David Matthewman

There's a room.
( Cut, because I suspect it's triggering for depression and the like. )
[Note: this is distilled, concentrated, and almost certainly sounds worse than it it. And I feel a lot better for writing it. I really just wanted to share, because I'm interested if it rings any bells for anyone else.]

'If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and one, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind' – John Stuart Mill On Liberty

One important test of a political party is how well it stands up for its principles, even when those principles may cost it votes. I'd be the first to admit the the the Liberal Democrats do not have a 100% record on this, particularly in some local councils and election literature. But we also have some notable successes, and I feel that it's worth celebrating them.

I've already mentioned that we, both as a party and as individual activists, were deeply concerned with 'green' issues way before they hit the wider consciousness. The same goes for gay rights, as part of a wider commitment to equality, and it's easy to forget how far we've come in the last ten years, let alone the last twenty. In our 1992 manifesto, we included the following commitment: 'Guarantee equal rights for gay men and lesbians through changes to criminal law, anti-discrimination legislation and police practices. We will repeal Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act. We will create a common age of consent regardless of gender or sexual orientation.' Yes, there's a missing 'b' word there, but for 1992 this was remarkable, and Jeremy Paxman indeed mocked Paddy Ashdown for including such an obviously unpalatable clause in the manifesto.

But we stayed firm on that. Here, in 1999, is the vote to ban workplace discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. Even just over ten years ago, this was considered a sufficiently tricky subject for the government to block it, but the Lib Dems were solid in their support for it. Here is Dr Evan Harris, almost ten years ago, being awesome on the subject of gay, lesbian and bisexual students being bullied as a result of the continued existence of Section 28. Even today, there are still battles to be fought, and here Nick Clegg is still fighting them (although, yes, I'd prefer it if he included 'bisexual' and talked in terms of 'same-sex' rather than 'gay' marriage).

Nick Clegg's support for the Gurkha cause is now well known, but Lib Dems have been campaigning for justice for the Gurkhas for over five years now, led initially by Peter Carroll, a Lib Dem activist in Maidstone. Again, it may be hard to see this as an unpopular cause now, but it was only just over a year ago when we were being warned of the supposed dangers of 100,000 Gurkhas and their dependents flooding into this country. Most of the credit for the victory belongs to Joanna Lumley and the many Gurkhas who tirelessly camapigned for justice, and I would never want this to be seen as mainly a Lib Dem victory, but it was a victory in which we gave strong, principled support.

Just over a year ago, there was a large protest planned in the City of London against the G-20 summit. Worried about the possibilities of police violence – based on the policing of similar protests earlier – the Lib Dems sent along several independent parliamentary observers, with the specific remit of monitoring the behaviour of the police, not the protesters. This was not a particularly popular move – this article by Daniel Finkelstein in The Times accurately reflected the view among much of white middle-class England that the protesters were a bunch of dangerous anarchists out looking for a fight, and that the the police were justified in using whatever tactics they needed to in order to stop them doing damage to valuable property. This view is still depressingly common even a year on, although I'm pleased to see that Daniel Finkelstein no longer shares it.

I have no idea to what extent Shirley Williams, David Howarth, Tom Brake et al shared the views of the protesters; I suspect that they were sympathetic to many of the concerns, but would probably disagree about how to address them, but I may be wrong. There was, in any case, no single message coming from the protesters. But as Liberal Democrats, they all had a genuine commitment to the rights of the protesters to protest.

As it turned out, it's a good thing they were there. Tom Brake's report from within the kettle was one of the key ones highlighting the problems with the police tactics, all the more powerful by coming from an MP. His convincingly-argued claim that the crowd was infiltrated by police agent provocateurs trying to goad the protesters into attacking the police has never, as far as I can tell, been satisfactorally addressed.

But it could have been very different. When the Liberal Democrats decided to monitor the protests, they had no idea how the day was going to go. The publicity for us, if we had been seen to be supporting violent protesters against a police presence trying to contain them, could have been very bad indeed. In fact, that's how the protests were reported for about 24 hours afterwards, until it emerged that no, the protesters hadn't been bombarding police trying to help Ian Tomlinson, and that the mysterious absence of any CCTV footage didn't stop there being plenty recorded on the ground on camcorders and mobile phones. However, our observers weren't there to get good publicity. They were there to defend the rights of the protesters against the police, and they'd be there again whatever the outcome.

We also, as I've mentioned before, have a manifesto commitment to scrap control orders and reduce pre-charge detention to a maximum of 14 days. In this, we are standing up for the rights of terrorist suspects, not a well liked section of society (and, therefore, a section with the greatest need of protection).

The principle of evidence-based policy making scored a recent victory in the Science and Technology Committee's recent recommendation that the MHRA should stop licensing homoeopathic remedies and that the NHS should stop funding them. Dr Evan Harris's contribution to this debate has been so widely recognised that it's often missed that the Committee's chair, Phil Willis, is another Liberal Democrat MP who was instrumental in asking searching questions of those giving evidence in favour of homeopathy. Phil is retiring at this election, and will be sadly missed. Evidence-based policy making may not seem like an unpopular cause to many people reading this, but in the wider community, threatening to stop funding homoeopathy did not go down well.

I should probably mention the Real Women campaign, launched by Jo Swinson at our Autumn conference last year. This has been the subject of some derision – the positive body image aspect of it was mocked by Anthony Jay's Yes Minister segment on the Lib Dem manifesto on Newsnight – but is something we're campaigning on because we feel that it's vitally important for the welfare of women in our society. The issue that's got most attention is that of labelling adverts that use airbrushed images – and note that it is labelling not banning, as many critics of the campaign would have you believe – but the paper has also contributed policy on name blanking on job applications to the manifesto. Whether or not you feel that the Real Women campaign is an unpopular cause will probably depend on your familiarity with the issues, but it is a grass-roots campaign that arises out of principle and attempts to persuade others that it's right, rather than being an obvious vote winner.

I like being in a party where I have at least some hope that if our principles are unpopular, we'll stick to our principles and try to change public opinion.

[Note - I've been running all of these past sashajwolf before posting them, and she's been doing fantastic work in picking up on typos, misspellings and areas where I'm not clear. But this post in particular is much improved on my first draft as a result of her input, and I thank her greatly for it.]

'Frankly, I think the odds are slightly in your favour at hand fighting.'
'It's not my fault being the biggest and the strongest. I don't even exercise.' - Westley and Fezzik, The Princess Bride

This wasn't the post I was expecting to make. However, when I wrote my first post on the subject of the Freedom Bill, I wrote a long section on the slipperiness of the word 'fair' (contrasting it with the supposedly hard-to-explain 'free'). In the end, I decided that it broke up the flow of the piece and stuck it in a footnote. Then I decided that even the footnote was superfluous.

And yet … fairness is a word we use a lot in our manifesto. So possibly I should consider what it means. To do that, I need to set out some of what's meant by 'fair'. It may seem intuitively obvious what fairness means, but intuition can trip us up on this one.

A 6-sided die is fair. A pack of cards is also fair, but they're both fair in very different ways. (I'm ignoring, for the sake of argument, trick cards and a loaded die.)

Initially, they're similar. If you roll a die once, you have an equal 1/6 chance of any particular number showing. If you deal a single card, you have an equal 1/52 chance of any particular card turning up. Aside from the numbers, that's the same. If that's hard to see because of the numbers, let's consider a much-reduced pack of cards where you only have Ace to 6 of hearts. Now when you deal, you have an equal 1/6 chance of any given card showing, just as with the die.

It's what happens next that's interesting. When you roll the die again, you still have a 1/6 equal chance of any particular number showing. But with the cards (assuming your first card is still on the table and hasn't been shuffled back into the pack), you only have five remaining cards, so you only have a 1/5 chance of any given card showing.

Let's say you've done this five times. And let's say that with the die, you've (by chance) thrown every number but a five. What are the chances of throwing a five on the next throw? 1/6, just as they always will be. But with the cards, if you've so far laid down every card except the five of hearts, the next card is certain to be the five.

So they're both fair, but they're a different sort of fair. A die is fair in the sense that every time you roll it, you've got an even chance of throwing the number you want. A pack of cards is 'fair' in the sense that the card you want will always come up at some point if you deal for long enough, and that it will come up exactly as many times as any other card (i.e. once) for each deal of the pack.

This may be trivially obvious if you're a gamer – in fact the most recent rules I saw for Settlers of Catan included a suggestion to use cards rather than dice to get round just this problem – in which case I apologise. But I have found that many people don't find the difference intuitively obvious. I realise that someone who insists that they are 'due' a six when rolling a die may be perfectly aware that a die has no memory, but I think many people have trouble with more complex scenarios in the real world.

The real world, as a whole, is very 'fair-like-dice'. Generally speaking, if you're having a run of bad luck in your life, you are not due some good luck soon as a result. But that's not what the stories tell us, with their happy endings, and their just deserts, and their tying up of loose ends in a satisfying manner. It's not what the notion of karma would have us believe. In fact, in life, 'fair-like-dice' often looks the very opposite of fair: 'why do bad things happen to good people? It's so unfair!' we cry. Well, bad things happen to good people because bad things have a (roughly) equal chance of happening to everyone. That's fair, in its way, but it's unpalatable.

Actually, and I thank sashajwolf for pointing this out, it's a good deal worse than that. The overall processes of the world may be 'fair-like-dice' in principle, but at the level of human society, the rich, powerful and privileged generally play with dice that history has already loaded strongly in their favour. Most of the stories, and karma, suggest that this loading of the dice will inevitable have a penalty later. It won't, by itself. Brecht, for one, knew this, and his stories tend to turn out very differently as a result.

When Liberal Democrats talk about making things fairer, then, we are frequently talking about redressing the inequalities of life. We are basically talking about (temporarily) loading a few specific dice ourselves to create a fairer outcome, or at least giving the dice a memory and a conscience. I should point out that I have no problem at all with 'fair' being used in this way; it's a perfectly legitimate use of the word 'fair'. I just feel that it's important to keep straight what sort of 'fair' we mean.

As often as not, we think we mean 'fair' as synonymous with 'equal', although as I point out in the next paragraph, that may be a mistake. Not everyone equates the two. To some people, equality is unfair, because it may mean giving up advantages that people feel that they've 'earned'. 'Privilege' is usually unearned, but that doesn't stop privileged people from squealing if you try to redress the inequality that privilege confers and remove the privilege.

Part of the problem is that even a concept as apparently simple as 'equality' can be complex. How do you achieve equality, in a world where inequality indelibly stains the fabric of our society? Is it enough just to provide a 'level playing field'? Sometimes, yes, but you also have to consider the teams that will play on that field. If only one team is composed of players who can afford the best equipment, who have been trained to play the game by the best coaches, who have spent their entire lives watching people of their race, gender, class, accent or body shape excel at the very game they're about to play, then the levelness of the playing field becomes an irrelevance.

This is why fairness is as crucial to liberalism as freedom is. Without fairness – a pro-active, interventionist fairness – freedom tends simply to increase existing inequalities. Without fairness, freedom of speech gives a voice only to those who can shout loudest. Of course, without freedom, fairness becomes imposed conformity. A liberal society needs both.

Take schools, and our policy of giving every child a fair start in life. Of course we don't mean 'fair' in the sense of 'stuck with whatever chances they were given when they were born'. We mean 'fair' in the sense of 'as equal a chance as possible with their fellow children'. It's not enough to supposedly level the playing field by making sure every child enters a nominally similar school at the same age, although that's a good aim in its own right. We also have to help those children who have already fallen behind; to take those who have thrown ones and twos all their life, and throw them a couple of sixes. And yes, those children who've had a string of sixes so far may well have to accept some ones and twos for a while to redress the balance. All people are not created equal with respect to opportunity in the real world, and I believe it's one of the key roles of government to redress that inequality in a fair way.

Liberals should be mistrustful of any call for the government to intervene in this way. We should set high standards for agreeing to it, and constantly review whether it's still needed. But to try to build a fair society without any intervention at all seems to me impossible (although I have the greatest respect for my anarchist friends who feel differently). And we should remember that the people in power will probably be poor judges of whether it's needed, so we shouldn't dismiss the call for intervention simply because we can't immediately see a need for it.

When we talk of fair votes, the situation's a little more complex. One person: one vote sounds the very essence of fairness, but the devil's in the details. In this case, as my blog entry of a couple of days ago points out, it's easy for 'one person: one vote' to produce an intuitively very unfair result, and not even necessarily obvious what a completely 'fair' result would look like. All voting systems have edge cases where the result is clearly unfair; the aim must be to have in place a system that gives reasonably fair results given the conditions. Given current voting patterns, First Past The Post is blatantly not fair.

Society – particularly looked at in terms of 'fairness' - is a dynamic system. I studied dynamic systems when doing control systems engineering for my degree, and one of the key features of them is that they're very hard to control or stabilise simply from taking a snapshot in time of the system. You need to consider the known past states of the system and the predicted future states, and you will almost certainly need to adjust your strategy constantly over time to respond to the change in state of the system.

So if (for example) we're trying to address gender inequality, then we may need to take actions that redress disadvantages for women. Seen in a snapshot of time, they may look as though they give women an advantage, but looked at in a longer-term context, they're (often barely) addressing an underlying inequality. Take the Campaign for Gender Balance within the Lib Dems – an organisation which among other things offers training, support and mentoring for women candidates. If everything else were equal, the lack of an equivalent organisation for men would seem unfair, but everything else is very far indeed from equal. The equivalent organisation for men is 'the party in general', both historically and currently.

No liberal should be comfortable with policies like that as an indefinite solution, nor would we want to keep them in a (hypothetical and possibly unattainable) world where gender inequality has disappeared, but if we don't use them in our current state, things will tend to the status quo. It's not simply that gender equality will not improve, it may well get worse, as (for example) higher-paid jobs appeal less and less to women, who don't think of them as the sort of jobs women do. Over time, positive feedback restores the system to an equilibrium, and we need to constantly push to stop that happening.

In this case, equilibrium - despite lexical similarity - does not mean equality for all. If anything, it means an inequality that will continue to re-assert itself without effort.

Another approach, of course, is to encourage people to see their identity differently, so that a woman can look at a well-paid man and think 'that person is like me; I could see myself in that job', where 'like me' is based not on gender (nor for that matter on race, religion, age or any other marker) but solely on being someone who is fulfilled by doing the job in question. That, too, is an extremely liberal goal, to try to free people from the constraints of conformity, and we can enthusiastically work towards it alongside other approaches. But I expect it's a very long-term solution, and may well take generations to achieve.

This is my concept of fairness, and I find it resonates well with how fairness is understood in the Liberal Democrats, and expressed in our manifesto. I'll return to the theme in at least a couple of my upcoming blog entries, but felt that the concept itself deserved its own entry.

Is it racist - or bigoted - to want to talk about immigration?

That's not an easy question to answer. Almost any discussion about immigration frames the debate in terms of 'us' and 'them', and once you've done that, bigotry or racism in some form almost inevitably follows. And yet, few people regard the subject of immigration itself as taboo, or are in favour of removing all restrictions (for the record, and with some reservations, I'm in favour of totally free migration, but I recognise that's not the general view).

What is undeniable is that many people raise the subject of immigration in a racist or bigoted way. Gillian Duffy did so yesterday, by asking 'You can't say anything about the immigrants. All these eastern Europeans what are coming in - where are they flocking from?' It was a bigoted question, and Gordon Brown was correct to label it as such.

(Incidentally, the claim that you can't say anything about immigrants is an odd one, since it's been brought up in both Prime Ministerial debates and was the very first question of all asked in the first one. I'd be amazed if it didn't come up tonight, either.)

Furthermore (and this isn't in many of the transcripts - The Telegraph has the best one I've found) Gordon Brown did try to answer the question. His reply: 'A million people come from Europe but a million have gone into Europe. You do know that there’s a lot of British people staying in Europe as well,' is a perfectly respectable answer to that question; it engages with the the question and makes some attempt to diffuse the fear behind it.

It's never comfortable to engage with bigoted arguments. Whenever I do it, there's a little voice in my head that says 'you do realise that by even discussing this, you're legitimising it?' But the problem is that if the only people who will engage with bigots are other bigots, the bigotry becomes self-reinforcing and gets worse. I have seen bigots become non-bigots. In my lifetime, I have seen vast swathes of British society move from being largely homophobic to largely accepting, and from being racist to being ... well, 'non-racist' seems too strong a claim, so I'll go for 'a lot less racist'. There have been many reasons for this, and several conflicting tactics have scored their own successes, but time after time what has happened is that the bigots have been engaged with, often by the people they are bigoted against, and come to realise that their bigotry is wrong.

I have, occasionally, seen someone have success by saying: 'you're being a bigot, and I'm not going to talk to you until you stop being bigoted'. But, crucially, I have only seen this work when used by someone the bigot respected, usually a close friend or family member. Very few people want to think they're bigoted, so unless they trust the person who's telling them this, they're unlikely to give the accusation much credence. From a stranger - including a Prime Minister on walkabout - it only reinforces the sense that this is a taboo subject that the other person doesn't want to talk about because they don't have any answers. It is something that may need to be said anyway; if we never say 'you are being bigoted' to bigots, then the target of the bigotry may reasonably come to feel that we share the bigotry. The target of the bigotry deserves our support far more than the bigot does, and we need to be clear where our solidarity lies.

So while I feel that it's a good idea to engage with bigots and try to make them less bigoted, I hope that it can be done without making the victims of their bigotry feel less isolated, and without looking as though we agree with the bigots. I realise that's a big ask, and in many senses unfair, and I also realise that a white, straight, middle-class, able-bodied male is precisely the wrong person to be making this case. The goal, though, is a less bigoted, more understanding society, so I hope the argument is sound anyway - I will listen closely to any dissenting views, though.

But that's a longer-term argument. Persuading bigots is a slow process. My fear for this election is that Gordon Brown's comments will have felt like an dismissal of a large section of the electorate who share Gillian Duffy's concerns; in this, it's even more tragic that what's being reported is his (nominally private) dismissal of her as 'bigoted' rather than his actual answer on immigration. This may push people to vote Tory, but is more likely to push them towards UKIP or the BNP - those are both parties that tend to see a surge in support whenever a Westminster politician of any party is thought not to be listening to the views of the public. That's why Gillian Duffy's apparently simple question was such a hand grenade; she perfectly expresses thoughts that vast numbers of British people agree with, but don't recognise as bigotry.

What all three of the leaders in the debate tonight need to say is something like this: 'yes, it was a bigoted question, (and here's why ...). But accepting that, let's - for the third time in as many weeks - address the issue of immigration (and here are our policies...)'. Doing the first without the second will alienate people and look like dodging a question that genuinely deserves an answer - even if the answer is 'your premise is wrong'. Doing the second without the first is tacitly condoning bigotry.

I'm not sure I can bear to watch.

'It’s called “democracy”, and I kind of like it.' – Nick Clegg, party conference March 2010

Electoral reform is surely a idea whose time has come, and Liberal Democrats are no longer lonely voices in the wilderness calling for it. The surge in Liberal Democrat support over the past fortnight has left the very real prospect of Labour getting fewer votes but more seats than the Lib Dems. The inequality had been apparent for some time before that, of course, but it seems as though as long as the parties came in in the right order, no one much minded.

The voting system isn't the only thing that needs changing, though. The British public is highly disenchanted with its MPs, mostly as a result of the expenses scandal. I admit that I think the disenchantment is out of proportion to the offence; certainly there were some egregious examples of abuse coupled with some ‘dog ate my homework’ levels of excuses, but the majority of MPs did little or nothing to criticise, and our government is not vastly more corrupt than others in Europe. That said, there are still severe problems inherent in the system, and we the electorate are right to be angry about the abuses that did happen and sense of entitlement that prevailed. Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson was the first to spot that the likelihood of expenses abuse correlated well with the safety of the MP’s seat. Correlation is not causation, of course, but in this case it makes sense to me that the safer an MP's seat, the less that MP feels themselves under the scrutiny of the electorate.

The Liberal Democrats' proposal to instigate a recall scheme for MPs will help with this. But far better is to reduce the number of safe seats in the first place. And we'd do that by getting rid of the current First Past The Post (FPTP) system and replacing it with a proportional one.

Of the non-FPTP systems, my preferred choice is Single Transferable Vote (STV) in multi-member constituencies of between four and six MPs. In STV, you number all the candidates on your ballot paper in order of preference continuing until you no longer care. If your most preferred candidate isn't elected, your vote is redistributed to your second choice, and so on. This makes it more likely that one of the candidates you've expressed a preference for is likely to get elected, and means that even if you mark your first preference for someone who doesn't get elected, you haven't 'wasted' your vote.

(An STV count is actually a bit more complicated than this makes it sound, usually involving fractional votes being passed around; I can elaborate in comments if asked.)

The other key point of this system is the 'multi-member' aspect, which is the one that delivers some semblance of proportionality. STV in single-member constituencies is known as 'Alternative Vote' or 'Instant Runoff', and tends to provide poor proportionality (as, obviously, does FPTP). If you only elect one MP per constituency, then the electoral 'view' of that constituency will be of a single party, no matter how the votes split. With five MPs, there's more scope for reflecting the diverse voting intentions of the voters across the constituency. A solidly Labour constituency may still return a block of five Labour MPs, but one in a more diverse area might return three Labour, one Lib Dem and one Conservative.

From the point of view of proportionality, an ideal at one extreme would be to treat the UK as a single massive constituency with 650 members, but this has disadvantages depending on how you do it. If you just make it a vote for parties rather than candidates, then your ballot paper is a lot shorter, but that means that party MPs are chosen from a list that the public doesn't get to vote on. This encourages candidates to curry favour with the party hierarchy rather than the voters. And if you make it a vote for candidates themselves (note that nobody would seriously propose doing this UK-wide), the ballot paper gets unmanageably long, and voters are likely to recognise only a fraction of the candidates on the list.

I prefer the compromise (and it is a compromise) of the multi-member seat approach. This allows voters to vote for individual candidates rather than parties, but keeps ballot paper length down to a manageable size. A constituency of between four and six MPs seems about right to me; the constituencies would be proportionately larger, so we're not talking about suddenly quadrupling the number of MPs here. (As it happens, we want to reduce the number of MPs overall by 150 as part of this process, so the constituencies would be slightly larger still.) Furthermore, this keeps at least some semblance of a regional link between MPs and their voters, with the advantage that most voters are now likely to be represented by at least one MP with views that reflect theirs.

A further advantage of multi-member constituencies is that parties can – and usually do – put up more than one candidate. This means that the electorate can choose to vote out an unpopular MP from a party even if they support the party in general. I don't want to over-sell this, mind you. Parties still have strong control over who gets to stand as a candidate, and it's unusual for a party to field many more candidates than the seats they're expecting to win. However, choosing between candidates in the same party is still more possible with multi-member constituencies than with single-member ones, which makes 'safe' seats a lot less safe. Yes, you may be standing as a Tory in a seat that's elected a Tory since Victoria was on the throne, but you're probably standing against three or four fellow Tories. At least some of whom may not have used public money to renovate their gatehouse. As a bonus, this system also makes it more possible for well-liked independent candidates to stand and be elected.

If STV proves to hard to sell to a hypothetical hung parliament, we may end up with 'Alternative Vote Plus' (AV+) as a system. This is the system recommended by the Jenkins Commission in 1998 and appears to be the one currently favoured by Labour. In this system, the bulk of the MPs are elected by AV in single-member constituencies, but they are 'topped up' by a set of candidates elected in regional blocks to make the final result more proportional. The system under consideration doesn't guarantee proportionality (there are too few extra MPs for that), but their notional order on the party lists will at least also be chosen by the voters rather than the public. I strongly dislike AV+; I feel that it's overcomplicated and does nothing well that STV doesn't do better. However, it is a viable alternative with a lot of support, and I have a instinct that it may be easier to sell to the public. Still, STV is my favoured system, and that of the party, too.

One consequence of a more proportional voting system is that locally popular candidates from smaller parties will find it easier to get elected, and yes, that includes the BNP. It's not a happy thought, but I firmly believe that if a large enough number of voters turn out to vote to elect a BNP MP, then the solution is not to disenfranchise them, but to offer them a better alternative. By that, I don't mean 'another racist party that's a bit fluffier', but 'a non-racist alternative that addresses their concerns'. The vast majority of BNP voters - as opposed to activists - vote BNP as a form of protest vote; Lib Dems in Burnley have had great success fighting them on this basis. (Historically, we haven't always done this well; the Liberals in Tower Hamlets would be a poor example to follow, for example.)

Voting reform is a long-standing pillar of Liberal policy, but it's by no means the be-all and end-all. We're also proposing fixed-term parliaments, lowering the voting age to 16, and replacing the House of Lords with a smaller, fully-elected upper chamber. We're also in favour of capping donations to political parties, limiting the ability of any one individual or organisation to buy influence at the party level.

We would also seek to introduce a written constitution and, in a bold if impeccably democratic move, we wouldn't impose this from above. The constitution would be drawn up in a citizens' convention with a majority of people drawn from all across the UK and all walks of life, and once agreed the constitution would be subject to a national referendum. Democracy; I like it.

'The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.' - Herbert Spencer

It has of late become fashionable to de-canonise St Vince Cable. This is understandable, and probably something that he, as a level-headed Yorkshireman would approve of. In fact, he’s complicit in it; he’s freely admitted that he didn’t see every aspect of the credit crunch coming, especially the US angle. The myth of ‘soothsayer Vince’ needs challenging, not least because it misses the point. Vince gets things right not because of some magical power of economic second sight, but because he’s clever, knowledgeable, patient and observant.

And he does get a lot of things right. As far back as the mid-1990s Vince was warning of the dangers of the demutualisation of the building societies. I’m unable to find a direct quote for this, (perhaps because at the time Vince was a chief economist for Shell rather than a politician) but Evan Davis says so and that’s good enough for me. He is on record (in Hansard, among other places) as warning about the continued levels of personal debt since 2003, warnings that were dismissed as scaremongering right up to the point when they suddenly and terribly came true.

It’s worth remembering, too, that he was calling for the nationalisation of Northern Rock from the moment it became clear how much trouble the bank was in. Nationalising a bank was a surprising proposal for even a Liberal Democrat to make at the time, but it turned out to be the right one, and would have worked considerably better if done to Vince's timetable.

All of which is to say that Vince may not be omniscient, but he is a pretty shrewd cookie, able to see some of the long-term consequences and not afraid to talk about them. Clearly he wouldn’t have been able to stop the credit crunch had he been Chancellor for the past five years - it was too big and too international for that - but he might well have lessened its effect on Britain. And he'd have known it was coming.

It’s interesting, in retrospect, to remember what the Lib Dems were doing while the credit crunch was closing in unseen around us. In September 2008, at the Liberal Democrat’s Autumn conference, party members were debating the Make It Happen policy. Make It Happen was an ambitious programme of policies, including paying for people who couldn’t get timely NHS treatment to go private, investing heavily in renewable energy and public transport, and paying for nursery education for all children. And it was fairly well costed, paid for by savings made elsewhere in things like scrapping child trust funds, and taxing polluters. There was much debate about possible tax cuts.

And then the whole thing - expensive policies and tax cuts alike - was overtaken a few weeks later by events. Well, not so much overtaken as crushed into the tarmac and left as roadkill. I’m not so keen on the tax cuts, but I hope some of the policies we lost can be resurrected when the economy’s in a better shape. But that won’t be for some time now. It’s unclear quite how bad a state we’re in - we’re running a £167 billion hole in the public finances, but how easily we can deal with that depends, crucially, on the speed of economic recovery. What seems certain is that servicing that debt will leave whichever party gets in very little room to do anything new.

We do, of course, have plans to reduce that deficit, which are well set out in our manifesto. Some of those I'll address in later posts. But we also have policies to reduce the need to bail out the banks again in the future, and the one of these that most excites me is the plan to break up the banks. In particular, it's the way we're planning to break up the banks; splitting them into low-risk retail banks and high-risk investment banks.

The normal business of the old-style High Street banks and building societies is well-understood and as safe as banking gets. We know how to do it without running a significant risk of going bankrupt. It doesn't make huge profits either, but that's OK; it needs to be stable, reliable and, well, boring. This low-risk retail banking is genuinely vital to the everyday running of our economy, not just for lending money for individuals to buy houses and for businesses to develop, but for less-known operations like letters of credit that allow global trade to continue.

This sort of business was not what caused the credit crunch; it was caused by them doing altogether riskier things, some of which were known to be risky (with that risk well-quantified and accepted), and others of which dressed up guesswork and optimism as a 'new paradigm', with predictable results when that guesswork turned out to be wrong.

It's not inherently wrong for investment banks to be doing the riskier business. It allows companies and individuals to innovate and be entrepreneurial, to raise funding for activities that are riskier or more speculative in nature, and there is much money to be made from it. But there's no need for the government to offer a safety net for it, and considerable moral hazard in it's doing so. If a financial institution knows that it is going to be bailed out if it gets into trouble, the incentive to stay out of trouble by making wise choices is reduced. Human nature and greed will reduce said incentive to zero, in many cases.

Furthermore, it means that banks and other institutions that do make wise, safe choices can be out-competed by those that don't; making wise, safe choices usually has significant overheads, and stops you going for the most potentially lucrative (but riskiest) deals.

So the solution is to tell banks that they have a choice. They can do the high-risk investment banking, but if they fail, they fail. No bailouts, no public money invested to help them. The failure of a large investment bank won't be painless for the economy, of course, any more than the failure of any major company. We won't be completely safe from an investment bank becoming 'too big to fail', but we should be safe from its failure putting people's houses at risk.

Alternatively, the bank can choose to do relatively safe retail banking. Retail banks will have their activities prescribed, and will not be allowed to partake in the riskier investment banking activities. I confess that I have a romantic notion of this meaning a return to the days of High Street banks where the manager knew all their customers by name. I know this to be unlikely (and a somewhat rose-tinted view of history anyway), but I suspect that it will lead to smaller, more approachable institutions. Coupled with our proposals for Local Enterprise Funds and Regional Stock Exchanges, it may also make our financial economy far less centralised and dependent on the City.

This will hugely change the banking sector, and almost certainly be unpopular with the investment banks. They will lose two safety nets at the same time; the safety net of having the relatively reliable retail banking to underpin their business, and the safety net of knowing that, in the end, the government can't allow them to go to the wall. There will be less money in banking in the UK; we may lose jobs and skills in that sector, and money currently invested in it may go elsewhere.

That's OK. The booms may be smaller in the future, but so will the busts.

I'm about to attempt a series of twelve blog posts, one per day, between now and the election. They'll be on the subject of why I'm a Liberal Democrat and why I support the party. I'm making them because I've left a number of comments in various journals over the past few days that touch on this, and I felt the need to set out my stall a little.

What this isn't is an exhortation to vote Lib Dem. Everyone reading this will have different priorities from me, different backgrounds and different political cultures. There's no reason at all why you should vote Lib Dem (or vote at all) just because I'm going to. Of course, in the abstract, I want the Lib Dems to get a lot of votes, get into power, and implement some of the policies I'm going to be so enthusiastic about. But on an individual level, you're all independent, intelligent people who can do your own research, make up your own minds, and I wouldn't presume to tell you otherwise.

I'm quite serious about that, by the way, and I feel the need to emphasise it because I know it's not how a lot of other people feel.

Managing expectations a little: I'm not sure I'll actually have time to write anything like twelve of these, and I'm also unlikely to have much time to reply to comments, particularly if the reply is likely to take me some time to write. I'll try, though.

I have an apology to make to the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary party in general, and to David Heath in particular. I'm sorry I wrote what I did this morning about the supposed poor response to the Digital Economy Bill. I pulled together a lot of links for that post; in fact, one of my main motivations was pulling together a set of links that showed what state the Bill was at, because I hadn't found anyone else who'd done that in the way I wanted.

It turns out I missed a couple of important ones. For which I'm kicking myself - I mean, really, how hard would it have been for me to Google '"David Heath" "Digital Economy" Hansard'?

Here is David Heath on 18 March, asking about the Digital Economy Bill and doing exactly what I criticised him for not doing yesterday. Perhaps more impressively, here he is doing the same thing on 11 March, while we were still putting the finishing touches to our Emergency Motion to Conference.

I realise neither of those is a stinging criticism of the Bill, but such criticism would have been out-of-place in the largely procedural Business of the House session. I am reassured (by this and *stop press* the letter Bridget Fox discusses here) that Lib Dem opposition to the disconnection clauses in the Bill is anything but token and very much alive.

I'm sorry about the earlier post, and I'll try to research more thoroughly next time.

I am heterosexual, and have never really needed to come out as that. It's the assumed, default position; that confers heaps of privilege on me, and means that I don't have to spend large chunks of my life explaining my sexuality in tedious detail to pruriently interested parties.

I'm also cisgender; not only have I never needed to come out as that, but I'm sure that the majority of my similarly cisgender work colleagues (and probably many of my friends) have never even heard of the term and would question the need for it if I tried to explain it.

I wish that my gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender friends who have been today posting coming out posts could make similar posts to this. I hope that one day, future generations will be able to. Even if things were to change tomorrow, people who have already come out would still have those experiences in their past; and even the smoothest coming out story usually carries some anxiety in the lead-in.

(I'm also both kinky and poly, which are not the default assumptions, but that's another story.)

Bisexuals want everyone to remember that they exist.

They'd like people to be accepting of their sexuality, and they'd like the myths and stereotypes associated with it to go away. But primarily, they want to people to say 'straight, gay, lesbian and bisexual', and recognise them all as things a person could be. They're not going to quibble with that list growing longer, with asexuals, pansexuals and sapiosexuals joining it, or even with it being referred to as the Whole Sort Of General Sexuality Mish Mash, as long as it's recognised that some people fancy both men and women, and this is OK.
( This gets long, and isn't really apropos of anything except I've been wanting to write it for a while... )