy warrior

The scale of the electoral slaughter in Scotland yesterday was truly astonishing. The Scottish National Party (SNP) didn’t just take almost every single Labour seat, they took them by swings that have no precedent in electoral history. Turnout was over 80% in some constituencies! Even a 20-year old SNP candidate was enough to sweep aside a seasoned Labour politician. Forgive me for quoting myself regarding what things were like on the ground:

I ran into a Scottish friend recently, a diehard Socialist and Nationalist, who was not in the least discouraged by the recent negative vote on independence. “It was like the old days” he told me, with excitement in his voice “People standing on street corners talking about politics, complete strangers debating each other in the pub about the future of Scotland, the whole country came alive!”. Thinking about the default cynicism and political disengagement in most of the developed world, I had to admit that it sounded vivifying.

The unmistakable difference between Labour Party and SNP supporters this year is how many more of the latter were voting positively. When I asked my friends who supported Labour why they did so, they could almost never speak even two sentences without attacking the Tories. Some couldn’t even get two words out without mentioning them,

Q: “What do you like about Labour?”

A: “The damn Tories…”.

Q: “I know you don’t like them, but what would your party do if it won?”

A: “We’d kick out the damn Tories!”

In contrast, my SNP supporting friends rarely mentioned either of the major parties in explaining their votes. Instead, they talked about what they dreamed a Scottish nation could become under SNP rule, almost always with a smile on their face and hope in their voice.

Parties can certainly win elections entirely by saying what they don’t stand for, who they are against, and how they are not as bad as their opponents. But if all you have going for you is such negative voting motivations, you are completely ill-equipped to handle an opponent whose support comes not from what they aren’t, but from what they are. The positive vision of the SNP drew a huge number of people into the political process who had previously been disengaged and energized long-time voters who were used to pulling the lever while holding their nose with the other hand.

In the U.S., we all bemoan the level of political alienation in the electorate and the negative tone of our politics. The SNP experience shows that there is a possible solution: Candidates and parties that give people something to vote for rather than merely vote against.

The Presidentification of U.K. Politics

A small but irritating sentence from the FT:

On most projections Mr Cameron is expected to win more seats than Mr Miliband, although the race is tight.

In fact, any sensible projection would have Cameron and Miliband winning the same number of seats: One each.

In the U.S. System, the nation does indeed vote on one individual versus another for the top job. But in the Westminster system you vote for a party. Unless you happen to live in his/her constituency, you do not vote for or against a prime minister at all. Further, the party you voted for can throw its PM out of office at any time and go right on governing, and even if they keep their leader, s/he has (unlike a president) little independent power apart from the party. But between the UK’s wrongheaded adoption of our tiresome televised candidate debates and the relentless focus of the press on the party leaders’ personalities, families and lifestyles (even, their eating habits), you’d think the British public are about to vote for the next President of the United Kingdom.

How Oxford University Became Such an Argumentative Place

Oxford

The following anecdote from Oxford University has been recycled many times in debates about campus PC speech codes, most recently by Judith Shulevitz:

At Oxford University’s Christ Church college in November, the college censors (“censor” being more or less the Oxford equivalent of an undergraduate dean) canceled a debate on abortion after campus feminists threatened to disrupt it because both would-be debaters were men. “I’m relieved the censors have made this decision”, said the treasurer of Christ Church’s student union, who had pressed for the cancellation. “It clearly makes the most sense for the safety — both physical and mental — of the students who live and work in Christ Church.”

Andrew Sullivan was one of many other people who also picked this story up and decried how close-minded Oxford “kids these days” have become.

Knowing the history of British Universities (I have been a professor at two of them) I can affirm that this sort of thing never would have happened at Oxford 200 years ago!

Because Oxford didn’t admit women then. Or Jews for that matter. Or Blacks. Or poor people. Or, well, you get the idea.

Of course those of us who spend our days on campus should try to be civil to each other, listen to each other and learn from each other, and it’s a public service to point out when we fail to meet those standards. But the idea that universities today are shutting down debate to an unprecedented extent is risible. For centuries after it was founded, Oxford stifled debate on campus by only admitting a narrow, like-thinking subset of society. When the university quite rightly opened its gates to more a diverse range of students, huge disagreements that were always present in society at last became visible on campus too.

Labour’s Scottish Message vs. Ramsay MacDonald

With Britain’s two main parties running neck and neck in a race in which neither is expected to get an outright majority of seats, each is trying to persuade minor party voters to “come home”. For example, to help stanch Labour’s Scottish losses to the Scottish National Party, Labour advocate Jim Murphy is arguing that a vote for the SNP is a vote for the Tories:

It is a simple fact that the single biggest party gets to form the next government.

I couldn’t square this claim with my recollection of UK political history (more on that in a moment), so I consulted Southampton University Professor Will Jennings, who blogs at the excellent site Politics Upside Down. I asked Will what David Cameron could do if the Tories didn’t get a majority, but eked a few more seats than Labour (say 290 vs. 286) because the SNP managed to grab a number of seats (say 40) that otherwise would have gone to Labour. If Labour and SNP wanted to form a majority coalition of 326 seats, could Cameron stay on anyway on the basis of his being the single biggest party?:

the incumbent government has the right to attempt to form a government. However, the government would still need to command a majority in a vote of no confidence, and that would depend on the arithmetic of the opposition parties. So if the Conservatives won with the seat permutation you suggest, it would quickly become apparent they would lose a vote of confidence, and would have to step aside for an alternative government.

Ramsey MacdonaldI was grateful to Will for confirming my suspicions, which funnily enough come straight from my recollection of the founding of the Labour Party by Scottish politicians, most notably Ramsay MacDonald. Having read up a bit over the weekend, I can now relate the intriguing story.

The MacDonald-led Labour party secured 191 seats in the 1923 election, well behind the Conservatives’ tally of 258. Under “Murphy’s Law”, this would have ensured a Tory government with Stanley Baldwin as PM. But H.H. Asquith of the third place Liberal Party threw his 158 seats behind Labour, which meant that Baldwin couldn’t possibly win a confidence vote in the Commons. Thus, despite coming in a distant second in seats, MacDonald became Labour’s first Prime Minister.

A vote for the SNP in Scotland is thus..a vote for the SNP in Scotland.

The Brits Score Again in Political Satire

Veep continues the noble British tradition of drolly mocking politicians

The British television series Yes, Minister remains for me the ultimate in political satire, but on a long airplane ride I recently discovered something almost in the same class: Veep (a late discovery I know, but if you don’t own a television, airplanes are your chance to catch up on small-screen developments).

A small bit of digging revealed that the show has British origins, being a descendant of In the Loop which descended from The Thick of It which descended from Yes, Minister.

We’ve had some magnificent political satirists in the U.S., but I must say for a smaller country, the Brits sure punch above their weight in the droll mockery of politicians department.

Weekend Film Recommendation: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The BBC mini-series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is the perfect realisation of the John Le Carré novel.

BRITAIN-GUINNESS-007If I were BBC Director-General, and had been granted only 24 broadcast hours to make the case to the nation and its elected officials that my organisation was capable of greatness, I would immediately fill the first 315 minutes of my schedule with this week’s film recommendation: 1979’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

This is what a television mini-series can do that is virtually impossible in the movie theater: Tell a long, complex, intimate story over a series of episodes that hang together, and in which the audience being forced to wait for the resolution adds to the exquisite tension of the tale. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is also the apotheosis of what BBC can do better than any other organisation when it sets its mind to it: Trawl through the British theater for stage-trained, perfectly cast actors to play parts large and small, give them a quintessentially British script, and spend a TV-level budget in just the right way to get the sets and production that are “tailor made” (sorry, couldn’t pass that up) for the story. The result is BBC television magic.

The plot: The aging head of the British Secret Service, dogged by a series of espionage failures and declining health, sends out a trusted agent on a mission to Czechoslovakia that will help smoke out a high-level mole who is working for the Soviets. The mission goes horribly wrong, almost as if the enemy knew of it in advance. A different group of agents ascends to control of the service, and casts out along the way faithful, long-serving head of personnel George Smiley. But the politician who oversee the service believes the mole is still active, and recruits Smiley out of retirement to covertly investigate his former colleagues. With glum professionalism, and the aid of an embittered assassin who has been demoted, he slowly draws on the loose strings that he hopes will lead him to the mole’s identity.

I am no expert on Le Carré, but his passionate fans embraced this production as assiduously faithful to the book. Indeed, the man himself said that after viewing the mini-series, he could no longer think about Smiley without visualizing Alec Guinness.

Many people say Sir Alec was “born to play” spymaster George Smiley. But people said that about many of the parts he played in his career, a tribute to his genius as an actor. I love all the small things he does in this movie: Wiping his glasses on his tie, locking his flat door behind him without looking, wincing almost imperceptibly at the mention of his wayward wife. And he never commits the dramatic error of trying to make Smiley normal or likable. As his former wife says to him in the crucial final scene, he doesn’t understand life very well at all, he is strangely emotionally detached and not someone you’d want to have over to dinner. Unlike many of the people around him, he still seems to hold his country in some regard, but even that explanation doesn’t seem to fully explain why he takes on the difficult mission which he is assigned.

I frankly think this movie is no less enjoyable if you know in advance (from the book or from prior viewings) the mole’s identity. The story is about institutional rot, collective lassitude and endemic careerism. Yes, one man is particularly guilty but in various ways, every one of the key suspects has much of which to be ashamed.

Director John Irvin was at the peak of his skills in the late 1970s, helming this series and The Dogs of War immediately afterwards. His career seemed to stall after those two triumphs, but he certainly delivers the goods here. Irvin had a champagne cast with which to work, not just Guinness. The actors are so uniformly fine that it seems an injustice to single out particular performers, but I will nonetheless take the risk to applaud Ian Richardson as Deputy Director Bill Haydon, who defeats Smiley in bureaucratic battles and does something even more horrid to him on the home front. How in the name of The Queen, St. Michael and St. George was this magnificent actor never knighted? Perhaps it was the suddenness of his death when he seemed in rude health…if so that’s a case for honoring people when they deserve it rather than waiting until they are “old enough”.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a million miles from the heroic James Bond-sort of secret agent picture. There are no car chases, fist fights or explosions. There instead is the gritty, slimy work of espionage, the grind of a meticulous investigation and the guessing and re-guessing of who can be trusted and who is a villain. Yet even with a running time of more than 5 hours, it never loses the viewer’s interest. Indeed, I would not be surprised if some people who own it on DVD devour it in one or two sittings.

p.s. I am given to understand that the US rebroadcast version of this mini-series is shorter than the UK original and also makes some narrative changes. Not having viewed it, I do not know how it compares to the version I review here.

Awards and Class

A combination of union rules and asbestos in the walls makes it illegal for me to hang pictures and plaques in my hospital office. That task was undertaken by a friendly fellow who, drill, screws and hooks in hand, informed me that I had ill-chosen the placements of the plaques displaying my degrees.

My undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees are important to me — they represent seven years of my life after all — but I feel fulsome displaying them. I therefore had selected for them a strip of bare wall between a bookcase and a rear corner of my office. In this position, I would be able to see them but my office visitors would not.

The picture hanger objected “You ought to be proud of these, doc. Put them out here where everyone can see them!” And though I am proud of them, I did not comply. Why did we see the matter so differently?

The anthropologist Kate Fox documents that this is a subtle difference between social classes (she studied the English, but her findings generalize to at least some Americans). Working class people generally keep their plaques, certificates and sporting trophies in the front room for all to see, and indeed feel comfortable pointing them out.

As we ascend to the middle of the class ladder, we find such honesty unfashionable. Perhaps we want to conceal our vanity and ambition because it’s a wise career move, or perhaps being modest makes it more likely your colleagues will give you awards because they don’t yet find you insufferable.

The dilemma for middle to upper-middle class strivers is that they want everyone to know about their awards without looking as if that is precisely what they crave. Fox is spot on in diagnosing how most English upper-middle sorts handle this: They hang their awards in the lavatory. All houseguests will thus be sure to see them, but the larky placement will suggest that the winner of all these laurels doesn’t think much about them, after all, they hung them in the loo, didn’t they? An American friend has her “nonsense wall” of awards, explicitly referred to as such, which has a similar effect of displaying achievements while at the same time appearing not to value them. Another American approach: Hang them in that dusty spare room where you also happen to put overnight guests whom you wish to impress.

What about the upper class? Self-made American uppers usually follows the working class model, never shutting up about all their putative achievements, which they mention them without the slightest provocation. However, a sliver of the American upper class and most of the British upper class are extraordinarily reticent about their honours, even when pressed on the point. After all, they can afford it, and they don’t need pieces of paper to assure them of their relative place in life.

The truly classiest approach I have observed, in the sense of the word “class” that Michael O’Hare so well explicated? A senior colleague who was so famous he could not attend a conference without receiving a plaque kept them all in a stack under his desk. He had space on his office wall for exactly one. When he was scheduled to receive a visitor from, say, the Royal Astronomical Society, he would dig through his plaques and hang the matching award in the place of the honour. He would then say to his guest “Normally I don’t make much of awards, but yours was so special to me that it’s the only one I display in my office”.

Restoring a House of God in a Secular Nation

Canterbury Cathedral is an awe-inspiring, magnificent place. It is also in need of restoration work. To finance the effort, a philanthropic campaign is underway which inadvertantly provides some insight into religion’s standing in the country.

The campaign features large posters with photos of people who are connected to cathedral, each of whom is quoted completing the sentence starter “I love my cathedral because…”. The reasons are varied and understandable: The wonderful staff, the joy of singing, the historical value, the educational programmes and the restoration opportunities for artisans.

Notably absent in the list are motivations such as “I love the cathedral because it brings me closer to God” or “I love the cathedral because it is an inspiring place to practise my Christian faith”.

The campaign designers know their audience. In a self-consciously secular nation, a fund raising campaign to save one of the most significant shrines in Christendom can’t sound any more religious than would an effort to preserve Battersea Power Station.

Men of the British Isles…and Their Sheds

We visited a kindly Irish couple and their three children today, and the father of the house showed me the spot in the backyard where he will build what he most needs: A shed. The garden shed has a place in the emotional life of the men of these Isles that is a bit difficult for outsiders to understand. There are even physical health promotion and mental health programmes that specifically target otherwise hard-to-reach men where they are, i.e., in their sheds.

I suppose the American parallel is the “man cave”, a work room, dark room, spare room, den or the like inside the home. As they immigrated from the UK to the US, perhaps men discovered that the houses were bigger in the latter, and one could therefore “move the shed inside”, so to speak.

Can a man have too many sheds? Consider the risks: