The tragedy of inevitability

Some of those who know my views on Brexit were commiserating with me about last week's election result.

In truth, I had given up hope of reversing the referendum decision. I still think that, economically, politically and strategically, Brexit is a blunder, wrapped in a fiasco, inside a catastrophe; but the rift has gone too deep already. Between the EU's disastrous governance - which has grown even worse since the (genuinely) moderating hand of the UK was withdrawn from its deliberations - and the UK's own schizophrenic posturing, the two have already drifted too far apart to simply reglue them and pretend nothing happened.

No, Brexit has to happen now, in the same way as Corbyn had to be given his shot at leading Labour, and - so David Cameron argues, at least - the Brexiters had to be given their referendum in the first place. There's simply no other way to finish it.

One of the stupider takes I've seen on the election - basically from Americans who, I presume, are plugging for someone from the Warren/Sanders wing of their own party - is that "moderation doesn't pay". True, the traditionally-moderate Lib Dem party was crushed - but it was crushed by a Tory party that frankly ate their lunch. The vast distraction of Brexit seems to have blinded a lot of people to it, but on social and economic policy - Johnson's Tories were, by far, the most moderate party on the ballot.

Which brings us to Labour.

Tony Blair tried to tell them - and Blair, for all the hate, remains one of only four leaders in Labour's history who have ever won a general election. But maybe this is something that every generation has to learn for itself. Now it looks very much as if Labour's next leader - or at least, its next serious leader - will have to fight very much the same punishing internal war against Momentum as Neil Kinnock did against Militant in the 80s. Which will probably cost the party at least one more election, very likely two - it depends on the calibre of the new leader.

The thing is - success in British politics is inversely correlated to ideology. The more convinced you are of your own rightness, the less likely you are to win. (Before you hold up Thatcher as a counter-example, consider who she ran against.) The most damaging word you can throw at a British politician, if you can make it stick, is "dogmatic".

Johnson is a brash, lying, cynical, self-serving, manipulative, entitled bully. Supporters of Trump, and detractors of Johnson, like to compare the two - but any fair comparison shows up more difference than likeness. Johnson has none of Trump's "aggrieved" schtick, none of his "outsider" baggage, nor his petty vindictiveness, nor his boundless and groundless self-confidence. Johnson is a man who seeks expert advice and listens to it. He habitually follows up rows with charm offensives, and even apologies. His opponents' efforts to paint him as a xenophobe and bigot fell flat, as they deserved to - those are not labels you can credibly slap on a two-term mayor of London with a long record of supporting socially-liberal causes.

Most of all, Johnson has what Trump never had - a plan to govern. I wish him luck.

Data is good, 'mkay?

Early this month, the story broke of a study in the Netherlands that had found large inaccuracies in the measurement of "smart" electricity meters. I started writing this post in response to that story, but it's far too long, so I've broken it into parts. Part One is why 98% of the bad things people say about smart meters are wrong. Part Two will be about the Dutch story specifically. Part Three, if I get that far, will be about what is wrong with smart meters.

Even so, it's a wall of text. Sorry about that.

I like "smart" meters.

Like most houses in New Zealand, my home is already fitted with one - has been since 2013. But more pertinently: as the billing and reconciliation manager of a small electricity retailer, I handle about a million smart meter reads every month. And I am, perforce, actively involved in working to get the things deployed "everywhere". (The scare quotes are there because we all know they'll never be everywhere. Hey, there are people out there who are still running Windows 98. But for statistical values of "everywhere", it is possible.)

And so I am more than averagely aware, both of the uses of these things, and of the popular resistance to them. This resistance is well organised. It looks like a genuine grassroots movement, but at the same time I would guess it's quietly egged on by interested parties, such as electricity retailers, meter manufacturers and meter readers, as well as the usual troublemakers (journalists and self-styled activists).

Sample website here. (I am indebted to smartmeterharm.org, for providing a central repository of the more plausible arguments. It beats heck out of such amateurish efforts as stopsmartmeters.org, which earnestly argues that all wireless technology is evil because RADIATION!!!) Marginally more rational arguments are:

1. remote disconnection
2. data privacy/security
3. incompatibility between meter types and readers
4. lack of benefit to customers
5. inherent unreliability in the meters themselves.

The last of these is pretty technical, and it's really the theme of part two of this series. For now, let me consider the less geeky objections. To deal with the weakest point first:

Radiation

If your smart meter is located under your pillow, then it's just possible that you might absorb as much radiation from the smart meter, during the night, as you would during a two-minute conversation on a mobile phone. If it's located a few feet away from your bed, then the dosage will be less than 2% of that. If it's, like mine, on the far side of the house - then in terms of radiation strength, you would have a hard time even detecting it above the background radiation of terrestrial broadcasts, phone signals, alarms, car keys, baby monitors, garage door openers and all the other hum of 21st-century technology going on all around you. And don't even think about getting a wifi router, smart TV, or IOT-enabled device of any sort.

Of course there's no such thing as "totally harmless radiation", in the same way as there's no such thing as "totally harmless sunlight" - but most of us have long ago decided that the undoubted benefits outweigh the hypothetical risk. If you want to dissent from that opinion, then... I'm sorry, but I see no reason why the rest of us should have to pay for your hyper-caution. (It's not a huge cost, yet. At present, you're probably costing us something in the ballpark of $5-7 per month. But that figure will rise sharply as the number of legacy meters declines, because the economies of scale in handling them will fade away, so be ready for a substantial surcharge in a few years' time.)

Remote disconnection

Really, there are three separate fears under this heading. Remote disconnection may be done by your power company, by the police/government/similar, or by criminals (terrorists or other hackers). So let's take them in turn.

The procedure for your power company to disconnect you is closely regulated. We have to make certain efforts to warn you before we do it. There are laws prescribing the methods, wording, and timing of those communications. And - this is the key point - those laws are exactly the same, regardless of what type of meter you have. The big difference is that the whole process is a lot quicker (and easier to reverse), and cheaper, with a smart meter. This alone is a big win for customers. And if we do it wrong, either way, you can sue us.

At this point, I once had the rejoinder "for now, maybe, but what happens when the capacity is getting slim and the grid is desperate to shed load?" The answer to that is a thing called a ripple relay, which disconnects some loads in your house that are both heavy, and unlikely to be time-critical. (Generally, that means "an immersion heater".) The worst that happens is you have to go without hot water for a few hours, while the rest of your house continues to work as normal. Of course having no hot water is bad - but only until you compare it to the alternative, which is uncontrolled brownouts affecting your entire supply.

If you're worried about the police/government taking the time to disconnect your power supply - get your priorities straight. I've never heard of them doing that, and can only imagine that if a SWAT team is about to bash in your door, the power supply to your house is not going to affect things much either way. (Okay, so you may have some half-baked fantasy about standing them off with a homemade Gauss rifle or something. I recommend buying a battery. And life insurance.)

As for evil hackers/terrorists doing it: well, terrorists already have much simpler, low-tech ways of doing much greater damage (Google "northeast blackout 2003" to see what I mean). If it does happen to you - well, congratulations on being the world's first ever victim of an entirely new type of crime. Now call your power company and tell them what's happened, and your lights will be back on in a jiffy.

Data privacy/security

Probably the most overblown of all concerns. The issue here is the granularity of data.

When I look at a set of smart meter reads, I see usage per half-hour for the previous month. (Note, the previous month. We don't get the data in anything like "real time". Not even the meter owner knows how much you're burning right now. There are companies that get the data only one day late, but that's a significant amount of extra work for them.) I may be able to see, for instance, that your usage was around 0.2-0.3kW overnight, then started to ramp up at 5 a.m., peaking at 2kW at 7 a.m. and then dropping off to a steady daytime rate...

And that's all very interesting. It gives me an idea of what time your household gets up, showers and has breakfast. But - that's about all it tells me. It doesn't tell me what you have for breakfast, or whether you watch TV while you eat it, or whether you shower in the morning. There's no way of distinguishing between "a TV turned on for the whole half hour" and "a toaster turned on for a few minutes". I might guess that the 5 a.m. ramp-up is a timed dishwasher - but that's only a wild guess, it might just as easily be an immersion heater, or even an early riser getting in some quality screen time before the rest of the household gets up. There are dozens of possible explanations for any given pattern, and without more data there's no way of picking one.

And that is how I know that companies like ONZO are full of shit. In order to do what they claim to do, they would need more - much more - than your smart meter reads. I would guess that when they demo their technology, they do it on households that have a lot of interconnected and/or spying stuff in the house (an IOT-enabled toaster, or an XBox, or a smart TV, or a cable box, or Alexa, for instance - any of these would provide some serious quality spy data to supplement the meter reads). If you have any of those things in your house, then you're giving away far more data than your meter can gather.

Incompatibilities

This is a real problem in the UK. It is not, however, a problem in New Zealand, even though our technology is not all that exciting. Because it's not a technological problem at all - it's a structural or organisational problem.

There are two big companies that provide metering in Auckland. (Actually there are about eight, but only two major players controlling well over 90% of the market - Metrix and AMS.) These companies fit and maintain the smart meters, and collect read data from them. They pass that data to us retailers in (reasonably) well defined file types. If you want to be a retailer in New Zealand, you learn those file types and love them - and that's all you have to do. Dealing with the fine detail of extracting raw data from the meter and translating it into this standard format - that's the meter owner's problem (and we, the retailer, pay them for the service). If you switch retailer, the same meter continues recording the same data and it's collected by the same company - the only thing that changes is who they send it to for billing.

From what I gather, in the UK, power companies are supposed to read their own meters. That's... well, let's just say that it looks very much like a racket got up by the big, established retailers to raise barriers to entry for competition. It needs to be fixed with a clawhammer.

Lack of benefit to customers

This is probably the hardest case to argue, because it means engaging with a counterfactual: how different would the consumer's experience be, if there were no smart meters? And that, of course, drags us into a whole briar patch of assumptions.

There are some solid numbers we can point to. First, and most obviously, the cost - of all things related to meter reads and changes - drops dramatically with a smart meter. You want to get a read because you're moving in or out? That drops from $15 to zero. You've been disconnected and want to be reconnected? Price drops from $150 (hey, disconnection/reconnection is two site visits) to $40. You've paid your overdue bill and want to be reconnected immediately? The average time to accomplish that task drops from 2-3 hours to about 15 minutes. All of these are real, tangible gains for the customer.

Then there's timeliness and accuracy of billing. You may not think it's a great benefit to have an accurate bill. But when your immersion heater is playing up, or your kid has taken to leaving the heater on all night, or someone has switched your spa pool on and left it - often the first you'll know about it is when you see your power bill. If some of your bills are estimated, you may not know anything about it until two, three months after the problem has started, at which point you're already several hundred bucks out of pocket. With a smart meter, you'll at least get a chance to notice it much sooner (because every bill is based on a real read). If you ask your retailer for more data (as is your right), then you can even figure out exactly when it started, and hence who's likely to blame.

And finally, there's the competitive effect. I don't know the UK industry in much detail; but here in New Zealand, I know of at least three retailers (out of a total of about 18) who would never even have entered the market, if they hadn't seen Opportunities in the data afforded by smart meters. (One company makes a big advertising feature of "an hour of free power" every day. Can't do that without a smart meter.) So without them, there'd be at least that much less competition.

Conclusion

It's not hard to come up with superficially plausible objections to any new technology. And we live in an age when tens of thousands of wannabe activists are just itching to find a cause, preferably a conspiracy, to latch onto and tear down, to make their names and claim their place in celebrity culture. We reward people in our society for being loud, rather than coherent. Heck, look at Donald Trump.

But we shouldn't judge arguments on the shrillness of their proponents. An awful lot of what gets argued, online, is just plain bollocks, no matter how fervently the true believers cling to it. And the whole "smart meter conspiracy" story is firmly in that category.

Next instalment: the dodginess of the meters themselves. How bad are they, really? (Spoiler: far from perfect, but not nearly as bad as the press would have you believe.)

In his own words?

I'm curious about this "Corbyn" phenomenon.

As an outsider to Britain now, I'm exposed to even-more-than-usually selective news about what goes on there. I know I have an impression of Jeremy Corbyn. But it's quite different from my wife's impression. How can I get some real information?

Let's start from the premise that all the press is biased. The Grauniad is mostly pro-Corbyn, the other broadsheets are virulently anti-him; wherever I see any discussion about him, it's couched directly in these adversarial terms, which makes it impossible for me to form any opinion of my own. That's - pretty worrying in itself, actually. A personality that provokes such strong reactions will find it hard to foster helpful and constructive debate. Corbyn will have to bend over backward to encourage free expression and exchange of ideas to compensate.

But I want to base my assessment on the man himself, not his supporters or detractors. What face does he choose to present to the world?

That's - actually, quite hard to find. His record at labour.org.uk was last updated in September 2015. Googling his name turns up 'jeremycorbyn.org.uk' - apparently all politicians nowadays have their own vanity domains - but he seems to have got bored with that back in April, it hasn't been updated since then. Besides, most of the material there is just transcribed from Hansard, which is pretty dumb because if I wanted to read Hansard I could read Hansard. (Actually that might not be the worst idea, and I may yet try it. But let's hold it in reserve for now, because it'd take a long time to piece together a position on a given topic from that record.)

One of the nice things about Mr Corbyn is that his name is distinctive - it turns up very few false positive search results. And so it's with some irritation that I discover his most current campaign has dropped it, and is just running as "Jeremy for Labour". (At a ".com" address, no less - none of your parochial ".uk" for the Jez.) This site appears to be up to date, but it's hard to tell because its own updates are undated.

(Contrast with Theresa May. Say what you like about her, at least her website is visibly maintained.)

Not impressed with Mr Corbyn's ephemeral online presence. It seems to me that "repeatedly switching between platforms" is pretty suspect behaviour in a party leader. If there is no continuity of platform, what does that tell us about the policies? Only that someone is, either intentionally or naïvely, making it gratuitously hard to check for continuity there.

Putting that aside, let's look at his current incarnation. Under 'Respect & Unity':

There should be no personal hostility and nobody should feel intimidated at any time. So no foul or abusive language will be tolerated and all candidates should be listened to with courtesy and respect at hustings, meetings and events.

In particular, there should be no demonstrations or protests targeting any individual candidate or outside any MP's office or surgery - and no personal heckling of any candidate at any hustings, meeting or event. [...]

There will be no tolerance of abuse on social media. All candidates should ensure that anyone who acts in an abusive way on social media is referred to the Party for investigation.

No heckling at hustings? What the heck is a hustings for, if not to heckle? No demonstrations or protests outside any office or surgery? "No tolerance of abuse" - without any definition of either "tolerance" or "abuse", this is basically a blank cheque for censorship. This is the very opposite of "encouraging free exchange of ideas". Indeed, it probably goes a long way to explaining some of the very strong adverse reactions.

But let's be generous, let's concede that the rules have changed and the idea of candidates being required to stand up for themselves and face down their enemies is... Well, actually on second thoughts let's not. Isn't that a pretty reasonable requirement for a politician ("someone who chooses to take a public part in the political process")? After all, if you can't stand up to hecklers within your own party, what chance are you going to have against a Putin or a Trump?

Enough of "respect". Let's move on to actual "pledges".

We will [...] guarantee a decent job for all

It doesn't say exactly how "we" will do this. There's the usual guff about investment and innovation and "new industries", but it seems to me that the only way to "guarantee" jobs for all is for the state to employ them directly. Jeremy: whether that's what you mean or not, please say so, so that we can talk about the idea on its merits.

We will end insecurity for private renters by introducing rent controls, secure tenancies

Oh gosh, where to start... This may be the only housing policy that's actually worse than the current "rent subsidies". One of the very, very few things on which Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman unequivocally agree is, rent controls are a bad idea.

We will give people stronger employment rights from day one in a job

I've seen this one from both sides, as an applicant and managing my employer's recruitment process. And I'm here to tell you, a probationary period makes the whole thing much easier. Do away with it, and employers will work around the law by giving people short-term contracts before offering them a real job. That's the same end result, but with more paperwork and less employee benefits. Don't do it.

NHS, education - I don't feel qualified to comment on those. Environment, though - this is my language:

We will deliver clean energy and curb energy bill rises for households - energy for the 60 million, not the big 6 energy companies.

Look, this isn't hard. The cleanest energy of all is what's never used. Give people heat pumps, low-energy lightbulbs and insulation, encourage them to trade in their old fridges and TVs and washing machines, and you'll do more to cut their power bills and improve their living conditions and cut their carbon footprint than any plausible amount of changing the mix of generation. But whatever you do, you'll need the energy companies' help to do it. Start off by casting them as The Enemy, and you're screwed before you begin.

I could go on, but it's as disheartening to do as it is, probably, tedious to read. I can see three possibilities, none of them good.

One, and I think this is probably the correct answer, is that he is so - disassociated from reality, from his own memories and life experience, and from the advice of anyone who's not a card-carrying, certified-ideologically-pure Old Labour apparatchik, that he really believes all of this is a good idea. No word of dissent is ever allowed to reach his ears, and his own memories have been effectively scrubbed by decades of brainwashing.

Two is that Corbyn is self-consciously (and clumsily) trying to drag the Overton window to the left. I could sympathise with that as an aim, but not with his way of doing it - which, instead of progressive socialist policies, self-consciously harks back to an imagined "golden age" of pre-Thatcherite Britain. Worst of all, if that is his aim, it comes at the cost of reducing the British Labour party to irrelevancy. That's bad for - well, everyone. I remember Neil Kinnock's battles with Militant in the mid-80s; at this rate, after Corbyn, the next sane leader - if one ever emerges - will have all that to do again.

Or three, that he's another Donald Trump: an incredibly vain man, who doesn't much mind what people say, just so long as they're talking about him.

A tool, a fool or a troll. I'm not sure which is worst.

Don't let a good disaster go to waste

(Edit: This is easily the most thoughtful analysis I've seen of Brexit. Summary: yes it's bad, but not nearly as bad as it's made out.)

Last week, as you may have heard, my country got voted out from under me. ("My country" in this context being, of course, Europe.) I wonder if this is how the Serbs felt, all those years ago.

I wasn't present to witness the campaign on either side, but nothing I have seen of it leads me to believe that any sort of rational thought went into that vote - on either side. Neither Leavers nor Remainers made the slightest attempt to explain the issues soberly, they both went straight for the id. It was pure - instinct. The instinct of people who have spent their whole lives being protected from their own instincts, because that's what modern civilisation does.

But second-guessing the result is a mug's game. Lots of things could have been changed. If the Greeks had been forced out of the euro, if the French had been a bit more competent at policing (and protecting) their own immigrants, if the Germans had been just a little less high-handed in their treatment of everyone else in the HRE - sorry, I mean EU - if the Irish had managed their own banks better, if the Labour Party hadn't adopted its insane "democratic" leadership election process, if Nick Clegg hadn't made that stupid pledge about tuition fees in the first place...

But they did. And there's no point guessing what might be going on in a thousand parallel universes where history was a little different, because there's only one that we get to live in. There was a vote, and it went the way it did. Everything else is so much applesauce.

So let's at least try to be constructive. What should happen now?

Well, first of all, there's the position of the 3 million-odd non-UK EU nationals currently living in the UK. They should be guaranteed a place for life. Every single one of them, without exceptions, right up to and including the mass murderers among them, should be allowed to remain in the UK just as long as they want to, and to come and go as they please, forever. Anything else would be so unjust, it would bring lasting shame and well-deserved vitriol on the whole country.

Then there's the however-many non-EU immigrants. It would be odd if, having just voted out of the EU, the country's first independent act was to discriminate in favour of EU citizens at the expense of other potential partners and allies. So they'll be staying, too.

There's all the EU red tape about consumer products. This is, of course, already built into UK law, and I heartily recommend that the UK adopts the same policy as New Zealand does toward Australia - viz, if something meets Australian product standards, it can also be sold in NZ with no further paperwork required. (The Australians, in turn, also accept EU or US certification and testing.) However, this doesn't have to be reciprocal. That would mean you could sell things in the UK that would not be legal in the EU.

This could, of course, be a very bad thing. But it's just as likely to be beneficial. A lot depends on the next government's attitude to consumer protection.

Manufacturing that's required to be inside the EU will move. Let's make no bones about it - that will be a disaster for many areas, e.g. Sunderland, whose early declaration was so foreboding on the night. There will be a huge temptation for the next government to move heaven and earth (i.e. pay out ungodly sums of money) to prevent this, but it would be a catastrophic mistake to give in to that pressure. Instead, they should pay out some of that money to people who are willing to set up new enterprises to employ people outside the EU. (And not just "manufacturing", either. Don't be dogmatic about what sort of industry it should be. A job is a job.)

Presumably, EU R&D programmes will no longer be portioned out to the UK. I'm pretty sure most UK researchers will see this as an unmitigated disaster. It's natural to see "disaster" when the assumptions that you've based your career on are changed. Natural - but not rational. In those areas where British researchers and departments are among the best, the Europeans would be fools to exclude them. Where they're not, they're fools now to include them, and I think that might go some way to explain the glacial pace of EU R&D over the past 40 years. Academically and intellectually, I think Britain could be better off out than in - IF, and it's a honking big "IF", the best minds don't get swept away in the current tide of anti-intellectualism and ideological hysteria.

And the City of London will lose much of its current business. Again, what can't be cured must be endured. Worst case, this might result in a massive recession in the British banking sector. Or to look at it another way - the beginning of the much-longed-for redistribution of wealth away from the top 0.1%, and the long overdue decline of house prices in southeast England.

So cheer up, Remainers. Whatever you did to win the vote it wasn't enough, so now you've got a lot more work to do in the aftermath. One thing I'm sure of - that if you spend your energy now on denial, recriminations and fantasies of fleeing the country, the UK is screwed. Because those same people who voted it out will be running it.

Shock and ow

Exchange of texts between me and my sister-in-law, on Friday:

Sarah: What's your thoughts on England leaving EU? And do you think the other countries will allow it? (hope you're not impacted by the currency fall)

Me: I am quite a lot affected by the currency fall, but that's life. It's a scary thing, leaving the EU. The bright side is that the shock might just possibly be enough to inspire the EU to reform itself a little. The downside is World War 3. Some of the Brexit leaders have been saying some very stupid things about doing deals with Russia, and if anything could provoke a full-scale European war, that's it. It worked a treat the last time we tried it.

Sarah: Do you think England will become stronger for exiting?

Me: Hell no. Well, not economically or politically. Maybe culturally, because chaos is always creative.

Sarah: Strange turn of events then. Why do they want to leave?

Me: Because - apparently - there's only so long you can go on treating people as idiots. Even if they clearly *are* idiots. Even idiots have their pride.

Shake it all about

At one point last week, my favourite referendum pollster was projecting a 48.5% Leave vote. That is, as the Duke of Wellington might have put it, a damned nice thing.

Today the odds have slipped back to 46.5%. Which is still closer than it was last month.

Now, we know there is tendency for polling margins to narrow, as major votes approach. I don't know how well studied or documented this is, but I'm reasonably sure it always happens. Landslides are no fun, and more importantly, they don't make for good copy. As a vote approaches, journalists will do whatever is necessary - including commissioning as many spurious polls as necessary - to make both sides believe the margin is much closer than it is. (Which is why both of Obama's elections were billed in advance as "too close to call", even though, by electoral college rules, they were never in much doubt.)

Even politically, it makes sense. A side that thinks it's losing will keep changing its strategy, finding new avenues, until it finds something that improves its standing. Whereas the top dogs will just keep doing what they "know" works - until they feel threatened, at which point they'll get a bit bolder, and the gap will likely widen again slightly.

(There must be some way to make a profit from this rule. If only Ladbrokes had a mechanism for placing a bet, then 'trading it in' later when the odds change - but I doubt if they do, because it'd be too open to abuse and corruption. You need to be a banker to get away with that sort of thing, bookies are too closely watched. But if anyone knows a practicable way to do it, please do tell.)

I must confess - if I had a vote at all, I'd be increasingly tempted to vote 'leave'.

Not because I think the UK or its people would be "better off", for any material definition of "better". Anyone who thinks the UK would be richer, or freer, or better run outside the EU is someone who simply hasn't been paying attention, this past quarter-century. No, the only sane and rational reason to vote "leave" is if you believe it would lead to the breakup of the European Union itself.

Why would you want that?

Much as Niq argued about Scotland leaving the UK - the EU is broken. The UK actually does pretty well out of it - those really suffering are the Mediterranean countries. The Greeks, Italians, Spanish and Cypriots are looking at youth unemployment rates well over 30%, and the Germans have made it very clear that they're not taking any nonsense about "democracy" from those countries - they are governed by bankers, until such time as German voters decide to let them go.

And they've made it just as clear to Britain - that even without the financial stranglehold they have over the Med, they won't put up with any wandering from their prescribed policy. "Stay in the EU", their message has been, "and you will play by our rules. Leave, and we will do everything in our power to punish you. Moreover, we regard your 'democratic process' as a pistol to our head, and we will not negotiate under such terms." (Working out the terms under which they would be willing to negotiate is an exercise for - who, exactly?)

This cavalier attitude to democracy is bad enough within Europe, but outside its borders it becomes positively dangerous. We've all seen the disastrous consequences of EU meddling in Ukraine and Georgia; and if the Baltic States survive, it will be thanks to a sterner stance by NATO, nothing to do with the EU. (In fact, here's a prediction: if Trump wins the US presidency, at least one of Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania will be overrun by the Russians within four years.)

Game theory teaches us that "playing nice" is a good strategy, only as long as the other players hold to it too. If you carry on being nice when they play dirty, you get screwed. Of course there is a price to be paid for breaking the tacit agreement, even if the other side has already broken it first; but if you show you're not willing to pay that price, you can expect to go on being screwed until you are. I have personal experience of this dilemma. I voted "out" then.

If you're in Britain this week: voting "out" will certainly cost you. Probably, a lot. (There will be people who will come out of it better off - but believe me, those are people who've laid their plans and invested their money and made their friends accordingly. In short, they're Not You.) But that doesn't necessarily mean it's the wrong thing to do.

Shoot the Moon

I see Ladbrokes is projecting the UK to remain in the EU by a very similar margin to the Scots' vote to remain in the UK. Currently, they're offering evens on the 'Leave' vote being over 44.5%. Which sounds about right to me, but of course there's still a month to go.

One marked difference between the Scotland/UK and UK/EU votes, though, is the attitude of the larger partner. The UK pathetically begged the Scots to stay with them; but the EU is, notably, doing no such thing to the UK. Cameron has been begging for concessions, and the EU has, apparently, been laughing at him, which goes to show they're not as silly as the Leave campaign would have you believe. Compare and contrast how Salmond treated the English during his campaign.

Which goes to show, I guess, how useless a negotiator Cameron really is. Both times, he's given ground like snow in springtime, and his opponents haven't budged.

He should take tips from Donald Trump. Ask for the Moon. I mean, literally - Britain's demand should be "we leave, and we take the Moon with us. We're going to build a giant space shield over Europe that will stop it from seeing the Moon. (Except Ireland, of course, because that would be impractical.)"

Because every news outlet in the EU would run that story. EU politicians would queue up to explain why the idea was impractical, impossible, illegal and immoral. Engineers would explain how it might be done, what it would cost, and what the impact would be. Everyone in Europe would be talking about it for weeks, even though every single person concerned knows that it's total bullshit.

And that, as Donald Trump knows, is the way to get concessions.

Envy is the same colour as money

The New Zealand Herald, the other day, published a story about how much John Key was spending on a hotel room.

Well, not really. Mostly they cribbed the story from the UK's Daily Mail, which was more interested (and it shows) in what David Cameron was spending to attend the G20 summit. Turns out, Cameron is the third-biggest spender after Presidents Obama and Xi. While the leaders of such also-ran countries as Germany, Italy and Japan, and even the king of Saudi Arabia, are slumming it at $400-600 a night hotels, our Mr Cameron is splashing out A$1250 a night for his bed in Brisbane.

(Actually, we don't know that - not from this story, at least. He might be accepting a bribe from the hotel so it can advertise that he stayed there. Or he might be accepting bribes from other hotels to keep him away. Who knows? So long as he declares them, it's all good.)

But the Mail, I guess, is more concerned with the look of the thing. Is it Right, for Mr Cameron to be spending like this abroad after four years of preaching austerity at home?

Which just goes to show what a tediously snobbish little rag the Mail really is. Because as Cameron surely knows, if you want to make money, it's essential to spend it as if it meant nothing to you.

I have no idea where I first heard that bit of wisdom, beyond "somewhere in my youth". I don't think the person who told me had any idea why it worked, but I've given it a couple of decades' thought now, and I've worked it out. See, the most important thing about money - as every economist from Micawber to Friedman agrees - isn't how much you have, it's how fast you spend it. "Velocity of circulation", it's called. And in the interests of the economy, it's better for everyone that it should be spent as quickly as possible. Money changing hands is a good thing.

And therefore, when people make decisions that affect who gets to be rich - all other things being equal, they'll tend to favour the big spender. This is the real reason why political campaign ads work. It's not the content, it's the demonstration value: "See, this is how I splash money about! Vote to give me more money, and some of it might splash on you!"

So, David, congratulations on doing your country proud. Now I trust you'll take the next logical step and strike the word "austerity" forever from your political vocabulary, and that of your party.

The only leader who deserves higher marks (Obama spends more, but let's face it, the US genuinely is richer and bigger) - is the president of Burma, who is staying in a $1300 hotel despite Burma not even being in the G20. Now that's ballsy.

Failing the Turing test

Just when we thought politicians couldn't get any less principled, they go and pull a move like this. Alan Turing receives a royal pardon.

Well, that's very nice. But the question is: why?

Is it because the law he was convicted under is now seen as unjust? Then what of the thousands of others, some no doubt still living, who were convicted under the same law?

Or is it because he was a national hero, who contributed significantly to winning the Second World War, as well as making some significant contributions to early computing?

I hate to say it, but Gordon Brown, of all people, was better than this. His government said that the conviction was correct, even if the law wasn't. Brown's apology to Turing was both appropriate and just: it recognised Turing's contributions, but without closing its eyes to the others affected by the same law.

That's a strong argument, and four years ago it was decisive. It hasn't been forgotten, and it hasn't been answered. It's just been - ignored.

This pardon is just about how special Turing himself was. It's shameless pandering to the gay lobby. And it entrenches the power of "one law for the great, another for the rest of us". It is, I think, slightly more shameful than the original conviction. The people who passed the law under which Turing was convicted - they may have been wrong, but at least they believed in something (in fact, they were most concerned with preventing sexual slavery).

Today's politicians? Don't even pretend to believe. They're just trying to buy votes.

Giving prostitutes a bad name

Good news from the homeland, for a change: it looks as if the government may be forced to recant on the madness of privatising the handling of prisoners.

It's telling, I think, that when I was a kid, if someone used the phrase "the prison service", they'd mean "service" as in "to one's country" - like military service, or - no, actually that's the only example I can think of where the meaning of the word is still reasonably close to what it was pre-Thatcher. Nowadays, it means "service" as in "service industry", as in "we may not create any actual output but we're no less commercial for that". Or to put it another way, "our business is modelled on the proud tradition of the world's oldest profession".

I was a firm believer in privatisation in the 80s. Unquestionably it was the right thing to do with manufacturing and mining industries, and with real services (defined as "things that I can be billed for personally, like telecoms or banking or travel"). But some "services" have a fundamentally different character. Policing, prisons, poor relief, public health, justice, fire and medical services, even politicians - these are "public services" that need to be paid for collectively, because any other system lends itself either to gross inequity, or the worst sort of corruption.

Of course corruption happens in non-privatised services too. However, it seems to me that it happens more, since the word "service" got divorced from "public" and shacked up with that slut "industry". That may be just a perception based on reporting/exposure, but if so it's a very widely shared perception.

The difference is that a service that is "public" can, in principle, be cleaned up. Given sufficient political will (read: outrage or scandal), you can appoint a new chief with the skills and determination to root out this sort of abuse. It doesn't happen often, and when it does, it doesn't generally last all that long.

But in a "service industry", the very concept of such "cleaning" makes no sense. When all incentives, both benefits and penalties, are expressed in terms of money, it follows that anything you can do to get more money is, by definition, not wrong. In these cases, moral bankruptcy isn't a failure or a collapse of anything - it's the baseline assumption of the system.

"Long live the Acclamation"

(This post started out as a comment on Niq's blog post regarding changing the rules of succession to the throne of the UK. Niq sees it as a modernist plot aimed at undermining the monarchy itself. I disagree.)

I'm wary of commenting on royalty. The medieval doctrine of the King's Two Persons has been updated, in our time, as a dichotomy between the royals' role as National Figureheads and their role as Mildly Irritating Celebrities. No matter how elevated you try to be, it's hard to prevent the discourse from degenerating into How Wonderful Her Majesty Is and whether Charles Should Stand Aside And Let Wills Take Over After She's Gone, which is a subject that interests me marginally less than the salt content of frozen peas.

But behind the soap opera there is a dark magic at work here, one that medieval philosophers understood far better than modern journalists, for all that they never knew whom their king was boffing on the side.

Niq believes that the "defining characteristic" of a monarch was to be a military leader. I think that role was only ever peripheral. It fell into disuse when the army became professional, for two reasons. First, the more reflective type of soldier began to think that it might be better (from the participant's point of view) for battles to be directed by people who had studied the subject full-time, rather than by some playboy in a funny hat.

The second, and more important, reason was that with a professional army, you no longer needed the king to raise his standard in order to signal to the peasants that it was time to down tools and come to fight. And that is our clue to what kings are really for.

A monarch's most basic job is to be recognised. No matter what our disagreements, on topics ranging from eugenics to spinach recipes, we all owe allegiance to the same monarch (which is how we know we're British). And once she announces what our national policy is - re, for example, Libya - that's what the country will do (us included), whether we personally agree with it or not.

(Of course a constitutional monarch doesn't make announcements like that in person, but through her officers in government and/or parliament. But that's a minor distinction.)

So: does changing the law of succession weaken the monarchy as an institution?

On the face of it - no. That's why there had to be a meeting of Commonwealth heads of government, and they agreed to the change unanimously. If just one country had opposed it - or even abstained - then there'd be the real prospect of a split monarchy, and that really would mean the end of monarchy as a useful institution. But they all approved it, so that particular crisis was averted.

If there is a danger here, it's the "can-o'-worms" type: the danger that by drawing attention to the subject, you will encourage people who want to make other, further-reaching changes.

But in truth, they didn't need encouragement.

Speaking from one of the loyaller Colonies, I can assure you that the "Monarchy vs Republic" debate is never far below the surface, particularly during a news drought. Any columnist in New Zealand, faced with a looming deadline and no imagination - which is to say, most of the time - won't hesitate to reach into their bag of pre-mulled opinions and reheat some tired old diatribe about either Shaking Off The Legacy Of Imperialism or Maintaining The Roots Of The Nation.

If anything, I think that changing the rules as a concession to modern ideas of "fairness" will make the monarchy more robust. It reinforces the idea of a living institution, whose rules can change. And it reminds us all that, when all is said and done, the queen is queen not because of who her parents were, but because we say she is.

"Divine right" died with Charles I, and good riddance to it.

Quantitative unease

Memo to the Bank of England:

If you must print more money, for the love of all that's good and holy, don't give it to the banks.

You got £75 billion and want to stimulate the UK economy? Fine, give every Briton £20 a week for a year. The poorest will spend it (thus stimulating the economy), the richer will save it (thus improving bank liquidity). Everyone wins. Even the people you're robbing (savers) get some compensation.

And maybe the unwashed masses won't be quite so quick to blame you and your cronies for robbing them of their chance to have a stake in society, if you cut them in on the loot.

By giving the money to bankers, you miss all of these opportunities. All you're doing is bribing your own key constituents. That's very nice for you, but at this stage it might not be greatly overstating the case to call it "fuelling the boilers of the revolution".

The Crowded Planet guide to Britain

Big news from the UK this week is that the famous Lonely Planet guide is sticking it to Britain's tourist industry.

About time too.

I love England. I love touring around it, I love showing it off to my foreign friends and relatives. (I've had a fair bit of practice at that now.) But there's no denying that the restaurants, hotels, sights and resorts that make the most effort to attract tourists - are those that are the least worth visiting.

There's probably a good reason for this. Every Briton - well, at least every middle-class Briton with my upbringing - knows that the best don't need to advertise. So it follows that anyone who does advertise is, at best, second-rate. Stonehenge doesn't advertise; but the tacky visitors' centre that has pretty much destroyed the point of going there - that advertises like nobody's business.

Whatever the reason, there's no denying: if it's British and you've heard of it, it's almost certainly either (a) crap or (b) laughably overpriced. Sometimes both.

What's important to remember about Britain, though - and England in particular - is the incredible density of it. This means there are two things everywhere you look: people (hence, pubs, hotels and restaurants that your guidebook has never heard of), and history.

It's not exactly secret, but it's not advertised either.

My recommendation, if you're contemplating a visit to the UK, is to do some reading before you go. Either pick a place[1] and read up on its history, or pick a history and identify the places associated with it.

[1] "London" isn't a place - it's about 60 places all wedged together. Trying to do them all is a rookie mistake, and a recipe for (at best) extreme boredom.

And don't take the Lonely Planet. While it's true that most places marketing themselves to tourists are overpriced and disappointing, a guidebook's job is not to lament these pitfalls, but to guide you safely past them. If it can't do that, it's not worth the weight.

The population density school of lit crit

One of my favourite writers is Kazuo Ishiguro.

For a while after I read The Remains of the Day, I wondered what it was that gave a Japanese-born writer such a deep, sympathetic insight into the character of his all-too-English narrator. Okay, so Ishiguro is English by naturalisation, but still - his understanding of Stevens' mentality is infinitely more insightful than that of almost anyone I know. In just two generations, it seems, the "servant" mindset has been, pretty much, completely erased from British culture.

When I read An Artist of the Floating World - one of my favourite books - the mystery began to clear. Because that story is almost exactly the same, but for the teensy details that it's set in postwar Japan, rather than postwar England, and deals with a distinguished artist and patriarch, rather than a never-married butler. Those differences don't really amount to the proverbial hill of beans, compared with the similarities.

Why, I mused, did English society have so much in common with Japanese? On the face of it, it would be hard to identify two cultures that have had less opportunity to influence one another.

The answer I came up with can be boiled down to one word: population. Both Japan and England are densely populated, and they're both islands (well, technically England shares its island with a couple of other small nations, but let's gloss over that for the moment). That fact means that in both countries, it's very hard to forget that land (room, space) is a very limited commodity.

And that, I hypothesised, gave rise to two cultures in which "manners" play a very important role. You know that you're always going to be living very closely with other people. Therefore, it makes sense to follow fairly rigid social rules, even if those rules are not enforced.

Compare and contrast with grossly underpopulated countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Wide open spaces foster the illusion of personal independence and autonomy, the belief that the individual is somehow sovereign and has the "right" (whatever the heck that means) to ignore what others think.

My theory is that if you could come up with a way of quantifying the degree to which "manners" and "formality" are valued in a society, you could then plot that value on a graph against population density, and it would show that the more people are crammed into a limited space, the more likely they are to understand the need to get along with each other.

Granted, there's plenty of counter-examples. Big-city-dwellers, from Paris to Los Angeles, are proverbially rude and unsympathetic. But they are rude, principally, to outsiders - that is, to people who are not familiar with the city's protocols. People born and raised in the city seldom make that complaint, because they understand the reasons for city manners and values.

Values such as "keeping a stiff upper lip". When you live in a community of a thousand people, and you know by sight just about everyone you meet from day to day, it makes sense to share your feelings and support one another. When you live in a city of a million, it's a different story. No-one wants to go through every day, getting drawn into the lives of another random selection of strangers who happen to be going through rough times today. Hence it's important that people learn not to show their feelings in public, out of consideration for others.

And these are the sorts of values that Ishiguro's protagonists cling to, failing to realise that the societies around them no longer understand this need. The war has mixed everything up, and now they find themselves surrounded by people from different backgrounds who no longer understand how the old ways came about, and consequently have no respect for them.

It's a haunting and tragic story, both times. Ishiguro conveys sadness and regret like no other writer I know.

On people who are less trustworthy than politicians

It's a sad fact that journalists are lazy buggers - and if they think they can get away with not working, they will.

Witness the coverage of last week's publication, in the UK, of the Department for Transport's (whatever happened to the Department of Transport? Fed up with people asking whether they were "for" or "against" it?) latest efforts to siphon obscene amounts of public money into private investors' pockets. Oops, sorry, I should have spelled that "... periodic survey of public attitudes to traffic congestion".

There wasn't much coverage, but such as there was, was clearly based on the Department conjunction Transport's press release. The BBC's headline is "Half of UK road users support usage-based road charging". And other outlets are no better. Even the normally-cynical El Reg has swallowed this line of spin.

There is no indication that any of these journalists has read the survey itself. If they had, they might have noticed that's not what it says.

True, over half of people are against the present system, and I don't blame them, because road tax became indefensible around the time horse-drawn carts became rare. But they don't express approval of the options being pushed here. Quite the opposite: when asked "Do you think a new charging scheme is fair?" - without giving any information about what it might involve - over half of those questioned return an unequivocal and full-throated "No!". Barely one-quarter say "Yes". And this opinion has actually hardened over the past few years.

The headline figure, as far as I can tell, comes from asking whether the current system "should be changed so that the amount people pay relates more closely to how often, when and where they use the roads" - that elicits about 50% of "Ayes". But faced with the more specific suggestions that people who drive on busy roads, or at peak times, should pay more, that proportion drops to 25% or less.

If you're advocating road pricing, those answers don't add up. The public appears to be "confused". Me, I think the public understands the issue far better than the people framing the survey, and certainly better than the journalists covering it.

Fortunately, there is one group of people whose livelihood really does depend on interpreting this kind of survey correctly: politicians. Things have come to a pretty pass when I'm appealing to politicians to save us from the idleness and corruption of journalists, but that's where I find myself today. And the UK's coalition government, bless its insecure little heart, has correctly divined what its civil servants are up to here. It "has ruled out for the duration of this Parliament national road pricing on existing roads and any preparation for such schemes beyond that time".

Let's hear it for the politicians...

Prescription sugar

I read the other day that Britain's National Health Service sometimes pays for homeopathic prescriptions.

Blah blah, insert rant here about giving taxpayers' money given to snake-oil merchants, undermining the authority of the medical profession, and generally reducing western civilisation to a smoking ruin. But the fact is, I can't get terribly worked up about this.

The Department of Health says it doesn't know how much of the NHS drugs budget is spent on snake oil, but it's "a tiny fraction (approximately 0.001%)". How they can know this figure without knowing an actual figure - is a subject for reasonable suspicion, but even if they're out by a couple of orders of magnitude, it still suggests that there are more important things to worry about. Namely, the other 99.9(99)% of the budget.

I'd bet that a considerably higher fraction of that budget goes to AstraZeneca, a company with a documented record of deliberately hiding the truth about its own products. And the company is not unusual in that; what it's been caught doing is entirely standard industry procedure.

This isn't even news. We've known it anytime this past quarter-century. And yet we continue to pay these companies to poison us and lie to us about it.

I have a simple suggestion for the NHS: it should refuse to pay for any drug or treatment that is covered by a patent. Patients who want those treatments should have to find some other way to pay for them. Generic drugs are vastly cheaper, better tested (by 20 years of actual use), and more honestly marketed. Let the NHS stick to those.

(Remember, patents expire after 20 years, so that would still allow every drug and treatment that was available before 1990, and medicine wasn't exactly in the dark ages then.)

Of course, no sooner were this rule suggested, than a thousand and one "patients' groups" would form to lobby, loudly, for this or that exception. And most of them wouldn't even pause to think that they were acting as pawns of the pharmaceutical industry.

I wonder if the directors of those companies ever have nightmares of creating the perfect drug - one that actually cures a condition, with no bad side-effects? Because that would be the death of their business model.

Biblical taxation

For some reason, there's been a lot of coverage lately of an American politician named Michelle Bachmann, who favours a "biblical" model of taxation. "We render to God that which is God’s and the Bible calls for ... maybe 10%", she apparently says.

Since I was brought up to believe that everyone - no matter how stupid or insane they sound at first encounter - has something to teach me, it occurred to me to wonder what a Biblical tax model might really look like.

Sadly, Bachmann has it quite wrong. When Jesus was questioned about taxation, He pointed out that money bears the image of Caesar, not God, and therefore (He implied) it is Caesar's domain (Matthew 22:21); the church has no call on it at all. What one should "give to God" is "what is God's" - a definition that, given the context, is clearly meant to exclude money. Paul, ever the pragmatist, recommends that Christians should give a fraction of their income for the upkeep of their church (1 Cor 16:1-2) - but he never mentions the 10% figure. And money donated to the church is, in any case, entirely separate from the issue of paying taxes; the donation is, very explicitly, not a tax - it is something that must be given voluntarily, "not reluctantly or under compulsion" (2 Cor 9:7). The "tithe" is an Old Testament concept, where it's levied by the Temple to support its works - again, quite separately from what the state or the king demand for their works.

Clearly, in conflating taxes with tithes, this Bachmann is on very unsound ground theologically.

I can, however, think of one example in the Bible where a righteous figure is charged with managing a secular tax regime. In Genesis 41:33-49, Pharaoh appoints Joseph as first minister of Egypt, to establish a tax rate of 20% in years of plenty; the idea being that it will be doled out in the lean years to follow (making Joseph, arguably, the first Keynesian).

This tax is raised for one purpose: to alleviate the effects of famine (recession) by feeding the hungry. It does not include any allowance for defence, law and order, education, fire safety, maintenance of public roads or buildings, the Pharaoh's majesty, or any other kind of public service - those are all extra, presumably levied by a separate, parallel set of collectors. This 20% is taken purely for the purpose of redistribution.

What could we do with a regime like that?

The UK's GDP per head, today, is around £27,000 per annum. Imagine if the government took 20% of that money (only a fraction of its actual spending, of course) and simply paid it out evenly to everyone over the age of 18. Assuming one-fifth of the population is under that age, that'd be a shade over £120 per adult per week.

That's enough to live on. Not "live well", of course - you'd probably have to share lodgings, and you couldn't support much of a family on it. But enough to take the edge off poverty. No matter what happens - employed, unemployed, self-employed, retired, on holiday, in education, in prison - every UK citizen would have a guaranteed top-up to whatever other income they could get. For life.

I think that would be a Good Thing.

It would remove the poverty trap - no more losing benefits when you gain income, because all lesser benefits are simply abolished. It would massively cut down on the government-related paperwork that afflicts ordinary people (I've been unemployed, I remember it with horror to this day - and what I had to put up with, including the 90% marginal tax rate, was only a fraction of the ordeal that's inflicted on the most vulnerable people in society when they try to claim, for instance, disability living allowance). It would establish a base level of income for everyone, tied directly to national income, thus reducing inequality. It would allow us to forget about "fully funded pensions" - pension income would be, quite transparently, paid for out of current income (which is what must happen anyway, it's the only thing that makes economic sense, and anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something). It would support rural areas and take the pressure off inner cities - honest people need not be quite so desperate for jobs. It would eliminate the state retirement age, and indeed the entire concept of "retirement" - you could stop working at whatever age you felt you could afford it, and change your mind at any time later, with no repercussions and no paperwork.

So how, specifically, would we go about paying for the Universal Benefit?

For starters, it's considerably more than the current jobseeker's allowance, or the basic state pension (even including the winter fuel allowance), or disability living allowance, carer's allowance, child benefit, maternity benefit... So we could scrap all of those - basically, reduce the Department for Work & Pensions to a rump department charged solely with keeping track of who's still alive and what bank account they want their money paid into. That would save about one-sixth of the entire government budget, or over 35% of the money needed, without levying a penny more in taxes.

Second, the Universal Benefit itself would be taxable. So while the poorest get the full £120 a week, a top-rate taxpayer would get only £72 (my tax rates may be a shade out of date, but never mind that for now). Let's call it, to a reasonable back-of-the-envelope level of precision, another 25% of the cost clawed back directly from taxpayers at present rates.

The remaining cost to be charged in a direct tax amounting to 8% on all UK incomes. Since the money we're still looking for is (40% of 20%) of national income, it follows that 8% of national income would fill the gap. Of course there's still the zero-tax band (below, say, £10k), so the actual rate for those paying would have to be a bit higher - say, 9-10%. We could call it "national insurance contributions", and no-one would even notice the difference.

Who'd've thunk? It turns out that Bachmann has a fantastic idea. All that's at fault is her reading of the Bible.

I could easily use another pun on 'tooth', here

People can get very confused when you go off-script.

Yesterday took me back to the dentist. Not for the root canal this time, but for a general 12,000 mile service. The assistant, knowing I was British, asked me how I like New Zealand.

After five and a half years, I'm used to that question. But I still don't know quite what to say to it. I equivocate.

"At least the weather is better than England, huh?"

I look out at the concrete-grey sky, the leaves carried by the bitter winter wind across the car park, the runoff from ten days of rain that has left much of the country underwater. I think of late May/early June in England.

"No," I reply firmly. "I haven't been to England in the past week, but I'm pretty sure the weather right now is better than this."

It catches her completely off-balance. The impression I get is that in all the many times she's had this conversation before, nobody has ever said British weather is better than NZ.

Twitting

Well, I've been avidly following the BBC coverage of the UK elections all night. It was either that or work. And, by way of experiment, I've recorded my impressions at intervals in bites of 140 characters or less. This is how the night has looked, from down here:

God, Jeremy Paxman hasn't half aged. I wonder if he's stopped dying his hair. Or started. Perhaps grey is the new black.

Is that the Dimbleby? At least his hair looks natural. Which is more than I can say for the studio, looks like a Quantel dream gone berserk.

"Voters angry at being turned away from polling stations." What, a 15 hour day isn't long enough to get your arse down to a polling station?

"2230 California gov Arnold Schwarzenegger phones David Cameron to congratulate him." What does the Governator know that we don't?

Pix of queues outside polling booths. Good grief. But turnout is no more than usual. Cock-up, conspiracy, or both?

Maybe ID requirements have been tightened up, to demonstrate how ID cards are Absolutely Necessary In Today's Dangerous World.

What is the BBC playing at? Cosy panel of insomniac pundits is replaced by frantic bustling room of 30-plus. Trying to impress Americans?

Good luck with that. It's hard enough to get a US television audience to watch their own elections.

"BREAKING NEWS: Next result - Sunderland Central - Labour win". Surely "Lab hold"? This is the kind of thing I'd expect from Sky News.

"2303: Another former Lib Dem leader Neil Kinnock also says the figure for the Lib Dems is "almost certainly wrong"." It's not alone.

"2346 The BNP saved their deposit in Washington and Sunderland West." Oh dear. Maybe inevitable after Gordo's little Episode.

"The prime minister will try to form a coalition government in the event of a hung parliament." NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

National result after 17 seats: 4.2% swing to Con. Not nearly enough. Good grief, how much must Cameron suck that he can't even beat GB?

"0135 Gordon Brown increases his majority." Seriously, how was "date with density" wrong?

"0150 Lib Dems fail to win Guildford, Tory majority increased." Nothing like a Lib Dem threat to galvanise the Tory vote.

More license money being well spent. Have you seen what they're playing with right now?

"0236 Speaking on the BBC election boat,..." - "Election boat"? Seriously - WTF?

Very disappointing night for the Lib Dems. That's the downside of being taken seriously - people start to look at *all* your policies.

Cameron clearly thinks he's won. His constituency victory speech is all about what he'll do as PM.

Bet he's still hoping for a razor-thin majority. He knows the next five years will be a mess, he'll want to be able to share the blame.

0308: Alex Salmond concedes defeat to Labour. Damn shame. There was one party I'd love to see come out a big winner.

0313: BBC says UKIP and BNP have gained, but Greens have lost ground. So, not just a "protest" defection to minor parties then.

0321: Stories of problems for overseas voters: ballots not delivered. What with the home voters being turned away - bit of a balls-up, then.

0416: "BBC's freelancer at Stevenage reports expected declaration time at 0330am." Even *with* all those people, BBC still can't keep up.

0618: Tories now on 268 out of 550, Labour 213, LD 42. So 27 "others". If "others" split or abstain (Sinn Fein), that's a Tory majority.

0622: Bugger this for a game of soldiers, I'm going home. No doubt I'll hear the result on the News Quiz.

Time to support the other thugs

Gordon Brown has named the day for his date with density. In the now time-honoured manner of government stories it was extensively leaked in advance, which allowed it to be reported as news for three days running; but now, apparently, he's told the queen, which is the final step. Time was when Her Maj would have been the first to know, but tempora mutantur and all that. I wonder if she minds, hearing it from the BBC?

And I find myself in the awkward, even embarrassing, position of rooting for the Tories.

It's nothing to do with the wars, or taxation, or the economy. On those topics I see no reason to believe that Mr Cameron's gentlemanly thuggery would be any better than Mr Brown's randomised blundering. (Speaking of which, I can't believe that Mr Brown is running on his record. Or that the British public is, apparently, inclined to see him as a "safe pair of hands". "Yes, Sweeney Todd may have slipped a couple of times, but you can't deny his razors are sharp.")

No, there are two good philosophical reasons for ditching even the very well founded ideological conviction that the Tories are a bunch of crooks who are just waiting for the opportunity to shovel the tax money to their friends instead of Labour's...

The first is the National Identity Register - or as it's also misleadingly known, the national ID card. A massive, detailed, authoritatively maintained database of who is and, by exclusion, who isn't a British citizen. It's hard to define "fascism" with any degree of rigour, but one of its most consistent features is a hard, definitive clarity about who is Them and who is Us. I don't think I want to be a citizen of such a country.

The Tories have been encouragingly hostile, in a discouragingly non-specific way, to major government IT projects in general. Personally I think this is a big mistake. It means that the contractors will tend to side against them (on sound precautionary principles), but because they haven't made specific commitments to scrap specific projects, the rest of us won't credit them. We will simply assume that the Tory plan is, as usual, to divert money from Labour-supporting shareholders to their own. If Mr Cameron really wants to mobilise the popular vote on this issue, I suggest promising a complete moratorium on all government IT spending for at least five years. No new computers, no new software, no maintenance payments, all training to be provided exclusively in-house for that time. If you're going to create cushy, subsidised jobs, at least make them in the civil service where security and continuity are king - not in the private sector, where profit and growth are the motivators.

Best of all, it will keep the government from growing too efficient. In theory this should appeal to the Tories. An inefficient public sector, after all, is one you can't rely on. It's the best possible insurance against the unconstrained growth of the state, and against the all-pervasive intrusion of the state into private business. If only they could think straight, and rid themselves of the ridiculous fetish for "value for money"...

But one thing the Tories have specifically promised to scrap is the NIR. This is, of course, a 180-degree reversal from the days of Michael Howard, who thought it was the best idea ever. That's what a couple of terms in opposition will do for you.

Which brings me to the second reason: the natural cycle. When any party has been in power for over ten years, you can absolutely guarantee that it has long since run out of anything that might be called "good" ideas, and is now mostly jerking its knees when tapped by the tabloid press. Voting for an incumbent government, at this stage, basically means voting for Rupert Murdoch.

Voting for the other lot, on the other hand, gives them a chance to implement some of the policies they've come up with in opposition. Some of which may actually be good ideas. They'll be tapped out in, at most, two terms, and then the pendulum can swing back. But it's not good for anyone that it takes too long to swing.

If the National Identity Register comes to pass, the best I can hope for is that the Scottish Nationalists sweep to power and declare independence from the UK. I haven't read the specification for the NIR, but I have learned a thing or two about databases these past three years - and I'm guessing that an independent Scotland would render it obsolete at a stroke.