August 28, 2010 · 12:32 pm

The incident

Most of you know what happened on April 16th; some of you were there. I haven’t mentioned it on the blog before now for legal and other reasons, but after this week’s events I feel happy to do so.

I wrote what follows a few hours after the incident. I’ve edited it only lightly.

I’ve read many times that in an emergency you sober up fast. True.

I’m writing this with a curious sense of calm that I know is suppressing a huge, violent, unstoppable rage. I’m feeling simultaneously very upset and, I know wrongly, somehow guilty for what happened. It’s not my fault, I know that. It was all too fast, a vague sense of trouble, a shout; but not enough, not enough. The replay is in slow-motion: plenty of time to warn everyone. You can’t help the if-onlys. But it’s done; you can’t stop it now.

I was walking with friends from my birthday meal at La Margherita to the Bird for more drinks. We were on the tree-lined path on Jesus Green between the lock and Victoria Avenue; about half-way along, unlit thanks to broken lamps. Two rows of us: me, John, Lee, Jimmy, Ali in the first; Mike, Matt and Lawrence behind us. It was 10.45.

I saw the cyclist coming towards us. Not uncommon: it’s a path used by pedestrians and bikes, and you keep out of each other’s way. But this one was barrelling down the centre of the path towards us at full speed; no lights that I remember. You expect common courtesy; you expect some degree of common sense; you expect the faster mover to avoid the slower, as that’s the way it’s done.

He just kept pedalling. About a second or two before he reached us I realised he had no intention of slowing or avoiding us; he was acting as if we weren’t there. I shouted to my friends: get off the path, out of the way. Row one did. But row two hadn’t seen him. Too late, too late.

I turned in time to see the bike hit Lawrence.

He lay on the path; I went over, saw blood coming from his mouth. He was not fully conscious. Ambulance, now, I shouted. Lee dialled 999.

It was a teenager on the bike; late teens I’d say. He remonstrated with us: we should have got out of his way. There were other teens there now; I don’t know where they came from, but some seemed to be associated with the cyclist. I shouted something about how the cyclist should have avoided us; “You want to shut your mouth mate,” one of the teens replied – or something like that.

A different me would have decked him and kept him there, or tackled the cyclist. I replay the scene now and I know I turned away: it was not the time to argue, to fight, to make matters worse. There was a deal of shouting, from us and from them.

And they were gone. And Lawrence was on the path, bleeding from his head. And Lee was on the phone trying to explain to a non-Cambridge resident exactly where we were so that the ambulance could find us.

We didn’t know which route they’d use. John went to Chesterton Road, Jimmy to Victoria Avenue. We were told there’d be a fast response team then an ambulance. We were told to keep Lawrence on his back; Mike, Matt and Ali took charge of that. I took guard duty as other bikes came along – not so fast, not so dumb but some equally unlit. And some gave me grief for telling them to slow their unlit bikes down on an unlit piece of path with a semi-conscious, bleeding man lying on it.

Blue lights on Victoria Avenue. An ambulance: pretty timely, but stopped on the roadside. Lee had followed Jimmy but we couldn’t tell whether they were with the ambulance crew. Ali headed that way too to check.

Now farce. The gates onto Jesus Green were padlocked and the crew didn’t have a key. Nor did they have any tools to break the lock. They’d have to get the police out.

It was 11.15 – half an hour after the incident – before two paramedics walked across the green to attend to the casualty.

Ali, Lee and Jimmy were extremely angry. Why didn’t the crew have access to the green? Why didn’t they appear particularly eager to attend what could be serious head trauma?

And it was only after examining Lawrence that they made the call to get the ambulance on to the green. Delay, delay, delay.

At last some action. Fire engine to open the lock (seriously); ambulance; police. I gave the police as much information as I could. But the path was unlit; I couldn’t identify the cyclist or even the type of bike he rode. Matt went in the ambulance with Lawrence; Mike followed in a taxi.

It became clear that Lawrence was in a bad way, worse than we thought at the time. On Monday the police took a statement from me, the first story appeared in the Cambridge News and I appeared on Anglia News. I got in touch with local activist Richard Taylor asking about the ambulance delay; he then wrote a blog post. The Cambridge News covered the same angle, and on Thursday Look East got in touch: my second TV appearance of the week, with Ali.

Lawrence was kept in an induced coma at Addenbrookes for a couple of weeks to help his recovery, and then spent more weeks in hospital recuperating.

Meanwhile the police very quickly and efficiently found some suspects, and eventually arrested and charged two teenagers; it was not the first trouble they’d caused that night. They pleaded guilty and were sentenced a few days ago. You can make your own judgement about the appropriateness of the sentences. Their names have been withheld as the boy on the bike was under sixteen at the time.

He could have hit me; he could have hit any of us. It could have been fatal. These thoughts have rattled round my head for several months now. Does the boy truly show remorse? What would I say to him if I met him? I don’t know. The rage is still there, somewhere.

The other emotion I feel about that night is pride: I am insanely proud of my friends for how they reacted, most of them having only met Lawrence that evening.

Happily Lawrence is now much better, and home with Matt – and fundamentally that’s all that matters.

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August 22, 2010 · 6:25 pm

I’ve started so I’ll – oh look, a squirrel

Ruts are cosy. Mine is decorated with indecisive wallpaper and unhung pictures. Half the floor is swept, the broom standing in a corner gathering dust, a duster to dust the broom lying alongside it in the unswept dirt.

I’ve lost count of the personal projects I’ve started and progressed and abandoned. Creative detritus that had life only when fermenting in my brain, expiring once expressed.

Curiously, work projects nag constantly at me; aeons ago at some offsite/jolly I was labelled a completer-finisher, and at work, that’s true. Last week I finished an on-and-off rewrite of a bunch of JavaScript, transforming – let me be charitable – an organically grown mishmash into 6800 lines of vaguely modern code that receives the silent blessing of jslint with some strict options. The original, cheddary code in question has been twitching my nostrils for a couple of years now; I’ve been tackling chunks whenever an opportunity arose.

At home, though, projects wither on the Avaragado vine. I wonder why that is – and, unsurprisingly, never reach a conclusion.

The front runner: finishing implies exposing whatever it is to the critical gaze of Others. I cannot fail if I do not complete – except, of course, the marathon runner who gives up after eighteen miles can hardly be said to have succeeded. Thus, perversely, by trying to avoid failure I guarantee it.

It’s odd, as – if I might tootle my personal trumpet for a moment – the things I accidentally manage to complete do not on the whole get me pelted with unsold-by flora and fauna and bin juice balloons. (Climate change denier trolls don’t count.)

Perhaps, then, the projects I toss unfinished into the dirty corner of my rut, by the broom and the duster, are simply those my subconscious insists are just not up to scratch. It’s hard to be sure. I do know, however, that – oh look, a squirrel.

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August 9, 2010 · 11:21 pm

Climategates

Perhaps this is just proxy angst on becoming an uncle for the first time. Perhaps it’s the dawning fortysomething awareness of life’s rollercoaster clanking over the summit. Perhaps Cynical Dave is on a pols-doncha-hate-em downer.

But, you know, we’re doomed, aren’t we?

Sixteen million people at latest estimate – two Londons – are affected by the floods in Pakistan. An area equivalent to about four Manhattans – some very large cocktails indeed, one hundred square miles of ice – has calved from the Petermann glacier off the coast of Greenland, in the largest such event since 1962. Moscow is currently enduring temperatures of 40°C with choking, slice-with-a-knife smog, and Russia has banned grain exports as a fifth of the harvest has been lost to fire (wheat prices recently hit a 22-month high). The first six months of 2010 have been the hottest on record. Indeed, each of the last three decades has been warmer than the decade before.

And slowly, quietly, the already weak agreements made at Copenhagen last year to begin to take some faltering steps towards hopefully starting the process of, if it’s not too much trouble, as long as we don’t step on anyone’s toes, perhaps reducing climate change or mitigating its effects, begin to be rolled back.

The focus of much of the media recently? A woman who wears dresses for a living testifying at the war crimes trial of someone most people have never heard of (this was the lead story on BBC News online all day, even as millions in Pakistan suffered). If not that, then Cameron’s latest alleged gaffe. Or the usual: house prices, immigrants, wheelie bins and/or Diana. Phew What a Scorcher stories, yes, but about the holy trinity of blonde, bikini and beach.

We can’t rely on politicians to fix the climate. They think short-term and are beholden to vested interests for funding and support. They won’t even stop the massive waste of resources that is junk mail, lest it interfere with the god-given right of a moron to try to sell conservatories to people who live in flats. Top-down will not work.

We can’t rely on the people to fix the climate. We are never going to give up our luxuries, our sweat-shop brands, our big gay holidays. Multi-coloured recycling bins won’t save the planet. Bottom-up will not work.

We’re doomed, then. Doomed to more floods, drought, fire, smog, fresh water shortages, pollution, dust bowls, failed crops, famine, disease, war. Civilisation fracturing and falling, just as we’re getting the hang of it.

Perhaps this is how all civilisations ultimately fail: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from tragic. Perhaps this is the solution to the Fermi paradox: nobody has visited us because all civilisations self-destruct, their technological towers unable to support their own weight. Standing on the shoulders of giants is all well and good – unless you’re the poor schmuck at the bottom.

Hawking says: we must go to the stars! Well, yes. But let’s be realistic. He’s talking about projects that need timescales we don’t have, political will we don’t have, and money we don’t have.

In an ideal world, a strong-willed political leader would allocate billions of dollars and as much brainpower as possible to competing, blue-sky research into new and more efficient energy sources, and into trying to deal with whatever damage we’re doing to the planet. There are, as far as I can see, no downsides for the nearly seven billion of us who aren’t oil company executives.

Sadly this is not an ideal world. Obama can’t do it because it would never pass: vested interests and their hired help in Congress would make sure of that. China has the money and the manpower, but it doesn’t have the will. Current events in Russia suggest Medvedev has the will, but he also has the oligarchs.

If not Obama or any other politician, then who? The most likely candidate: Bill Gates. He has the money. He sees the business opportunities of disrupting the energy industry. And he can’t be bought by vested interests. Gates spoke at the TED conference in February on the subject. It’s well worth twenty minutes of your time.

His original vision for Microsoft was fulfilled – a PC on every desk and in every home – and those devices now guzzle energy like there was no tomorrow, which is uncomfortably close to the truth. Today the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spends nearly as much each year on global health as the UN World Health Organisation. Gates’ legacy is already assured. But how much greater a legacy he could have: helping to wean the world off fossil fuels and, perhaps, saving the planet from its own dumb, selfish population.

Perhaps.

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August 5, 2010 · 7:24 pm

The Gayaway

That was a… unique week. I was holidaying with gaychums John and Roger at the Barbados Apartments in Playa del Ingles in Gran Canaria, an area described variously as Spanish Brighton or Disneyland for Gays (though Disneyland is pretty gay already if you ask me). I returned light of head, light of wallet and lobsterish of hue, with a blue-edged soul flecked with volcanic sand and the fag lag of New York time on the Gran Canaria clock.

Our days enjoyed noon-ish starts, late lunches, a couple of hours of gay beach, silent contemplation/internet, dinner at ten, partying until late/early, and bed. We never left the bars before 2am, and were dirty rotten stop-outs until 5am more than once. According to my extensive records this was the greatest number of consecutive late nights + drink + dancing I have yet experienced. And I enjoyed it. The novelty played a part I’m sure; the sun and heat too. Plus scenery of both landscape and portrait aspects.

The gay beach, to a first approximation, consisted of older, larger, leather-skinned Germans working on their all-overs, and younger, lightly bronzed gym residents with stomachs you could bounce 5ps on. Coming a distant third were the Persil-white Brits and Irish, embracing the empinkening with relish, beer and insufficient sunscreen. Poor John overdid it that first day and a shoulder blistered up. Memo: ice, not aftersun.

The fastest path to the gay beach crossed a stunning expanse of sand dunes. These have a capital-R-Reputation, of which we saw some evidence from a safe distance. A few weeks before the holiday I had a dream in which I said the words “meandering through the sand dunes of Sodom.” It made me wake up laughing. It also led our friend Ali to create a T-shirt for the holiday, which I’m ashamed to say I didn’t wear lest it be misconstrued. I might bring it out for special occasions.

The central gay area in Playa del Ingles is the Yumbo. Drab, sun-bleached tat-n-caff shopping centre by day, it transforms into gay bars, clubs and… other establishments after dark. A bizarre juxtaposition of trashy drag acts, presentably seedy leather-clad dancers, decidedly sleazy entrances into dens of unknown sordidness, and families with young kids wandering about at midnight. Funny lot these continentals.

We favoured La Leche, a light, open, breezy bar with milk-based decor, yer standard pop toons and the occasional live act. We also haunted clubs like Mykonos and Mantrix (less seedy than it sounds). We saw many of the same faces day after day wherever we went – a quintet of Dutch guys, including it seems the Milky Bar Kid himself, seemed to stalk our every move.

We didn’t dare visit Bunker, Gran Canaria’s self-proclaimed sleaziest establishment. The posters boasted/warned “anything goes”. I imagined a gruff Yorkshire-born manager running the place, slouched at the bar surrounded by gin and depravity with some form of jazz cigarette dangling limply from his lips, casting a lazy botoxed eye over the writhing dancers and occasionally crying out “Maureen! Maureen! Clean up in suckateria three!” to a long-suffering post-op assistant. There is, you might not like to know, a web site; it is unlikely to be safe for your workplace.

Our hotel was pleasant enough. Stamped gay-friendly on Thomson’s web site to ward off the loons, it was nevertheless virtually gay-empty on our holiday. A few twinks here, an ambiguous twosome there. Mostly Spanish families with holiday apartments decorated by blindfolded dustmen and Blue Peter competition winners and, oddly, a great number of straight Irish teenagers permanently on the cusp of being ejected by management for booze-related noisiness. One of them, in a conspiratorial whisper, asked me what I thought our swimming pool resembled. He agreed.

We found, to our surprise, a couple of decent restaurants. Not just resort-decent, but decent-decent. La Liguria just opposite our hotel was a fine Italian with freshly made pasta and other delights. Mundo, down the road, was oddly decorated but busy and equally excellent: when the waiter/proprietor recommends you don’t order something on the menu you know you’ll eat well.

I’m almost shocked to say I think I’ll return to the area again. A different time of year, though – gay high season, October to March – and it’d be fun to stay in an exclusively gay hotel if only for the lols. I might need a little recovery time first, though. And a flat stomach.

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July 5, 2010 · 8:57 am

Pride and no prejudice

I’ve said it many times: the key to acceptance is visibility. Casual racism stopped being acceptable in polite society – bar over a family Christmas dinner, all evidence indicates – when people made ‘openly black’ friends and realised that the tabloid myths were just that. So it is with queers, faggots and poofs, FTMs and MTFs, puppies and masters, bears, cubs, otters, twinks, bis, bois, ladyboys, gym bunnies, muscle marys and even those of a lesbianic disposition. We are all god’s children, for very small values of god.

Nowhere are these disparate flavours of humanity more visible than at Pride, which I attended for the first time at the weekend. I’d always thought of Pride as a festival of tack, a freak show, Invasion of the Mansnatchers. And, of course, it is: but, it turns out, gloriously, visibly so.

I attended Pride not as a spectator but as a participant, invited (with gaychums John, Roger and Vitaliy) by friends Rob and Jimmy to march, camera in hand, with the group Families Together London. No official role, just beefing up the numbers: the group helps parents, family and friends of LGBT people through what is often a confusing and scary time, and unsurprisingly many feel unable to join in with such events.

The parade route took us from Baker Street along Oxford Street and Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus, down to Pall Mall and across to Trafalgar Square, ending up in Whitehall. It’s a walk I won’t soon forget: through a long, snaking tunnel of spectators three, four or more deep, smiling, cheering, taking photos. Even cynical old Avaragado found it uplifting, exhilarating even, and more than a little moving. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it before.

Many highlights: the sheer number of gay couples in the crowd; the man who watched the parade from inside a phone box; the drag queen who danced the entire route near us and constantly posed for photos; the cheers; the surprising appearance of Peter Tatchell, banner in hand, standing by himself near the end of the parade route; and seeing people I knew in the crowd.

There were protestors, of course: some purple-faced proselytisers ranting from a safe, police-enforced distance. And a curious gentleman dressed in various manifestations of the red and white cross of St George – wig, cape, make-up, the works – who marched the route just behind us but seemed to be an interloper. Not sure what he was up to but his cape was covered in images of England footballers. He argued at one point with a few other marchers but was otherwise harmless and silent. Whatever: these things were insignificant, lost in the literal noise of celebration.

We marched for two hours or so; it was only at the end, as we left the crowds and descended back to Earth and reality, that my smile faded and my feet began lazily to ache.

The Pride party continued: Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square were both fudge-packed. Soho extended and embraced the entire West End. I suspect Grindr imploded under the load – as I can’t think of any other reason I received no messages.

It’s easy and simplistic to extrapolate from London at Pride to the rest of the world, or even to the rest of the country. During and after the march we were visible and accepted, therefore everyone is accepted everywhere. Not true. Some countries still suppress Pride marches. Some countries still imprison, beat, torture and kill gay people. There are still places in the UK where it’s not safe to be gay; still bigoted, powerful people who preach hate.

That’s what Pride is for. That’s what makes the sheer number of happy, cheering, accepting people in the crowd – straight and gay – so memorable, and so moving. Because it shows how far we’ve come, and reminds us how far we still have to go.

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June 28, 2010 · 7:41 pm

The coughing canary

I was too scared to come out in the 80s, too dumb to come out in the 90s, and already gaydead by the noughties, having hit thirty and therefore ceased to exist except in shadowy, wraith-like form – the film version would be called Logan’s Ring.

Jonathan Harvey’s new play Canary is no Logan’s Ring. It’s more Close Encounters of the Predictable Kind. Imagine a velvet bag full of the usual ‘gay drama’ tropes shaken and cast onto an Ikea coffee table and then transcribed directly into Final Draft and you’re 90% there.

Cliches are cliches because they’re true, of course, and the play is sufficiently true to life to spark a raw nerve once or twice – despite very little resemblance to my own history. It is, though, desperately predictable and hand-wringingly earnest.

There is a message, and the message is that gays have fought, and lost, and won, and lost, and won, and now are in danger of losing again. The story moves back and forth in time following a group of people as they struggle with events: the criminality of the 60s, the militant liberalism of the 70s, the confusion and fear of the 80s, and the complacency of the present day.

You will hardly be surprised to learn that AIDS features prominently. I confess I rolled my eyes when a character started coughing for no apparent reason; I half-expected a Pythonesque neon arrow labelled PLOT POINT to descend from the stage loft above him. This is a play with no time for subtlety.

We skip between eras so rapidly there is no chance to develop any character: the obvious things happen, and then we move on. Despite this some of these vignettes work well – the best feature ‘guest appearances’ from Mary Whitehouse and Margaret Thatcher – and I wonder whether the play started as a collection of sketches later stitched poorly together with Tesco Value plot threads.

The cast do uniformly well with what they’re given, all but one doubling or trebling up in different roles between which they switch with dizzying rapidity. Paula Wilcox, once a Liver Bird, plays scouse and Thatch. Ryan Sampson – a pocket thesp seen in Doctor Who a few years ago as an annoying American youth in the thrall of similarly pocket Sontarans – does well to slowly ramp up the camp in one role while also playing a striking 80s miner. Philip Voss (caution: 90s web design) drags up nicely as Mary Whitehouse; if only we could harness energy from her spinning grave.

The set is minimalist but very effective and necessarily versatile given the frequent scene changes and occasional periods in which two eras clash on stage.

I wanted to like the play, I really did. I enjoyed Harvey’s Beautiful Thing for what it was – a fairytale – despite the schmaltz. With Gimme Gimme Gimme and more recently Beautiful People he has modernised camp comedy on TV, even showing camp schoolboys without as far as I can tell incurring the wrath of the redtops. My disappointment with the play stems from the clunky stereotyping and plain lack of originality.

We are surely past the point where a gay play or film or TV show or soap plot is about gay rather than about people. Were this an educational piece for schools explaining the modern history of homosexuality in the UK it would be effective and might counter a deal of uninformed prejudice. As a night out for grown-ups who value character and plot and perhaps something new, unexpected and challenging, it’s lazy and, for me, it fails.

But hey, it has hot young actors in pants.

Avaragado’s rating: a small punnet of cherry tomatoes

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June 18, 2010 · 9:25 am

Untitled Mitchell and Webb sketch

INT. OFFICE – DAY

DAVID MITCHELL sits behind a desk, on which is a nameplate ‘Head of Sketches’. ROBERT WEBB enters and sits the other side of the desk.

WEBB
I’ve come about my sketch.

MITCHELL
Sketch.

WEBB
I sent you a sketch.

MITCHELL
Sketch.

WEBB
I emailed it? Floella Benjamin and the House of Lords and toys and things?

MITCHELL
I see.

WEBB
I was just wondering. Have–

MITCHELL
Have I read it? Did I lol? Was I roffling meow? Have I just recently undergone emergency surgery to reinsert all innards herniated via my split sides?

WEBB
Well. Yes.

MITCHELL
I see.

WEBB
So…

MITCHELL
Let me explain.
The secret of comedy is timing.
Play School was cancelled in 1988.
Nobody under 25 has heard of Floella Benjamin, or the Round Window, or Big Ted.
Brian Cant is simply an opportunity for an amusing typo.
I suspect, I fear, that this comedy boat sailed some decades ago.

WEBB
But–

MITCHELL
Now if you’d included some more up-to-date material, like a riff on the Miners’ Strike or even Westland Helicopters and Michael Heseltine…

WEBB
It is up to date. She’s been given a peerage. So it’s perfect timing.

MITCHELL
Only if your audience is the coveted 35-44 demographic nostalgic for Pages from Ceefax, Rupert Bear trousers and Jet Set Willy.

WEBB
Isn’t it?

MITCHELL
No it isn’t!

WEBB
So what’s this then?

MITCHELL
What?

WEBB
This sketch. Who’s this aimed at? It’s mentioned Play School, Big Ted, Brian Cant, the Miners’ Strike, Westland, Pages from Ceefax, Rupert Bear trousers, the Falklands and Jet Set Willy.

MITCHELL
The Falklands? I’m sure it didn’t.

WEBB
It did.

MITCHELL
When?

WEBB
Just now. Look, are you going to use it or not?

MITCHELL
The Floella Benjamin rubbish, or this one?

WEBB
This one.

MITCHELL
No. Send it to Mitchell and Webb. They love all that ‘meta’ bollocks.

END OF SKETCH

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May 21, 2010 · 3:39 pm

Mostly harmful

What a primitive world you humans inhabit.

A world in which the most successful at spreading fear and terror are those charged with the fight against fear and terror, who declaim solemnly that to secure freedom you must surrender your freedom.

A world in which a bewildered, misguided old man in a silly hat and a frock holds sway over a billion of you with his hate-filled, evidence-free invective.

A world in which having is fine, but sharing is not unless a complex set of criteria agreed by neither the giver nor the receiver are abided by, to the benefit almost entirely of the writers of the criteria and not those they claim to have written those criteria on behalf of.

A world in which statistical outliers and anomalies have massively greater influence over what happens than statistical likelihoods, resulting in death and destruction on a vast scale that, unlike the outliers and anomalies, is apparently entirely unnoteworthy.

A world in which the difference between truth and falsehood, between guilt and innocence, between libel and opinion and between fact and fiction is often measured in gold.

A world in which people are sometimes not allowed to know that they are not allowed to know.

A world in which belief in a mythical sky fairy endows legal rights to discriminate, and in which choosing not to believe in a mythical sky fairy, or in the most culturally appropriate mythical sky fairy, can result in a painful and premature death.

A world in which plenty is never enough, where your wealth is seemingly determined by people who are only interested in their own wealth betting other people’s wealth that your wealth will go up or down more or less than other people betting other people’s wealth think; and getting it wrong, and repeating it daily forever with nobody calling a halt to the madness for fear that all these people will bet all these other people’s wealth that your wealth will go down.

A world in which legislation to prohibit certain actions and stupidity trumps trust and common sense unless the acquisition of vast wealth via betting is involved, in which case trust and common sense trump legislation even where it is plain from experience that the people involved are untrustworthy and lack common sense.

A world in which the foolish and the gullible are neither protected nor educated but treated as prized markets to exploit.

A world in which the most fundamental, irreplaceable resources are mined, squandered, moulded and fashioned via the collective expertise of hundreds of generations, causing untold waste and pollution and permanently damaging the environment of the only planet you inhabit, then quickly discarded into large holes in the ground or thrown into the sea, all in the pursuit of wealth and frippery.

Time for the hyperspace bypass.

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May 12, 2010 · 3:45 pm

Thoughts on the coalition

I didn’t vote Liberal Democrat for a Tory government. I voted Liberal Democrat because I wanted a Liberal Democrat government.

But I’m not naïve. Despite those heady days when the polls went mad, and a couple of secret what-if moments shared between me and the BBC’s election prediction applet, I never truly expected Nick Clegg to end up as PM. The most likely outcomes were always either a hung parliament or a small-to-workable Tory majority, with a faint chance – given the vagaries of our current electoral system – of a Labour minority government.

I would have preferred the Lib Dems to enter a coalition or confidence-and-supply agreement with Labour, if possible, and without Gordon Brown as PM. The election result made this unworkable: Labour plus Lib Dem still wouldn’t make a majority. There was talk of a “rainbow coalition” including every man and his dog, but such a government wouldn’t last the year. Not the best way to achieve anything.

So the only feasible outcome, discounting an immediate second election that nobody wanted and only the Conservatives could afford, was a Tory/Lib Dem agreement of some kind.

Not ideal. It’s no secret that I think David Cameron is a fake, a PR man. I think George Osborne will blunder his way through the job of Chancellor. I fear Cameron dragging back Tory grandees who still have a thing for Margaret Thatcher. I fear a return to the bad old days of Section 28 and the Poll Tax, albeit in different, better-branded forms.

But, but, but. At least we don’t have the “strong, stable government” that Cameron craved: a sizable Tory majority. That’s the goal of all parties, of course. They want to be in control, to use their electoral mandate to pilot HMS Britain to port or to starboard according to their manifesto or newspaper baron of choice.

People want “strong, stable government” too, but not in the sense that political parties want “strong, stable government”. Parties want power; people want a better life for themselves and their families and friends. People want governments that do the Right Thing. People want fairness, honesty, respect.

We’ve seen the results of the party political version of “strong, stable government” that large majorities give us – Thatcher’s divisive, dictatorial 1980s and Blair’s war-mongering, fear-mongering 2000s. In the last thirty years we’ve now had just two changes of ruling party, counting this one. Eighteen years of Conservative government – “strong, stable government”, gradually weakening and festering into corruption, sleaze, decay, a step too far, a change of leader, in-fighting, and back-stabbing – followed by thirteen years of Labour government – “strong, stable government”, gradually weakening into corruption, sleaze, decay, a step too far, a change of leader, in-fighting and back-stabbing.

I don’t want that again.

It’s my belief that a coalition government would never have passed the Poll Tax, or Section 28, or ID cards, or railway privatisation, or PFI, or the Digital Economy Act, amongst other bad laws. A hung parliament by definition means no party has a mandate to ram through its own legislative agenda: it must work with others.

A coalition government by necessity dulls the sharp edges of party purity and rabid dogma. Like the memento mori of ancient Rome, in a coalition government the leadership is constantly reminded of its own mortality, its own limitations. Instinct might drive Cameron right; Clegg’s reminding whisper should hold him steady: the desire to keep his job will be strong. Clegg can bring down the government, and Cameron knows it.

Joining a coalition doesn’t mean selling out and abandoning your principles: it means compromise. It means sacrificing some of your stuff to get some of your other stuff done – and at the same time stopping some of the stuff you don’t want done from happening. I’m sure I won’t like everything the coalition does – but then I never expect to like everything a government of any colour does.

I might be wrong. Perhaps the Lib Dems are walking, smiling, into an abyss and David Cameron’s perception filter has fooled them all. Perhaps we’ll suddenly be at war with Eurasia again. Perhaps Nick Clegg is actually a cyborg sent from the future to prevent John Redwood again from learning Welsh. I don’t know.

But right now it looks as though the Liberal Democrats finally have a chance to implement some of their policies. If we’re lucky – very lucky – we’ll change to a fairer voting system. And at the next election people might vote for what they want, rather than in fear of what they might get.

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March 27, 2010 · 1:55 pm

Murdoch vs the asteroid

Sixty-five million years ago – or is it twenty – meganiches dominated the earth, lumbering across the landscape aiming themselves at men or women or teens. They were crude, ineffective monsters, clusterbombing their way to dominance. We’re now entering a new, hyperlocal era of a million overlapping niches defined by our myriad social circles. Precision bombing, laser-guided proto-rats target ever-tinier groups.

The late adopters to this new world are the large media conglomerates like News Corporation.

Only a dinosaur like Rupert Murdoch would think that he could charge a pound a day for a generalist, biased, self-publicising news service online – the same price, you’ll note, as the dead tree version of The Times. I’m convinced this will fail and fail spectacularly.

There’s a well-established buying hierarchy: functionality, reliability, convenience and price, in that order. Given two products, buyers prefer the one with more functional benefits to them; if there are no differences, they prefer the more reliable; then the more convenient; and finally the cheaper of the two. Functionality, reliability, convenience, price. The first three are subjective: a book shop infected with Starbucks is objectively “more functional” than one without, but if I don’t want coffee™ the difference doesn’t matter and they’re functionally equivalent to me.

In the software world, this hierarchy means people put up with shoddy user interfaces (inconvenience) and crashing (unreliability) if the software itself does more of the things they want it to do. And they’ll pay for it. People buy iPhones not because they’re functionally and reliably better than other, cheaper phones but because they’re subjectively good enough in those areas, and much easier to use.

Non-free products beat free products only if they are more functional; or equivalent but more reliable; or equivalent but more convenient. That’s why people still buy Flickr Pro accounts even though they could use Flickr for free. It’s why people still buy Microsoft Office even though OpenOffice is free.

So how would the super soaraway pound-a-day Times stack up?

Let’s say I’m looking for entertainment news online. A site like Digital Spy, flawed though it may be, has more functional benefits to me than The Times will: it targets a smaller niche. The Times might be more reliable and more convenient (all news in one place) but it fails on functionality. Digital Spy could in theory charge for access: but that would fail since other sites are equally functional, equally reliable and equally convenient – and cost nothing.

How about political news? There are hundreds of sites for that, ranging from generalist (eg BBC News) to specialist (eg TheyWorkForYou) to official sources (Parliament). The Times fails on functionality for all but the generalist case; and in that case, the BBC’s site, for example, is either more reliable (unbiased, no Murdoch influence) or more convenient (easier to find things, no adverts) or cheaper (the licence fee per day costs less than The Times’ cover price and gives you much more than just online news). The Times has political columnists that add value; but I can read blogs for free.

People will pay for specialist news, for timeliness, for exclusivity and a few others: these are all functional benefits. They’ll pay for general news on a mobile: that additional functionality (and also convenience) trumps free. They won’t pay for general news online.

It’s fascinating that the lumbering, meganiche conglomerates can’t or won’t see it. But this is entirely common and predictable. The telegraph companies didn’t see the telephone as a competitor. TVs would never be able to compete with cinema, nor would digital cameras ever displace film. Even today the vendors of CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs still graze diplodocally on ancient grassland even as the world moves shrewdly online.

And the Berners-Lee Asteroid has barely impacted the surface.

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