Very cool, if true

Which I like. But wish there was a version without him over the top of it.

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cmcmck

5. The Times has just come out in favour of Labour!

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calimac

3) The debate, it points out, began at 9 PM. But so did the State of the Union address at which Biden did so well that Trump started spreading the rumor that Biden was on drugs.

Considering Biden's "recovery" in his subsequent speeches, the answer is more obvious: Biden does well when he's on, not drugs, but a Teleprompter.

Trump used to claim that Obama could only speak well on Teleprompter, which was ridiculous, and it wasn't always true of Biden either: but it may be true of him now.

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10:00 to 16:00 are office hours. Seems perfectly reasonable for a gentleman to confine his compentence to office hours.

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I'm certainly not competent outside of those hours.

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This

“is there any policy you can offer me that would positively impact my life?”

and the out of hand dismissal of it as a legitimate question

really resonated with me.

I think MacMillan said something to one of his election strategists along the lines of - see if you can find out what our people want, write it down on a side of paper and, if we can, we'll try and give it to them. Which seemed like the essence of Centrist politics.

And thinking that a question about what policies might offer a positive impact to someone's life is somehow illegitimate is very telling.

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That very-much doesn't seem to me to be my understanding of centrism.

But it does seem like it ought to be something that politicians think about, rather than their econmomics being driven by ideology, it should be driven by "What actually works, and gives people what they need/want?"

The fact it was dismissed out of hand seemed utterly ridiculous to me. If you want people to vote for you then making their lives better would seem to be something that you should at least try?

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What’s your understanding of centrism Andy? I have been thinking about this a lot recently.

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"Not rocking the boat".

It feels, from the impression I get, to be very-much a small-c conservative approach, where we don't want to startle anyone, or do things that might require us to actually persuade anyone of anything. It's the "We are the sensible adults, and thus we don't have to deal with any kind of weird things." It's a "Not examining things too closely, because then you might discover that it's not too nice under the surface." and "That kind of thing might work perfectly well in other countries, but round here we've been doing just fine for hundreds of years, and we will continue to do so by not rocking the boat."

Basically, if you define yourself by looking at whatever the current middle chunk of the population are currently thinking, and then avoiding anything at the edges, then it will work really well when things are going well (see 1997-2010), but when things go less well you haven't actually improved anything, or won any arguments, so things fall revert really quickly.

You can see this with the current Labour approach - where their election message is "The Conservative approaches on Brexit, taxes, and society are *fine* they're just incompetent at carrying them out. We'll be the sensible adults in the room and do them properly." - a message that will succeed when your opposition are staggeringly inept, but falls apart when they aren't, because you've totally conceded to them on every point of principle.

If that makes sense :-)

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It does make sense. I am not sure it’s my definition but Dan’s isn’t either. I haven’t gone away and looked this up, so there may be a widely accepted definition that makes nonsense of mine.

However, I consider myself to be a centrist and here is what I mean by that - am very open to having it taken apart: largely progressive policies, executed in a way that prioritises competence, within largely existing institutional frameworks. I have been thinking about this quite a lot.

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"largely progressive policies, executed in a way that prioritises competence, within largely existing institutional frameworks"

I'm good with #1, but they frequently don't look that progressive to me. They look like compromise with terrible people.

Definitely onboard with #2.

#3 I have negative interest in. "Monarchy, but efficient!" is something I'm dead against. I want *better* institutions, that actively support people to be the best they can be.

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I think this comment perfectly sums up the difference between your and my politics.

The argument for my case in a sentence is that the mitigation to largely and the framework of existing institutions is required for competence to be possible. Other arguments exist.

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"that the mitigation to largely" - I'm failing to parse this bit.

I'm also confused as to why you think that competence is only possible given a specific set of institutions which happen to be the ones we have right now?

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I think it’s less available for almost all values of trying to change institutions, and the likelihood of the right plan and context are very low.

Put differently, I have seen many changes in policy that have resulted in (or had the potential to result in) better lives for people. I’ve rarely if ever seen a change to an institution that hasn’t been for the worse.

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Off the top of my head:
Creation of the Scottish government.

Creation of the Welsh government.

Reform of local election in Scotland which moved them to PR.

UK Mayoral elections moving to multi-round (later reversed by the Conservatives because they didn't like it).

Reform of the House of Lords to hugely reduce the number of people who got to vote on things because of their dad.

Creation of the UK Supreme Court.

All of these were fairly large changes to how our institutions work which have made things better. All carried out under the last Labour government.

I'd also argue that things like the Inquiries Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Data Protection Act fundamentally brought in reform of how many of our institutions work and improved them significantly.

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The devolved governments are an excellent counterexample and remind me that the word “largely” engenders a requirement to be on the look-out for circumstances where the point it qualifies doesn’t hold.

I could argue with some of the rest but am not going to because I don’t really either know enough or need to be right. I’d want to know more about the implementation methods, costs and ultimate impacts of these changes though before they had a significant impact on my view here, though. There’s too great a body of evidence in the other direction and although your list has some meaty examples, it is still short.

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I'm curious what examples you're thinking of in the opposite direction?

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Writing a post that will address this comment. (It won’t answer it but it will explain why not.)

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I shall look forward to it :-)

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What I mean is that only “largely progressive” rather than “unqualifiedly progressive” manifestos can be implemented with competence because of some combination (varying with context) of (1) the need for a critical mass of support* and (2) aspects of human nature that may be undesirable but are non-negotiable.

*this might take my definition of centrism closer to Dan’s

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I'm not sure you always need a critical mass of support. If you did, we'd still have the death penalty.

(I do agree that some things that some progressive want aren't feasible. And attempting to do infeasible things is automatically going to lead to incompetence.)

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I’m not sure you always need a critical mass of support and your example is a good one (and always fascinates me given the difference between public opinion and what’s now a fairly well enshrined policy plank.

I think you usually do, and (as a rule of thumb) more so the higher in impact the policy. The death penalty isn’t really salient for all that many people.

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Yes, if you want to put something in that actually affects people, then you need to get a large chunk of them onboard.

Although it is possible to persuade people that things affect them even when they don't.

(See Starmer, today directly contradicting the Equality Act 2010, because The Telegraph has asked him about transgender women and toilets. Something which affects almost nobody, and only a tiny minority care about deeply, but has become a terrible wedge issue.)

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Agreed, and I stand by my comment that a sustained campaign against tax rises during the pre-election period could overrule even quite strong polling numbers relating to the drive for investment in public services.

Relatedly I am fascinated that you think the FOI act is a systemic good because I think the reverse for precisely this reason: it enables the type of press enquiry that leads to the demonisation of high-drama low-salience stories and hence incentivises legislative behaviour in poor directions.

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I think that transparency is a good. And that if people are allowed to hide things from the press then that will inevitably lead to corruption.

For society to change in a progressive manner, sneakily doing good does very little in the long run, it just gives the power of sneakiness to the next set of conservatives to get power.

People need to hold their representatives to account, and robust discussion based on an accurate view of reality is a necessary part of that. If we don't even know what's going on, because people can hide it, then democracy is of very low value in the first place.

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What do you think is better because of the act in specific practical terms?

I mean, I don’t in principle disagree with any of the above and I don’t think most people would, but I am not sure that the act has led to meaningful change and I do think the negative consequences are visible. But I haven’t really dived into this so could be wrong.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_2000#Facts_revealed_by_the_act

Which gives us evidence of corruption both from our government and others. Which presumably makes it less likely (as people know they won't be able to just hide it).

The MPs expenses scandal in 2005 was uncovered through FOI requests.
A series of them uncovered reliability information from British cars (presumably useful to anyone who owns a car, or intends to).
Food Hygiene certificates are only available generally because of it. Lots of the information about water cleanliness is only public because of FOI requests.
Lots of the information that GoodLaw uncovered about corruption in purchasing medical equipment during the pandemic only came to light because of FOI requests.

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Fair enough. These are all multifaceted issues.

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At some point you and I discussed this on a post (I think, I think here) and I wrote quite a lot on what I thought the definition of centrism was.

But I can't find it so far.

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I'd like to be reminded! Wikipedia says "moderate policies" which seems to be to convey no information at all. Andy and I got sidelined into a conversation about how we disagree politically, which is always interesting but not the same as the original conversation about what centrism is.

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You know - "moderate". "Somewhere in the middle". "Between". "Central" ;-)

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Yes but it’s interesting that you, Dan and I have independently thought about this problem and come up with three such different answers.

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It is.

But the same is true of so much of politics, where the terms are not well defined. And vary from country to country.

"Left wing" in the USA isn't the same as it is in the UK or in France. So any politics which defines itself as "Not like those scary left-wingers or those scary right-wingers" is also going to vary in which people end up in that bucket.

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I don’t disagree, but I think I meant something slightly different, which is that I’m surprised to find how ill-defined the term is given how much it’s used. Maybe I shouldn’t be. Thinking this through as I go.

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Also I’m not sure that your argument about countries holds very strongly given that you, Dan and I all live in the same political culture with the same norms. It might have some force given that the two of you live in Scotland and I don’t. (I might be misunderstanding it.)

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Do we live in the same political culture? The people I spend my time talking to aren't the same as the people Dan spends his time talking to. I heard an opinion yesterday from someone who expected Reform to sweep the board, because locally everyone was very excited about them.

When I think about "What is worth doing in politics?" I'm very rarely looking at "What has the UK done before?" - I'm looking at "What has any country done which seemed to work well?" - so the context of what I'd like to see happen is very much "Golly, look at the Netherlands, wouldn't that be nice?" - and the center that I see is the center across all of Europe. Which I then look at what self-proclaimed UK centrists are actually aiming for, that's going to put a very different light on it than it will to someone thinking about it in a context of purely UK political history, even if we live practically next-door to each other.

(I'm not saying that that *is* the lens Dan is looking at it through. Just that the lenses can be different, and affected by different countries, even if we live in the same one.)

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When I talk to Dan about politics, I tend to conclude that our frames of reference are close to identical. We have very similar pollsters and commentators in our twitter fields. We tend quickly to pick up each other’s references. I would expect you to be conversant with all, though the reverse is less likely to be true.

To be clear, I think your argument holds fully as soon as you take the countries out of it.

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Seems to me.

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Yeah, me too. I recall there being 4 types or definations.

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What is your current understanding of centrism?

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