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An apostate's view

The Fire Window, Manchester Cathedral

We've heard a number of religious views about the Pope's extraordinary offer to allow Church of England priests who can't stomach women bishops to convert to Rome - even though some of them are married, and even being allowed to keep to some of their Anglican traditions. Some feminists have criticised it as predatory; some have predictably welcomed it, and some bishops look like taking it up. This is everybody's business, though, not just believers' business - just as much as private clubs' membership rules are in my view everyone's business, say, or political parties' candidate selection, or indeed political defections. Anyway, I've never noticed any reluctance on the part of Popes or Bishops to opine on non-religious matters. Here, then, is the view of an excommunicated apostate. Believers are more than welcome to correct me if there's anything I misunderstand.

I agree that the Pope is being predatory here, not to say wholly cynical: you have to admire the old man's chutzpah in trying to annex part of the C of E in advance of his state visit next year. Perhaps he hopes to Newmanise the whole of England.

What is most baffling about this affair though is how any Anglo-Catholic can see the issue of women bishops (perhaps together with a perceived liberal drift on homosexuality - one imperceptible to outsiders) as a reason to turn to Rome. Can any of them really, in conscience, now say they suddenly accept Catholic dogmas, having lived contrary to them all their vocations long?

Let's take the issue of whether scripture contains all things necessary for salvation, as we're told Anglicans believe. That's not Rome's position - it sees tradition as just as important. Do these Anglo-Catholic defectors claim to have changed their mind on this - or did they never agree with what seems the official Anglican doctrine in the first place?

Getting a bit closer to the bone, if the question of whether bishops can be women is so crucial, why do they attach so much less importance to the question whether priests can be married? Some of the potential defectors are themselves married - conduct in their own personal lives that is directly contrary to Roman Catholic belief about the nature of priesthood. And have they been living in accordance with Humanae Vitae? Do they propose to from now on?

Even closer to the bone, for some, is the issue of homosexuality. George Pitcher certainly thinks quite a few potential defectors are themselves gay. It's okay to be a gay priest in the C of E, so long as you don't practice it: as I understand it (from Issues in Human Sexuality, para. 5.19) clergy who come out as "homophile in orientation" but who accept abstinence are to be welcomed and employed; and candidates for ordination will not be quizzed about their celibacy unless there are strong reasons for doing so. But in the Pope's church, men presenting "deep seated homosexual tendencies" cannot be ordained at all, whether or not they practice their sexuality; and it is even prepared to use psychological tests to root out these tendencies. Again, therefore, to be conscious of ones homosexuality seems to this outsider just as contrary to the Catholic idea of priesthood as to be married. On reflection, some of these priests may be forced to conclude they are excluded from Rome just as they would exclude others from their own church. Only unmarried straight or effectively asexual Anglo-Catholics can, it seems to me, unashamedly aspire to be Catholic priests.

Most critically, though, potential defectors have, until now, been happy to be part of a church that rejects papal authority. Indeed, opposition to his authority was the rock on which the Church of England was founded almost five hundred years ago. How can these people now say that just because of women bishops that's all forgiven and forgotten - a little mistake - and that they're now happy to do as the Pope tells them? They may have convinced themselves that he's merely some sort of primus inter pares; but he certainly doesn't see things that way. The defectors have been happy to serve in a church that's at least partially democratic and to argue their case against reform; if they turn to Rome, they'll find they have no say whatever, for instance on whether offers like this should be made, or when some future Pope unilaterally decides priests can be married, or women, after all (as I predict he will within fifty, then within a hundred, years). The Pope in Rome may only rarely be infallible, but he's always the one who decides.

The gulf between Canterbury and Rome seems to me as wide as the Channel and as high as the Alps, and any Anglo-Catholic who defects now must explain why the prospect of women bishops has made him change his mind on other, more fundamental doctrines; or else, if he claims always to have accepted those doctrines, why he hasn't been a Catholic and lived by them before now.

Many atheists will, I think, conclude that in reality this is nothing to do with the details of the dogma of either denomination, and that theological disputation about it is just a thick cloud of incense. Isn't this really about some extremely conservative-minded people's deep-rooted commitment against women's equality - a commitment that transcends and overwhelms all other doctrinal, spiritual and ecclesiastical considerations and loyalties?

Gordon Brown's conference speech

It wasn't the game-changer Labour was crying out for - but Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour conference today was a much better effort than many expected, and approaches, at least, the kind of argument and the kind of vision he needs to set out if next year's election is to be a contest.

He opened by talking of changing the world: it was good, for Labour supporters, to see him lift his vision. But the bread and butter of winning for Labour is to flesh out that vision in a programme. He followed up with a long, relentless, deliberately extended drumming out of Labour's many achievements in office. Labour does need to remind the public of this, but in a way that's heard instead of making people tune out with boredom. I don't know whether that'll work. More importantly, from early on and throughout his speech he focused on the clear choice Britain faces next year, and again and again he cast that choice in terms of opting to favour the interests of the majority or those of a privileged few - surely the right light for him to try to throw on Conservative policies. He came back to that attack at the end of his speech, too, showing a determination to get the message across.

I liked the way he explained how he had acted in the financial crisis and to stave off depression: I almost thought this passage was too quick, and that he could gain by taking more time to explain this, impressive part of his record to the public in more detail. He is really missing a trick on all this. He told an anecdote about a complacent bank chief, for instance, telling Brown his bank was in fine shape - only for the PM to discover than, in truth, it was shaky. A big problem for Brown is that he seems to be part of the financial establishment and to be on the side of bankers - he needs to reposition himself as the angry, parsimonious and grumpy champion of the taxpayer against the banks, and he could usefully express more astonishment about actions he has had to take and more anger about what some banks have done. Alistair Darling's planned legislation on bonuses is not nearly tough enough: it may not be morally admirable, but people want some of their anger taken out on rich bank employees, and Labour should be offering much tougher action. Anyway, if you believe in a fair society, huge bonuses aren't just wrong where the recipient has been negligent. And finally, he expressed determination to recover for the public all the money lent to support the banks - but I wanted to hear more of this, and for him to paint a grim, almost horrifying vision of Brown as the inexorable public bailiff-in-chief with a debt to collect over five years.

He made some good pledges - the one not to cut spending on schools but to raise it, for instance, was important. But there was, as last year, a bit too much schemery, with quite a few good and welcome but relatively small ideas that are too forgettable and cannot amount to a big vision in themselves. Examples were the skilled internships and green work placements he offered.

On fiscal responsibility I thought he was good. Last year I was impatient with his technique of setting medium and long terms goals by legislation - a target alone does nothing to reach itself. I can see the international credibility argument for a Fiscal Responsibility Bill, though, and he promised a similar approach to achieving a high and sustained level of overseas aid. Perhaps I was wrong and he is right - still, I'd like him to explain why this use of binding pre-commitments is not gimmickry but substantial policy. The best point he made though - and something I'd like to hear more of - was to remind conference he had squeezed spending before, after 1997, while still achieving important policies like the New Deal and minimum wage. To argue he can play the same trick again is a good argument he should make more often.

Half an hour in was when the speech began to get really serious. He made important policy pledges: that the minimum wage and working tax credits will go up every year under him. This is more like the substance he needs to produce.

Bravely, though, and impressively, he has dared take on and take forward some of Tony Blair's thinking with controversial proposals about housing for teenage parents - they will be given supervised accommodation and support, not simply the keys to a flat - and pledged the extension of Family Intervention Projects to Britain's 50,000 "most chaotic families". This is bold, interventionist talk that will displease much of the liberal left but that may offer a way to reconnect with core Labour voters. He hinted at applying the target-driven approach to improving public services more aggressively to community policing - an important idea that meets an increasing concern, especially after the Fiona Pilkington case.

Labour needs a really big idea, though - and Brown's proposed "National Care Service" may be the sort of thing required. Long term care is of course a massive social and financial problem that causes fear among many families and wipes out savings - the way illness and injury did before the NHS. If Brown can put real flesh on this idea and convince people he has a way forward on care, votes will follow. The challenge will be the detail, but his pledge of free personal care at home for those most in need of it is a decent start.

Finally, on the constitution, his proposals to allow recall of misbehaving MPs and to abolish the hereditary Lords were minor but welcome. His promise of a referendum on the alternative vote system was a real surprise, however. I'm not sure I'm in favour of it, and the move has a flavour of cynicism - almost all his cabinet and Labour critics seem to be behind electoral reform right now - but it is bold. It was the confirmation, to me, that he may now at least dimly "get" the need for him to offer much more daring plans for the next Parliament.

"Dream no small dreams," Brown said, quoting - well, I'm not sure yet whether it was Goethe or Victor Hugo. Warm, inspiring words for a Labour politician. More hard-headedly, they're good strategic advice over the next six months. He's finally offered some forward vision, and given some hope he can put forward big ideas. If this marks the start of a real change in Brown's approach, and he can work this sort of thinking up into a convincing manifesto platform - who knows? We could yet have a real election next year.

This post first appeared at The Wardman Wire

You've not heard much from me recently - I've been taking advantage of the silly season to catch up on other things. And my blog break is going to continue for another week. I'm taking a complete break, getting away from everything, even the intarwebs thingy, and plan to recharge.

See you later in September.

The past decade has seen widening differences in income and wealth, which taxation and regulation have failed to address. When New Labour was first elected, it established the Low Pay Commission to measure the claims of workers for a higher minimum wage against the wider economic impact, particularly on employment. There is now a compelling case for a high pay commission to measure the claims of top earners that their rewards are justified and necessary, even if they offend natural justice and our sense of fairness.

So wrote Vince Cable in yesterday's Guardian, supporting Compass's call for a High Pay Commission to investigate pay at the top, and come forward with proposals to rein it in. Compass's initiative deserves backing - but Cable's words of support worry me.

By suggesting the highest paid should be made to justify their incomes, he implies individual desert is the issue, and indeed he goes on to make clear he's fine about Bill Gates being worth more than the £31.1 billion interest Britain pays on its national debt. It's rewards for failure and uselessness that he really objects to, as David Aaronovitch has rightly pointed out. But why be so timid - so narrowly, individualistically moral about it? The point isn't whether such and such a banker has properly "earned" his six-figure bonus, or whether a premiership footballer has "earned" his six-figure weekly pay (I think Vince is slightly out of date about football salaries, at least at the very top). The real question is whether in Britain today where many of those who are lucky enough to have work survive on the minimum wage or less and where average income (distorted upwards by Frank Lampard and Stephen Hester) is twenty thousand or so it's right that anyone should receive such vast revenues, regardless of what they've done to "earn" them. It's not about market or merit, but equality.

Much greater equality would be better for us all. The only serious question is how to achieve it, although the evidence suggests that doesn't matter. I'd be happy whether we tax or, as David Blackburn suggests, "regulate" (another word for 'legislate") big bonuses and pay out of existence. A commission to look into it would be a start but it should not be a tribunal before whom the rich are forced - or allowed - to defend their privileges. It should work out a mechanism to reduce the greatest incomes, as the minimum wage aims at raising the lowest.

He should shut up about it

Policy Network/CreativeCommons

Lord Mandelson has today accused the shadow chancellor George Osborne of "political cross-dressing". One one level, fair enough: if Osborne is claiming the Tories are the progressive party, then Mandelson is right to contest that. He is trying to steal Labour's clothes, to use a more traditional political phrase.

What worries me about Mandelson's choice of words, though, is the way it recalls Damian McBride's e-mail suggestion that the proposed website Red Rag should spread false rumours about there being photographs of Osborne dressed in women's clothes. The Sunday Times's revelations about McBride quote him as using the phrase "cross-dressing" in relation to Osborne - and he did not mean it politically. The Guardian rightly called McBride's smear puerile: no grown-up could think it clever or funny, and certainly no adult could think it "progessive", to mix lies and intolerance in that way. If Mandelson thought the McBride smears were a serious matter - he said so at the time - then he should certainly not be using language that recalls those smears.

One of two things has happened here. Mandelson may have used the phrase in all innocence as a political metaphor. That would be uncharacteristically inept. I'd rather believe that, though, than the alternative - which would be that he used the phrase cynically in an attempt to reinforce McBride's disgraceful and stupid smear in the public mind, knowing he was pandering to prejudice. Were that true, it would be shameful.

In any case, Mandelson should not use that language, or anything like it, again. It's not only wrong, it's counter-productive and if repeated will hurt Labour, just as Damian McBride's activities hurt Labour. If this kind of recklessness is what Mandelson meant by his underdog strategy, he should forget it.

What could it mean?

Pixel Addict/CreativeCommons

On television last week, Lord Mandelson accepted Labour are the "underdogs" in politics now; and that therefore they'll have to work harder than they're opponents. It sounds as though Mandelson's been reading Morey and Miller's 2004 book The Underdog Advantage, on "using the power of insurgent strategy". Or perhaps Malcolm Gladwell's May New Yorker article on how David beats Goliath. Morey and Miller stress the importance for competitiveness of imagining you're an underdog, and of being perceived as underdog; Mandelson's suggestion that Gordon Brown could propose a televised debate with David Cameron can be read in that context as a public signal of Brown's underdog status. Gladwell argues that underdogs win, apparently against the odds, a surprising amount of the time, if they're prepared to commit to an unusual, outsider's strategy - and to effort well exceeding that of their more fancied opponents.

Well, of course Labour should behave as though it's the underdog: it's true, it is. Nor will it have any difficulty being perceived as the underdog, in the sense of being unlikely to win next spring. And it seems obvious that Labour politicians and volunteers will need to put in an overwhelming amount of work on the ground if the party is to have any hope next year.

But Gladwell's idea at least goes further than this. His point isn't simply that a successful underdog knows it's an underdog. His point is that an awareness that you're bound to lose in a conventional contest can drive you to adopt an unconventional, game-changing strategy that covers up your own weaknesses, exploits those of the favourite, and evens the odds considerably - or turns them in your favour.

So what might a genuine underdog strategy look like for Labour? What might be the equivalent, for Labour, of suddenly slinging a stone, a non-stop full-court press, or attacking Aqaba from the desert? We all expect a general election to take place next spring. Should Labour go on the offensive, and choose to fight in October? We all expect an election to be fought largely in key Labour-held marginals - should Labour adopt instead the apparently insane goal of making gains from the Conservatives? That would be magnifique rather than la guerre.

Better would be to leap over the current debate about future spending cuts with a set of new and big policy ideas - much bigger than anything Gordon Brown has suggested before, and much bigger than the normal piecemeal initiatives the government puts forward. Labour could propose democratic control of what are now state-owned banks - and over pension funds. It could plan a crusade to reconquer NHS territory lost over the last twenty years - in dentistry, for example, where private provision is increasingly the norm - and break new ground with a commitment to free long-term care as soon as resources allow. It could propose a ten-year plan to equalise incomes and wealth, with firms taxed more or less according to how much the pay of the top ten percent of staff differs from the average. It could announce a revolution in public service, with student fees and debt forgiven, and taxes reduced, in return for a period of service in education, the health service, social care, policing, probation and prison service and of course the armed forces. Going on the offensive in politics - like an outsider or underdog would - means refusing simply to defend a record. It means offering more, and more radical change than your opponents even conceive of.

Still, though, the most radically game-changing step Labour could take would be to change leader. Barack Obama won the US Presidency not in the autumn of 2008, but in the Spring: his primary contest with Hillary Clinton involved and fascinated America, and focused Americans even more than the general election on the choice they had to make in November. Labour could yet replicate that this winter: Brown's resignation at the conference could trigger a leadership contest later this year that could make voters look again at Labour, as the famous 1990 "House of Cards" contest and defeat of Margaret Thatcher captured Britain's attention for the Tories. A new Labour Prime Minister, betting the shop on an election within weeks of his or her taking office and asking for a mandate for a new programme - that would be a real insurgent strategy. The moment for this may well have passed. Labour has talked of being underdog before, and done nothing about it. MPs refuse to face how likely defeat is, perhaps devastating defeat, if sleeping underdogs lie, and Labour fights the normal, conventional, sensible election next spring under Gordon Brown. But as Morey and Miller say, every Labour supporter needs to

Think about your company in very personal terms. Are your greater personal regrets for the things you did or the things you failed to do? Are your greater regrets for the path taken or the one not taken?

This post first appeared at The Wardman Wire.

The Tories' experiment deserves to succeed

Lawrie Cate/CreativeCommons

Needing to replace the ridiculous Anthony Steen, the Conservatives are choosing their candidate for his Totnes constituency by an open primary: all voters in Totnes have (in theory) been sent a voting pack with information about the would-be candidates and explaining how to vote by post. Michael Crick did an excellent report on the contest (beginning at 16.25 mins) on Tuesday's Newsnight, which is well worth watching. The process has had problems: Michael Crick suggested turnout may be very low, with some voters not having received voting packs and the whole process having been rushed; the selection may also be hit by a postal strike, the local newspaper suggests. Totnes Tories, Central Office and whoever insisted on this may end up looking very foolish.

But they ought to be congratulated. Any innovation involves risk, and this could turn out badly. But an innovation it is, and I applaud it. Whatever happens, it was right to try it, and it will be right to do it again elsewhere. Choosing candidates this way will be good for voters, as it will give them more control over who represents them than the choice of evils a general election often presents; in a safe seat, an open primary may be the best chance you get to change who your MP is in the end. It will be good for politics generally, as it will reduce the power of party activists and insiders, and put pressure on streams of opinion that flourish within parties but which are unpopular outside. And it will be good for the parties themselves as it will open them out to the public - to their opponents, even - and help keep them safe from internal groupthink.

I have a few suggestions, though, for making open primaries work better. First, it's important that wealth should not give anyone an advantage in this sort of contest (or any other candidate selection, incidentally), and it's important that the costs of the process be kept as low as possible. Michael Crick estimates the cost of the Totnes procedure to be around £40,000, possibly much more - which strikes me as excessive. I think a selection like this could be much cheaper. For a start, it seems to me that postal ballots are far too expensive: I know e-voting isn't easy or problem-free, either, but there must be potential for government to fund one central website, perhaps to be run by the Electoral Reform Society, on which every local primary could be conducted and at which people could register to vote. Once established I reckon that site could deliver voting more securely and more cheaply than arranging postal ballots for every primary individually. Second, I admire Dr. Sarah Wollaston for spending absolutely nothing on her campaign: there's no reason she should. I think candidates should be prevented from spending anything beyond personal travel expenses for themselves: there should be no leaflets and no posters in support of any candidate. Campaigning should be allowed online through blogs (on free platforms only), podcasts and vodcasts. I suppose there's a risk rich candidates could outspend their rivals this way, by having fancy cameras and mikes - but I think ways round that problem can be found. There'd be local media - where local newspapers exist and can be persuaded to take any interest.

Mainly, though, the primary contest should be conducted by walkabouts and public meetings: those wanting to be selected should get among people on the streets, in shopping centres and everywhere they can be found. Local authorities should provide rooms free for parties wanting to hold public meetings, and I suspect quite a few churches and pubs could be persuaded to make rooms available, too. Those meetings should be run by party volunteers, and the main local expenditure by the party should be in promoting them. The revival of the public political meeting would be a serious contribution to reinvigorating politics, and keeping MPs' feet on the ground. Open primaries could contribute to this revival.

A final point. I have no problem with Conservatives, say, helping choose who should stand as a Labour candidate, or vice versa; they will after all choose whether or not ultimately to elect that person and I think open participation in selection will make all candidates stronger. Few people are so sad and cynically partisan that they'll deliberately vote for a bad opposing candidate. Anyway, parties should not be so foolish as to shortlist anyone they think is unelectable. But one thing that might well bring open primaries into disrepute is if political parties actually instruct their members to vote in particular way to manipulate their opponents' primaries. That's why it's sickening that Adrian Sanders, the LibDem MP for Torbay, is so gleeful (19.40 mins into the Newsnight report) about his attempts to muck up the Tories' first effort: doing this sort of thing should be made a disciplinary offence in all parties. Sanders ought to be ashamed of himself: if this is his attitude to democracy, then he's not fit for his job.

I hope Totnes succeeds for the Tories, and confounds the cynics and Sanders - it deserves to.

This post first appeared at The Wardman Wire

Slavoj Žižek

Andy Miah/CreativeCommons

Another Carl, the one at Raincoat Optimism, wrote this week about the possible application to "Red Toryism" of Slavoj Žižek's ideas about violence:

Early in 2008, philosopher Slavoj Žižek published a book entitled Violence: Six Sideways Reflections in which he aims to describe the differences between the violence we might see on the news in the form of thuggery and the violence incurred by the workings of the rogue bankers tweaking the economy. The difference, for Žižek, is the difference between “subjective” and “objective” violence. That is to say, “subjective” violence is the perceptibly obvious violence seen on the streets in the form of “crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict” whereas “objective” violence is the unseen form of violence that takes the form of either the “symbolic” (bound in language and its forms), or the “systemic” (the catastrophic consequences of our economy when it is functioning as normal). The very notion that this objective violence is unseen sustains the level with which we perceive something as subjectively violent.

I'm not really convinced by the Raincoat Optimist's application of this opposition to Red Toryism: he implies that just as Žižek's visible, subjective violence masks a deeper, more real but less visible violence, so Red Toryism's surface compassion masks a deep right-wing savagery. But of course the point of the rhetoric of compassionate Conservatism is to persuade us that radical social policies really are compassionate rather than savage. Just because Carl isn't convinced doesn't mean there's anything sinister in Red Tories trying to claim compassion for themselves. What interests me more, though, is whether anything Slavoj Žižek says or writes can sensibly be applied in any serious political context, and how it is that he has come to fascinate and beguile people.

Let's take this idea about violence. First, it isn't Žižek's idea at all. The idea that the systematic exploitation of the poor by the rich is a form of violence is an ancient Marxist standard, and something I remember leftist friends of mine saying twenty years ago and more. It has been revived most recently in 2007 by Naomi Klein, and Žižek has kept it warm long enough to produce another book. I understand why people protest about the way the world works - how people in poor countries are exploited by the better off so as to produce cheap clothes and commodities, sometimes at the risk of their health and lives, and how poor people at home are paying the price in unemployment of the banks' recklessness and the asset boom that made the middle class feel rich. I admire writers like Naomi Klein for doing the legwork of researching and showing how the system operates so that we have to face the truth of our world. But to stress the importance of injustice by renaming it "violence" is merely a rhetorical trick. It has no real significance but has the attraction, in common with many of the rhetorical strategies of postmodernist philosophers and cultural "theorists", of seeming to say something radical.

Žižek has a relatively serious side. You see it here when among Marxists, he argues for revolutionary politics today, in a way. I think. By the way, it's very interesting to see him, towards the end, defend himself against (presumably) accusations of sexism for having used a joke about rape.

But I think his serious side is unattractive. Take his latest piece in the LRB in which he argues - well, what does he argue? That Mousavi in Iran isn't a western-style reformer, and that Berlusconi is an authoritarian capitalist leader pioneering a type of pseudo-democracy that is spreading from Asia through Russia to the west. Well, he's right to be wary of Berlusconi, but wrong I think if he thinks Britain, Germany and the US are about to be Putinised or Berlusconied. I don't think he's saying a great deal apart from that, to be honest. But much of what he does say shows not so much a fear for liberal, western-style democracy, but a pleasure in undermining and debunking it:

... in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive. The problem of democratic legitimacy is homologous to the problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to make it seem that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call the ‘crisis of democracy’ isn’t something that happens when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, when they perceive that the throne is empty, that the decision is now theirs. ‘Free elections’ involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to grant it to them.

He seems to me to be wishing for something else. Or take this 2007 piece in the LRB in which he seems to praise Hugo Chávez:

It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And... he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed...

... and why I'm on "the left"

The website for Open Left, the new Demos project directed by James Purnell, asks us to submit our own views of what it means to be "on the left". I've submitted my own effort, which you can read here. Why I went on so much about noise and Islam, I've no idea but I think I've managed more or less to convey what I think are the most important issues for social democracy today.

I’m not sure I believe in a simple “left vs. right” model of politics. But I do think of myself as both a social democrat and a liberal, for a number of key reasons. Because I think there’s lots of avoidable suffering in the world, and I think the task of politics is to avoid as much of it as possible. Because I think greater equality is probably the best way to achieve that. Because I’m not instinctively repelled by the state, and government action. And because I think positive political change is only ever achieved democratically.

The "E-word", equality, seems to me the most important idea for social democrats - "the left" if you like - to think about and work on at the moment, in Britain in particular. We've become a much less equal society over the last couple of generations, but increasingly evidence shows that's a negative development in terms of our well-being. We need more equality - in my view lots more - and only the state can take action to achieve that.

Two words on the idea of "the left" itself, though. I'm not all that happy with the term because I think its vagueness allows people to identify themselves with it whose ideas are radically different. Revolutionary Marxists think of themselves as "on the left". So does George Galloway. So does Hugo Chavez. But my politics, and those of James Purnell, say, are so far from those people's views that to create a big label to cover us all is just pointless. It may be a taboo thing to say on "the left" but in truth my views are further away from those of, say, Alex Callinicos than they are from John Redwood. Democratic egalitarians, democratic socialists and social democrats are just a different species from leftist revolutionaries.

The second word takes me back to equality. For all sorts of reasons people in Britain stopped thinking it was respectable in the last couple of decades to argue for equality in a general sense - at least, they've thought it necessary to qualify any egalitarian sentiment they might express. They talk about equality of opportunity, equality of respect perhaps, or equal treatment, say, in certain respects such as on grounds of sex. But many people have been quick to reassure you that in arguing for some measure or aspect of equality, they don't of course mean equality of income. I think that's the wrong approach, and limiting. I know people who consider themselves "on the left" who are zealous in their opposition to racism and sex discrimination and very much want equality of opportunity but who when pressed do not argue for greater equality generally. That frustrates me; and I think the task for social democrats, in particular for Labour in Britain, is to shift the public debate so that arguing for greater equality in all respects becomes normal, and arguing for equality only in certain respects requires justification.

That's why like Stuart White I'm suspicious of James Purnell's idea, taken from Amartya Sen, of equality of capacity or capability. I want more equality, including much more equality of wealth and income. I agree with Jon Cruddas - which is why I'm more minded to support him for the Labour leadership rather than Purnell. I expect both to stand when there's a vacancy.

Is "base rate neglect" a load of tosh?

Matt Adams/CreativeCommons

Reading a blogpost from Chris Dillow about Kevin Pietersen led me via Wikipedia to a couple of interesting psychological hypotheses by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman about bias, and the way it affects our judgments. First, the "availability heuristic", which does seem to me to have some relevance to criticism of KP's approach to batting (and indeed Chris's whole theory seems to me neatly to explain why Pietersen's test record is so much better than that of Mark Ramprakash and Graeme Hick). Second, it led me to the "representativeness heuristic" or theory of "base rate neglect" as a sort of cognitive bias, and in particular a classic experiment that illustrates it: the "taxicab problem":

A cab was involved in a hit and run accident at night. Two cab companies, the Green and the Blue, operate in the city. 85% of the cabs in the city are Green and 15% are Blue. A witness identified the cab as Blue. The court tested the reliability of the witness under the same circumstances that existed on the night of the accident and concluded that the witness correctly identified each one of the two colors 80% of the time and failed 20% of the time. What is the probability that the cab involved in the accident was Blue rather than Green knowing that this witness identified it as Blue?

I instinctively thought the probability was 80%. Did you? Well, according to Tversky and Kahneman, we're wrong.

Most subjects gave probabilities over 50%, and some gave answers over 80%. The correct answer, found using Bayes' theorem, is lower than these estimates:

There is a 12% chance (15% times 80%) of the witness correctly identifying a blue cab.

There is a 17% chance (85% times 20%) of the witness incorrectly identifying a green cab as blue.

There is therefore a 29% chance (12% plus 17%) the witness will identify the cab as blue.

This results in a 41% chance (12% divided by 29%) that the cab identified as blue is actually blue.

All very scientific-looking. But I doubt it's even rational. There are many criticisms of the work of Tversky and Kahneman, so I'm far from the first. And I claim no expertise at all either in psychology or statistics. But as a lawyer and citizen I am concerned about the reliability of testimony, and I think common sense demolishes the theory - at least as it applies to the reliability of witness evidence. I have no problem with the relevance of base rates in identifying the risk of non-human tests coming up with false positives; and even in the field of human testimony I'm quite willing to admit I'm wrong - if someone can convincingly deal with the argument I set out below.

The flaw seems to me to be the use of Bayes's theorem to arrive at an objective measure of the probability of a certain state of affairs being true, disregarding what any observer might say about it - and then using that probability to evaluate evidence from an observer. I'm not criticising Bayes's theorem itself: this example about schoolkids, skirts and trousers seems to me a very good application of it. I agree: of course the probability of the child observed having been a girl must be 25%.

But the schoolkids example is not the same as the taxicab problem because in the schoolkids example we are not using Bayes to question the correctness of what the witness says she observed - but simply to assess the probability, taking the observation as given, of a further, unobserved fact. Applying the base rate neglect theory, the likelihood of the observer having seen a girl would be more than 25%, because the probability of the observer having seen someone in trousers in the first place would itself be less than 100%, since you'd need to take into account the "base rate" of 20% skirt-wearing.

But it's not necessarily right to take the base rate into account - and I think it may even be dangerous to assume that evidence should be evaluated in that way. I think this may be a misapplication of the Bayesian approach. Let me explain.

In real life, you don't know how reliable or not a witness is in statistical terms. You could do tests I suppose (and the taxicab problem makes it look easy to conduct them) but it'd be nearly impossible to conduct reliable ones. So you'd never actually have a quantifiable witness "reliability ratio" to apply. I suppose, though, you are left with your own assessment of the reliability of the witness both generally, and in relation to the particular sort of evidence she's giving. That's analogous to the 80% reliability ratio in the taxicab problem.

So, let's take another example. A girl in the Bayes school (the one with 40% girl pupils, remember) has her iPod snatched, she says by another girl. We think she's a pretty reliable witness: intelligent, observant and so on, and very determinedly telling us she knows what she saw. How shall we assess her reliability ratio, roughly? Okay, let's say 80%. But we also know that in the school concerned there are only 40% girls. So now, based on that, do we conclude that she's only 72% likely to be right? That's the figure I come up with, applying the Tversky and Kahneman approach. Maybe; that sounds fair enough, you're saying.

But what if this is the sixth form of Wellington, or something, and there are only relatively few girls - say, 15%. Our 80% reliable sixth-former says another female sixth-former snatched her iPod. Do we now reason as follows?

There is a 12% chance (15% times 80%) of the witness correctly identifying a girl (= blue cab). There is a 17% chance (85% times 20%) of the witness incorrectly identifying a boy (= green cab) as a girl. There is therefore a 29% chance (12% plus 17%) the witness will identify the thief as a girl. This results in a 41% chance (12% divided by 29%) that the thief identified as a girl was actually a girl.

No: that would surely be nonsense. It seems to me much more rational, and much less of an error, to apply the 80% reliability ratio we started with, and to leave the "base rate" of girls to boys out of account. And unless we do that, we might well conclude that, contrary to what the witness says she saw, the thief was in fact a boy - and the girl in the dock would be acquitted.

I think the problem with the Tversky/Kahneman approach is that it gives insufficient consideration to the quality of the evidence given. The taxicab problem masks this, by positing a situation where one colour of cab might easily be mistaken for the other. But in the real world the two categories to be told apart might be more easily distinguished - in which case, I think our assessment of the witness's reliability both generally, and especially in terms of making the specific distinction, becomes much, much more important than the background "base rate" at which the two categories occur among the population. They're not of equal weight: so multiplying one rate by the other causes distortion.

I think this illustrates that the very first multiplication is the root of the problem. We're told we must multiply 15% by 80% to arrive at the chance (12%) of the witness correctly identifying a blue cab. But the test already demonstrated that the chance of the identification being correct is actually 80%. To factor in some other ratio is to deny the validity of the test. It is to be irrationally biased against the witness, to the point of discounting statistical evidence of the witness's accuracy.

In other words, the first multiplication introduces a logical flaw because it forces us to evaluate evidence which, if you considered its reliability directly, you may conclude is of very high quality, in terms of a purely probabilistic calculation that leaves that evidence out of account entirely. You end up preferring partly statistical evidence to direct evidence, thereby underestimating the likelihood of a certain state of affairs. You end up believing the thief was probably a boy, even though this runs counter to the clear evidence of the only direct witness. You end up always thinking green taxis are the ones that run pedestrians over, even when the pedestrians always say the taxis were blue. Because it doesn't matter to you what they say.

By the way, the base rate neglect theory also seems to me to suffer from the problem of identifying the pool from which to extract the relevant base rate in the first place. If, say, our sixth-form witness says she was alone with the thief in the girl's loo at the time of the podsnatch, is the base rate of girls to boys now 100 to zero? Or should our judgment of whether the other person in the girl's loo was a girl still be influenced by the base rate of girls to boys in the school? Why not consider the 50-50 base rate in the town as a whole? Or does the base rate of girls' to boys' toilets come into account?

So, if a witness we believe can tell blue taxis from green 80% of the time says the only taxi in the street in question at the time of the accident was definitely blue, why should we think this untrue because of all the green taxis there are somewhere else?

Actually, I think Tversky's and Kahneman's test subjects were probably very sensible, and show why the jury system is good, and too much reliance on expert evidence is bad. The ones who thought the witness more than 80% likely to be right obviously got mixed up. But in real life, since witness reliability cannot be independently tested, it makes sense to discount your subjective judgment about a witness's reliability to some extent to take account of the base rate: that might well lead you to conclude, depending how credible you think her (or how much you trust the test result you're given), that she is somewhere between 50% and 80% likely to be right. Which is what most of them said.

If you remain unconvinced, let me leave you with another thought that may undermine your faith in the seductive maths of the taxicab problem. How did the court know the witness correctly identified the colour of cabs 80% of the time? Doesn't the assessment of the correctness of the witness's answer in the test also depend on someone's identification of each taxi as either green or blue? Doesn't that mean the base rate of colour distribution has to be taken into account in assessing the reliability of the tester, and so, ultimately, of the test? Doesn't it mean that, in deciding whether the hit and run accident was really caused by a blue taxi, you need to factor in the base rate not once but twice? It could all get frightfully complicated.

If you think the simple, decisive point is that someone responsible for the test says they're certain what colour each test taxi was - then I think you agree with me. What matters is not the rate of green to blue taxis in town but simply how reliable you think the tester's evidence is. Or anyone else's evidence.