Love and Liberty

This article comes in two versions: in depth here, and the supercompressed version published as part of Lib Dem Voice’s Lessons From Coalition series.

All governments depend on events – some, like the LiberaTory Coalition, coming in when events were especially bleak. No lesson can predict all political outcomes. But whatever the economic and political weather, some lessons are plain.

The two biggest problems for any future coalition will be the breakdown of trust between the voters and the coalition parties, and the breakdown of trust between the coalition parties themselves. The Liberal Democrats have learned that all too well.

We know what the flashpoint issues for each during the current Coalition that still say ‘bitterness’ and ‘betrayal’ to many, too: tuition fees and Lords reform. On both, ugly reality got in the way of how coalitions ought to work. The challenge is to learn from them in order to foresee and avoid similar events – if we don’t find solutions to both problems, any future coalition will suffer the same poison.

If It Won’t Work, Walk; But If It Will Work, Walk In

We should aim to achieve things in government – that’s what a political party’s there for.

The theory of forming a Coalition is sound. If we don’t win a majority and no-one else does either, the Liberal Democrats must negotiate with other parties – ideally playing them off against each other to get more of what we want, if the votes tumble evenly enough to give us that chance. It’s the worst option apart from all the others. We should always oppose a ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement, which means nearly all the blame for none of the power to do anything. That leaves two options: a coalition, yes or no. For a political party rather than a debating society, the choice is straightforward. We should drive as hard a bargain as we can. If it’s impossible to reach agreement on enough of our priorities, we must be prepared to say no. But the corollary of that is that we must be prepared to say yes, too, if we can form a stable government with another party that delivers enough of our aims. When I spoke in favour of endorsing the LiberaTory Coalition, I was under no illusions, and neither was anyone else in the hall:

“Maybe it is the worst possible time to take power. But I don’t want us to wait until I’m wheeled into Conference aged 78, in another 40 years, to say, ‘Well, the economy’s crashed again and at last we’ve got another hung Parliament. Maybe we should try it this time’.”

From the platform, Vince Cable made a similarly practical point:

“It’s going to be bloody awful. But it’ll be less awful because we’re there.”

It’s never going to be easy, but it’s in the national interest – and it’s simply what a political party is for.

The Lib Dem Voice regular polling question ‘Would you rather form a coalition with Labour or Conservative?’ is based on a completely mistaken assumption. I’d rather we form a government on our own. If the voters don’t give us that, I’m still a Liberal Democrat, and I don’t follow the media narrative that I must be ‘really’ Tory or Labour, push comes to shove. I dislike both of them. My answer is not that I want to be a bit Labour or a bit Tory, but that I’d go with the one that’s prepared to be the most Lib Dem. Whichever way round they go, we should partner the party that compromises and not the one that’s arrogant enough to just demand we join them. That’s the principle; the simple common sense reason is that to prefer one side in advance is essentially an endorsement, one that sends voters streaming away to whichever side we’ve given the nod to before the election and loses all bargaining leverage afterwards.

2010 is the only case study we have. I’ll never like the Tories either, but the tiny band who pretend we should have formed a coalition with Labour (and Uncle Tom SNP and all, and still not got a majority) after the last election were out of touch with reality then and have rewritten history since. Both the number of seats that the voters gave to each party and the Labour Party’s own ‘negotiations’ made a coalition with Labour impossible – but I also remember what the Labour Party did with thirteen years of absolute power and saw them as no better than the Conservatives. I didn’t forget the war-mongering, evidence-sexing, amnesia-promising, freedom-crushing, LGBT-hypocrisising, rich-brownnosing, poor-taxing, crony-bribe-swallowing shameless Labour Government overnight in favour of a starry-eyed childish fantasy image of the ‘nice’ Labour Party that bears no resemblance to their continuing record. And I remember what they offered as the price of coalition: bugger all.

Next time will be different in ways we can’t know. The Tories may well prove ungovernable; Labour may realise that they can’t demand absolute power when more than seven out of ten voters oppose them. But there’s a simple lesson from 2010 about how to negotiate. Labour did not offer a Coalition. It demanded a mass defection. Despite the Lib Dems getting our second-biggest vote since 1928 and Labour their second-worst vote since 1918, Labour’s sense of entitlement pretended that they had the right to keep everything they wanted and Lib Dem voters should get nothing. Despite Labour winning eight and a half million votes to the Lib Dems’ seven million, they expected all Lib Dems to suddenly join the Labour Government to vote for everything we’d previously opposed, because our voters being 83% as numerous as theirs didn’t count. Well, that was a ‘privilege’ it was easy to turn down. There is no point whatsoever in joining a government only to do exactly what the other party would do anyway – otherwise, we’d all have taken the easy road and just joined one of the others years ago. One lesson for Labour from the LiberaTory Coalition is that the Lib Dems are not their battered spouse. As Andrew Hickey said most pithily, we are not Labour’s back-up plan.

The Tories had a larger vote still – ten and a half million – but they weren’t so tribal as to insist only their votes counted… Not when they didn’t have a majority, anyway. Of the four main priorities on the front cover of the Lib Dem 2010 Manifesto, the Tories agreed to three and a half of them (though the ‘half’ has since crumbled further), and Labour none of them. The main advantage of talking to Labour turned out to be that even the Tories couldn’t believe how arrogant Labour would be and assumed that they, too, must be bargaining in good faith, giving a boost to the Lib Dem-Conservative negotiations. I vividly remember self-important Tory grandee Sir Malcolm Rifkind complaining all over the TV that the Lib Dems were “harlots” for talking to Labour as well, a Tory predictably failing to comprehend so-called Tory principle of free-market competition to get the best deal.

So the theoretical lesson is that, short of a Lib Dem majority, the best outcome for the Lib Dems at the next election would be genuinely holding the balance of power (as we didn’t quite last time), with both other parties so hungry for power that they offer big compromises – like the Tories in 2010, only more so. That would give us the most power to bargain, and to choose the partner that would enable the greatest share of our Manifesto. The worst would be for the voters again to give us only one realistic choice, and for both others to behave like Labour in 2010 and offer nothing. Then I hope we’d have the guts to walk away.

Unfortunately, reaching even a good deal on paper is where the problems really start.

Compromise or Betrayal?

Voters don’t trust parties to do what they promise. Most of all, they don’t trust us.

The Coalition Agreement was a decent programme for government. The Liberal Democrats didn’t win the election. Fortunately, neither did anyone else. That gave us a chance at last to put some of our Manifesto into action after nearly a century of none of it. The LiberaTory Coalition promised government by principles of freedom, fairness and responsibility, all sounds Liberal ideals. We’d constantly made clear what our priorities were before the election, and three and a half of those four main priorities written on the front of the Liberal Democrat Manifesto were being delivered. Even in Coalition Government, even after Labour blowing the economy to bits and leaving an incredible debt to repay, and even having to compromise with the Tories over what they want to do, the Liberal Democrats have still put our own distinctive stamp on good things from government, not just lessening the bad. Raising the income tax threshold and cutting taxes for 23 million ordinary working people. The Pupil Premium to help out poorer schoolkids. Not just a stronger but a fairer economy, tackling the banks, record numbers of apprenticeships, green jobs and the new Green Investment Bank open for business. And tiny baby steps that soon tripped up on more open politics. Win-win-win-OK, lose a bit on the last one, surely?

Well, we all know what happened next. Somehow the narrative is almost entirely that to get nothing, zip, zero, nada done and help no-one at all would have been principled, while getting stuck in and delivering quite a lot of what we wanted to do is a betrayal. No-one’s interested in looking at policies as a whole: that’s too much effort. No-one complains when we moderate what the Tories want to do (despite the best efforts of baying Tory MPs who actually see what’s going on). But for the Lib Dems to make compromises in some areas to achieve wins in others is an unforgiveable sell-out. The irony, of course, being that this is the corrosive attack by Tory and Labour Parties who have identical policies on tuition fees, the Lib Dem effect on which was to make them far fairer to poorer students (and poorer graduates).

Without a way to challenge the idea that any compromise is betrayal, it’s hard to see how any future coalition can work, either.

In retrospect, David Cameron’s cleverest move in the Coalition negotiations was to have the nous to put his foot down and say the new government would have to keep his expensive but explicit promises, like protecting handouts to millionaire pensioners, even when they weren’t key commitments of the Tory Party itself. And Nick Clegg’s was to be willing to bargain away expensive personal promises because they weren’t at the top of the Lib Dem Manifesto. We all know by now how devastating the effect of Nick breaking his tuition fee promise has been, however improved the real as opposed to the political outcome.

The problem even for negotiations is that voters regard Labour and Tory as opposites and Lib Dems as somewhere in the middle – according to taste, a moderating or a blandifying influence. This is something Nick Clegg has done his best to amplify. It’s not enough on its own. It gives only weakly negative reasons to vote for us, when even Nick in the early days of the LiberaTory Coalition knew that it wasn’t enough to hold each other back, but to achieve big positive things, too. And it’s actively dangerous to future negotiations. It does nothing to explain our poor bargaining hand on the many, many issues where the other parties are identical and we oppose both: most famously, raising tuition fees, but also wasting billions on Trident and, increasingly for the Tories as they move back towards Labour’s far right position, attacking civil liberties.

The best case that can be made with this message is that the Liberal Democrats are in Coalition with the relatively moderate side of the Tory Party and pulling them to greater moderation in the process. While shrieking ‘Traitor!’ for the Lib Dems being an independent party and not their possession, Labour see no contradiction in voting again and again and again with the far right of the Tory Party to make politics more rabidly authoritarian. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t that no-one else sees the contradiction in that, either, because it simply doesn’t fit the narrative that Labour’s illiberal gut instincts are just as extreme as the Tories’.

Agreements Are the Start, Not the End

Parties don’t trust each other to keep to their agreements. Most of all, we don’t trust either of the other two.

If Labour were the more unbearable immediately after the election, a large proportion of the Tories have been making up for lost time in the Coalition itself as their own sense of entitlement grows. And not just the far right MPs who are irreconcilable to any compromise with the Coalition, with their own Leader, or with reality, but – more subtly though in many ways more damagingly – many of the Tory Ministers who in theory are loyal to the Coalition. So what would be the point of making another Coalition Agreement with Mr Cameron if we know from experience that his Leadership is too weak to deliver on his fine words?

Both the letter and the spirit of the Coalition Agreement have slowly withered. A lesson from the LiberaTory Coalition is that agreement on policy at the start is not enough. For two inevitable reasons, any unequal coalition government will get more like the larger party as it goes along: the initial agreement will run out of steam as (and if) it gets delivered; the larger party having the mass of ministers will be able to respond day-to-day to events to its own tune. And those inevitables aren’t all. Large swathes of written promises and more of the principles on which the Coalition was proclaimed have simply not been delivered.

The LiberaTory Coalition has tested if the Lib Dems really meant our Opposition rhetoric about co-operation; through gritted teeth and pain, it turns out we do. It’s also tested if the Tories really meant their Opposition rhetoric – and their signed-up Coalition Agreement’s explicit promises – about the environment, freedom and decentralisation. It turns out they don’t. George Osborne consistently undermining a greener government, Theresa May’s indistinguishable-from-the-Labour-Party authoritarianism and Eric Pickles micro-managing every local council to his own bizarre prejudices only the biggest examples of Tory Ministers simply chucking the LiberaTory Coalition’s founding principles in the bin.

More openly, there’s been a repeated pattern of Lib Dem MPs faithfully voting through some horrible compromise closer to what the Tories wanted, then Tory MPs voting against the more Lib Dem-agreed proposals or Tory Ministers simply dropping them. Part of this is because the Lib Dems agreed to the Coalition en masse, while only the Tory high command ever gave their word. Part of it is simply that it’s in the Lib Dems’ long-term interest to show that Coalition can work, and in the Tories’ long-term interest (if not in David Cameron’s, who can’t afford to lead a failed government) to show that Coalitions fail. Polling may show that more voters believe the Tories haven’t kept to the deal, but I suspect they also don’t care. The “Betrayal” label still belongs to the Lib Dems.

This doesn’t mean that Labour have been blameless in Opposition. More headless. Labour’s years of shrieking fury against the Lib Dems for having the temerity to be a separate party, where they flung shamelessly homophobic abuse at the Coalition and voted against everything they claimed to support simply out of mouth-foaming hatred and a desire to see the Coalition fail, have made them – as under George W Bush – soulmates of the US Republican Party in its obsession with wrecking anything to do with President Obama, even if that means wrecking America.

It all throws into sharp relief the problem with Coalition Agreements. What happens if the other party simply breaks the agreement? Like tuition fees for the voters’ sense of betrayal, one totemic issue was the breaking point. David Cameron agreed to Lords reform, but a large pack of his MPs are feral animals who will vote against him, let alone against us. The Labour Party has pretended to support Lords reform for a hundred years, but on the one single occasion that an elected Lords was on the verge of being delivered in that time, not just a feral faction of them but the entire Labour Party collectively voted to defeat its own principles because, like spoilt teenage bullies, they couldn’t bear anyone else to get the credit. As on so many issues that they claimed to support in principle, in practice they treated Lords reform as a political football, with them as Lucy van Pelt. I don’t know which is worse, but I do know that that day made it seem impossible for the Lib Dems to trust either party in 2015.

Is There Any Hope For A Future Coalition?

The Lib Dems can’t just sit back and hope that press, public or other parties will all suddenly decide to treat us fairly.

That isn’t to say that others may not change their minds in a more helpful direction. To be fair to our opponents / dubiously potential partners, there are straws in the wind that each other party may be stepping back from the abyss, if not quite becoming creatures of reason and principle. To Ed Miliband’s credit, in recent months he’s finally been grown up and passed up opportunities to cut off his nose to spite his face (on, for example, Europe and mostly-equal marriage). It’s too early to say if this means the end of Labour’s all-consuming hatred, but it’s a start. And to David Cameron’s credit, he appears to be realising that he’d have to get his party to commit themselves in another hung Parliament as the Lib Dems did, rather than leave himself exposed when he leads and they choose later not to follow. But faced with two such major problems looming for any future coalition, we need to find our own solutions too.

The Lib Dem Leadership’s ‘we are the middle’ answer appears to be to abandon the big ambitions of either Lib Dem policies in general or even of the early days of the LiberaTory Coalition. It’s at best a sort of judo, to let the other two parties stand for something and then try to turn standing for anything against them by saying ‘Well, we don’t know what we want to do, but we’ll stop them getting that.’ To me, a Manifesto that doesn’t promise anything much that distinguishes us from the other two may guard against betrayal, but it doesn’t give people much of a reason to vote for us in the first place. It also seems to be tacitly accepting in advance that neither of the others can be trusted to vote for any of our own programme, and that all we can hope for is for them to get their own, just not as much as they’d like of it.

I don’t have all the answers, but here are three proposals for a start:

• To help define ourselves and our bottom lines, pick an enemy. Announce firmly and repeatedly that we would not enter any coalition of which UKIP is a part, and mean it. It’s not likely they’ll get enough seats for that to be a runner anyway, but they have a distinct image that both Tories and Labour are afraid of confronting. UKIP are our opposite: openness vs insularity; diversity vs bigotry; looking to the future vs complaining their way back to an imaginary 1950s. By defining them as extreme and standing against them, we get the rare bonus of making ‘moderate’ also ‘principled’ – as well as making it clear that there are some places we won’t go, and that we won’t just sell ourselves to anyone.

• We never know how much money any government will be able to spend – but it’s a safe bet that in 2015 the answer will still be ‘probably not much’. That means we should only make a small number of tightly focused, red-line expensive promises. But there are things we can shout about that don’t cost money – or even that save it. Make freedom more central to our commitments. That way we make money-saving more positive by not wasting money on more security-state bullying, and can show a powerful extra reason to oppose the others’ authoritarian splurges when cash is so tight.

• Any new Coalition Agreement should have explicit sanctions if a party doesn’t stick to it. As the institutional power of Ministers is at least as big a drag away from any agreement as an open rebellion, how about for every Parliamentary vote lost due to one side’s MPs, that side loses a Minister to the injured party? Even if that would be too frightening for them to sign up to, it might concentrate their minds on a better deal in the first place.

Labels: Blogs, British Politics, Coalition, Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Nick Clegg, UKIP, What the Lib Dems Stand For

Sometimes you find a Liberal quotation in a book, a speech or a politician you know. Sometimes you find a Liberal quotation in a Dictionary of Liberal Quotations when your a-bit-too-occasional-lately series needs kick-starting. And sometimes you find a Liberal quotation in a cinema and scrabble for a bit of paper while trying not to grind too much popcorn into your pocket. That’s how to go from Lord Dahrendorf to Simon Pegg on a pub crawl, finding they’ve got more in common than you might think. Spoilers for the movie follow later…

“It is our basic human right to be fuck-ups!”

My previous Liberal Monday put together three quotations from respected academic, politician and peer Ralf Dahrendorf into a critique of utopia, a theme close to my heart. On an in-between Friday, Richard and I went to see the new Simon Pegg-Edgar Wright comedy drama The World’s End. I’d loved most of their previous work; I grew up reading and still love the sort of John Wyndham / Nicholas Fisk / John Christopher-esque ‘cosy catastrophe’ that I’d heard the movie was to open up into. And, obviously, I love Cornettos. What I was less expecting was for The World’s End also to morph into ‘Ralf Dahrendorf: The Movie’ (spoiler: may not contain actual Dahrendorfs. Other movie spoilers will be less prominent than my latest move to spoil the concept of utopia).



The World’s End is a less approachable film than, say, Hot Fuzz, and will probably make less money: it might make the audience ask difficult questions of itself, the paradox shared by many ‘cosy catastrophe’ novels that, at heart, they make you uncomfortable. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s another excellent reason for you to go and see it anyway. It’s been called a film about growing up, but it’s less dreary and more complex than that – with themes about consequences, and choices, and that while it may be better for you to grow up and better yourself and that the opportunity to do so is important, when you have all that imposed on you it’s really not worth it. And by the end it’s as explicitly anti-utopian film as any. Which is exactly where it chimes with Liberalism, those Ralf Dahrendorf quotes, and my sudden need to dig out a piece of paper and a pen in front of the big screen.

I left sixth-form in 1990 to a similar soundtrack to the lead characters in the film’s opening flashback, which struck the first of several eerie notes with me (though the flashbacks on grainy film are the sort of flashbacks people having grown up to turn 16-18 at that time would imagine, if it was really a flashback to 1990 it’d be on cheap video. But I digress. The digression in this paragraph is merely a device to separate the spoiler at the end. Honest). Some of you may know that drinking isn’t one of my many vices, so my only pub crawl was a year or three later, in the unlikely circumstances of being stranded in London after a business meeting (due to IRA bombs shutting down London Transport). This involved a friend who I worked with at the time going round a long assortment of pubs he wanted to check out while wearing identical pink ties (Tony was the straight one, and camper), with him sinking pints and me on fruit juices and the occasional absurd liqueur (I’d have thought it rude only to ask for tap water). The point of this anecdote is partly to express the movie-appropriate nostalgia that I’d like to get in touch with him, and the also movie-appropriate worry that he’d give me Nick Frost-face these days. But the main point of the anecdote is that, after a business meeting in Kensington, our crawl wound round Chelsea and Fulham and, inevitably, centred on The World’s End.

Spoilers. Liberal Bits. Ready?



The big reveal towards the end of the film is that the reason our heroes’ home town has been repopulated with very slightly higher-achieving Stepford people is that benevolent but disapproving aliens have decided that Earth is the least civilised planet in the galaxy (with a disapproving Polly Toynbee-esque chart to prove it). They’ve come to give us the opportunity to stop being such a blight on local spiral arm property prices, and to serve Alien Spitting-image Behaviour Orders on us if we don’t co-operate with the opportunity.

Yes – it’s New Labour From Space.

“Face it! We are the human race and we don’t like being told what to do!”

It turns out that we don’t like being forced to conform even if conformity can be shown to make things better against recognised galactic standards – with charts – though I suspect the percentage of those refusing to conform shows a slightly optimistic view of human nature. Less optimistically but chiming right in with my own prejudices, the attempt to impose a top-down utopia and sulky withdrawal causes massively more problems than the fuck-ups it was intended to ‘solve’.

The very end of the coda also displays in hearteningly simple form the difference between Liberals and UKIP: a fuck off to enforced utopia; but emphatically not a fuck off to aliens.


[Additional joke critique: Richard rightly points out that “Fuc-King Gary” would have been funnier, while I couldn’t believe that they didn’t knock over Chekhov’s roundabout sign.]

Labels: Books, Comedy, Film, Ideas, John Christopher, John Wyndham, Liberal Mondays, Liberalism, Nicholas Fisk, Personal, Reviews, Simon Pegg, The End of the World, The World's End, Utopia

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… This one’s from 1980, towards the end of three years starring Tom Baker, K9 and Romana. It’s a brilliantly designed, directed and scripted story, a fiercely intelligent evolutionary fable. The allegory of ‘revealed truth’ versus awkward questions and the morality of siding with the underdog are close to my heart. But for all the great dialogue, thought-provoking revelations and the Doctor’s moral passion, deep down the moment that most gets me is still the thrilling monster reveal. When Mistfall comes, the giants leave the swamp…

“Master. Alert.”

Doctor Who’s Eighteenth Season, broadcast from 1980 to 1981, has long been one of my favourites for its ideas and scientific fairy tales (in this case, great work from writer Andrew Smith and lead writer Christopher H Bidmead), as well as for suddenly stunning visuals and music. In the run-up to my Fifty, I selected Eleven Great Cliffhangers and wrote that this season has arguably Doctor Who’s most sustained run of terrific episode endings, with two stories in particular having outstanding cliffhangers every time. This is the other story for which that’s true: the climaxes to Parts Two and Three are brilliant as well, but you can’t beat a great monster moment.

Strange creatures rising from beneath the water are among Doctor Who’s most striking repeated cliffhanger images. First and perhaps most iconically, a Dalek emerging from the Thames in The Dalek Invasion of Earth; the Silurians’ amphibious cousins in The Sea Devils were excitingly captured for me in prose and photos on the page long before I saw their story; the Haemovores in the terrific The Curse of Fenric; if you’re unlucky, River Song. The Marshmen revealing themselves as they leave the water at the end of Full Circle Part One are for me the most memorable of the lot – perhaps because of the atmospheric direction, perhaps because of their monstrous design, perhaps because of the eerie spiralling music that accompanies them. Or perhaps simply because I was at the right age for this to be the first such scene I was able to see on TV.

For once, the sun came out for the location shoot, making the planet Alzarius seem much more alien – to British viewers – and the production much more lush. The Doctor’s vivid red outfit stands out so gorgeously against the vivid green that Richard Briers took this vibrantly exotic image for expensive tropical filming; the sudden murk of Mistfall becomes that much more of a contrast.

The citizens of the Starliner are used to gathering in food from around the great lake, but it’s the food itself that provides the first portent: strange tiny life growing within the marshfruit. Soon the lake itself is bubbling and something beneath the water is grabbing at the skinnydippers. Bearded patriarch Decider Draith announces the coming of Mistfall, the semicentennial Judgment Day during which his people are commanded to huddle within their centuries-broken spaceship, waiting for the deadly mists outside to pass over. Not all of these truths are true… And not everyone is following the commandments. Inquisitive strangers have arrived in a blue box from far further than the Starliner came before its crash on Alzarius, while teenage rebels define themselves by refusing shelter – “Outlers” – one of them even an Elite who ‘should’ be destined to be a Decider, Adric. Draith pursues his protégé, but rather than successfully bringing him back to the fold, the Decider is knocked into the lake and dragged under the water. Adric flees, taking with him Draith’s last warning, and collapses on running into the TARDIS. The Doctor (Tom Baker) and robot dog K9 (John Leeson) go out to the lake to investigate the legends…

The first major clue to the theme of the story – aside from Draith telling his head scientist that he has all the answers the other man seeks, but it would be blasphemy to divulge their ancestors’ secrets to him – is that after all we’ve heard about Mistfall, K9’s analysis instantly debunks it: the billowing fifty-year-recurring fog is non-toxic. So is this just propaganda to remind citizens never to stray from the Starliner? Or is there something else out there they shouldn’t mix with – and is it a physical, a moral or an existential threat?

As the Doctor kneels with K9 to study the marsh, the mist thickens and the lake heaves… K9 alerts the Doctor to potential danger, and the people of the marsh break the surface of the water, approaching the land. The slightly Creature From the Black Lagoon-ish Marshmen designs were one of the best-realised ‘monsters’ the series had created for some years, and Peter Grimwade’s direction gives them a magnificent introduction, swaying and dripping in slow motion in a great return to Doctor Who for scaring the kiddies.

The other contribution that really makes it for me is composer Paddy Kingsland, whose first full score for the series is a triumph, especially here when a spine-chilling motif builds the tension by circling higher and higher until the titles crash in to end the episode. The cliffhanger is cut at just the right moment to leave you wanting more, and if you follow through into the next episode, it offers more: rather than the howl of the Doctor Who Theme’s cliffhanger sting, as the Marshmen fully emerge from the swamp and stride onto land to open Part Two the eerie chiming music evolves into harsh electric guitar power chords for the developing peril.

As I’ve sometimes written, I enjoy film and TV scores but have no musical training and little musical vocabulary, which is why I think in metaphors such as “spiralling”; a person who does know a bit is John Toon, whose blog Doctor Who Electronica – 50 Scores in 50 Weeks for the 50th Anniversary is keeping up much better with its intentions than my own Fifty. He has this to say on that cliffhanger moment:

“A repeated seven note phrase plays over scenes that relate to Mistfall or that feature revelations about the Alzarian life cycle. The end of Part One, as the Marshmen emerge from the water, is a notable example. The notes rise and fall cyclically within the phrase, and the phrase itself rises across repetitions, as if emphasising the upward climb of Alzarius' super-evolving lifeforms. ‘The Ascent of Marshman’, we might call it.”

Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – The Power of Kroll

I wrote last time about the brilliance of Robert Holmes’ writing for Doctor Who. His last story in his ten years as a regular scriptwriter featured the same team of the Doctor, Romana and K9 – though a different Romana to the regenerated Time Lord seen in the other two stories I feature today. 1978’s The Power of Kroll doesn’t entirely play to Mr Holmes’ strengths: told to take out the jokes and put in a giant monster, he gives us an alien world whose green-skinned people show more buttocks than Torchwood and whose history of exploitation is a mash-up of Native Americans, Irish nationalism and, as you’re about to discover, the subtle tribal characterisation of King Kong. At least when Kroll the massive tentacled beastie does eventually rise from the depths he’s rather impressive (and has a well-conceived life cycle). Before he does, we’re given what looks like a traditional ‘monster reveal’ cliffhanger at the end of Part One, but is actually something stranger, cleverer, and at first glance a little disappointing: while several of Bob’s cliffhangers are stunning moments let down by lacklustre resolutions the following week, for this one time only it’s the reverse of instant gratification. As Romana (Mary Tamm) struggles on the Stone of Blood and the Doctor (Tom Baker) paddles through the swamp to find her, there’s memorable dialogue from the Tribe. This time with the actions. It’s no double act, and it may be memorable for all the wrong reasons, but I still can never help but sing along to The Kroll Song as the Tribe do aerobics with spears, stamping and thrusting and giving it some welly to summon their god. It’s a sort of ritual chant:

“Kroll!”
[Five drumbeats]
“Kroll!”
[Five drumbeats]
“Kroll!”
[Five drumbeats]
“Kroll!”
[Five drumbeats]
“Kroll!”
[Five drumbeats]

Repeat twenty-five times, or until cliffhanger.

Extra Bonus Great Doctor Who Quotation – City of Death

Today’s other bonus was first broadcast back in 1979, in between the other two choices, and though technically it’s not a monster rising from the depths, here we have a villain from the depths of time, traced back to the ocean floor before it was ocean, and who looks very tentacular when not looking like the fabulous Julian Glover. So it counts. And while this story is another to feature marvellous images and marvellous music, this time I’ve picked a line of drawing-room comedy dialogue. The script is credited to “David Agnew” – in truth, a mixture of Graham Williams, David Fisher, the actors and perhaps most prominently Douglas Adams – and towards the end of Part Three, Romana (Lalla Ward) has escaped from the villainous Count Scarlioni – in truth, ancient alien Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth – but returns to his château to find out what he’s up to. She breaks in with the aid of an out-of-his-depth private detective, but they don’t break in terribly successfully. They’re dragged in at gunpoint by a sneering henchman, where Scaroth (Julian Glover) tosses an aside to them with a beautifully underplayed little laugh:

“As soon as the alarm sounded, Excellency – he was halfway through the window, and she was outside. I thought you might wish to speak to them, so I called off the dogs. They cannot be professionals.”
“My dear, it was not necessary for you to enter my house by – ah, we could hardly call it stealth – you had only to knock on the door…”

She’s so utterly impractical, he’s so urbanely villainous, and it always cracks me up.


Next Time… The scariest place for anyone

Labels: Comedy, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Douglas Adams, Full Circle, Julian Glover, Music, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, The Key To Time, Tom Baker

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… Now we have a new Doctor and look forward to a new direction for the series, today it’s a celebration of two people who did those things brilliantly: second Doctor Patrick Troughton and lead writer Robert Holmes, both still regarded as patron saints by Doctor Who actors and writers today. Paired together here from 1969, this scene (and more) offers the sort of double act both men were famous for, a warning about computer games, and proof that nobody’s perfect:

“Oh, Doctor! You’ve got it all wrong!”

By the time The Krotons was first broadcast at the tail end of the ’60s, Patrick Troughton was approaching the tail end of his time as the Doctor, while Robert Holmes was just starting out on his career in the series – one which would see him write for five Doctors over nearly twenty years, become the series’ most prolific writer during the Twentieth Century with scripts that ran from comedy to horror and nicking from everything in sight, and establish himself as Doctor Who’s greatest ever script editor (the equivalent of today’s showrunners like Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat, without the money), defined by great dialogue and great wickedness. The Krotons is a bit smaller than all that and not the greatest story in which either Mr Troughton or Mr Holmes would be involved, but right from the first Bob writes perfectly for the Doctor and Pat runs with it superbly. You can see why so many actors who’ve played the Doctor since cite him as their favourite, from Peter Davison on BBC1’s So You Think It’s Capaldi… It Is Now! programme last Sunday night to still-current incumbent Matt Smith: not only is Patrick Troughton pretty much unbeatable when he’s giving his best, but he’s obviously the patron saint of ‘the impossible job of following the big success and making it work’. And one of the things both Pat and Bob made their own in their different ways can be checked by asking long-term Who fans, ‘Which Doctor / which writer was brilliant for comedy double acts…?’

Half-way into Episode Two, the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and his friends Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Zoe (Wendy Padbury) are trying to work out the secret of the Krotons, legendary beings long-unseen and perhaps best left that way* who rule from their great crystal machine over the locals, known as the Gonds. The Krotons have for centuries demanded tribute of the Gonds’ best and brightest delivered to them, and in a neat critique of instant gratification, by the time our heroes arrive the Gonds are predictably no longer best or bright. As the Krotons need mental energy to revive themselves, their own not exactly high-brain short-termism means perpetual slumber for them and perpetual slavery for the Gonds. Unless someone very bright indeed turns up and puts their foot in it, of course…

Zoe is a brilliant teenage computer programmer from the Twenty-first Century who, when the Doctor bumbles off to look elsewhere, is drawn to the Krotons’ teaching machines and all the games installed on them. Stop me if you can see where this is going. She’d have been a demon with ‘Tomb Raider of the Cybermen’, and even though ‘Selris’ only involves a completely inanimate block that has to be winched into place, she’s soon more than doubling the previous high score and flooded with endorphins. The Doctor wrenches off her headphones, but the Gonds’ dreary leader has already spotted the score. The Doctor’s not impressed:

“Yes, well, Zoe is something of a genius. Of course, it can be very irritating at times.”

That’s nothing to his reaction when a gong sounds from the great crystal machine and a message from the sleeping Krotons demands that Zoe join them as a special extra companion. As Zoe and the Doctor have both already witnessed that round the back of the great crystal machine there’s an exit where the ‘honoured’ companions are unceremoniously ejected and disintegrated after having their brains sucked out, the usually mildest of Doctors snaps to his friend in sudden fury and fear:

“Now do you see what you’ve done? Fooling around with this stupid machine!”
“But I’m not a Gond!”
“But the machine doesn’t know that!”

He stomps off to take the test himself, unwilling either to let the Kroton machine massacre the Gonds for disobedience or let Zoe go into danger alone. And that’s what I really love about this scene, because the Doctor’s palpable concern, and Zoe wanting to make up for her getting them into trouble, and looming certain death, all obviously create a situation which is both tense and terrifically funny.

The Doctor sits down at the teaching machine and their positions are suddenly reversed: he’s the one with the headset on and Zoe’s the responsible one telling him what to do. And on top of both wanting him to succeed, they’re absurdly competitive about it. She tells him to press the button to start, then tells him again, because he can’t hear with his phones on; he answers back too loudly, and with a storm of testy words that get her going, and coming, and them both rushing about:

“All right, there’s no need to shout! Now go away and don’t fuss me – no, come back, what’s this? – It’s all right, I know – right, fire away. I’m ready.”

At which an exasperated Zoe now mimes that he has to press the button to set it going. Not much of The Krotons looks good, but there’s some fabulous design here for the circling computer symbols (absolutely not CGI) assembling, breaking and reforming, all to great sound design, too, an ominous low chattering hum. Brian Hodgson’s soundtrack – a radiophonic mixture of electronic effects, textures and near-music – is now available to buy, and so fascinating that Richard has instructed me never again to play it in his presence (look, it’s shorter than The Sea Devils…).

So does the brilliant Doctor at once beat Zoe’s high score? No. He makes a clever person’s error and, rather than reading the instructions properly, works it out on the wrong basis and scores zero. The Gond leader worries to Zoe:

“This is the most advanced machine. Perhaps he can’t answer the questions.”
“Of course he can. The Doctor’s almost as clever as I am.”

So the Doctor gets it all wrong again, as Zoe jumps in frustration. That is, until he gets into the swing of it and, at last, the score battering over the upper limit, he turns very smug and she turns very cold:

“I think I’ve scored more than you have, Zoe.”
“You answered more questions!”

Before long, the “dinner gong” sounds again for them to enter the great machine, and even as the danger reaches its pitch, the Doctor’s deadpan polite thanks when Selris the Gond leader dolefully tells him his people will remember him is a scream…


*On another not entirely stunning visualisation, Alan and Fiona have recently covered The Krotons on Kaldor City and I laughed at their all-too appropriate “The Gond village looks like someone has dropped a packet of chips and a Scotch egg on a gravelled drive” – this is not among Doctor Who’s more lavish productions.

Bonus Great Patrick Troughton and Robert Holmes Doctor Who Quotation – The Space Pirates

If The Krotons is not the most fêted of Doctor Who stories, Bob Holmes’ second script, The Space Pirates, can be a bit of a slog. Of all the stories I’ve watched when prospecting for the Fifty, this was the hardest work to pry anything precious from: for me, it’s easily Bob’s weakest script, badly structured, thinly plotted, and with most of it junked by the BBC so only the soundtrack is left, not even visually diverting. With Bob’s entertaining but unexpectedly queasy final treatment of Patrick Troughton’s Doctor not until a 1985 guest reunion, though, this is the only other time they paired up. But the great thing about Doctor Who – and about Pat and Bob – is that even in the most exhausted parts you really can still find something marvellous. And here it’s not in the endless, plotless space chases but in the second half of the story, where the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and his longtime partner in the double act Jamie (Frazer Hines) finally get to meet people from across the plot and to do plenty of their perfectly timed schtick. A terrible gag with drawing pins that’s terribly funny; the Doctor’s favourite marble; and the bit that I’m afraid always makes me laugh – trying to break out of a cell with an audio lock, the Doctor gets out a tuning fork and, endlessly, twangs it. Jamie:

“Which end did he land on when you fell down that shaft?”
[After driving them all nuts…]
“Oh, look, Doctor, will you stop it?”
“You want to get out of here, don’t you?”
“Oh, that’s not going to get us out…”
“Yes, Jamie, it is! An audio lock is a simple solenoid switch which is only activated by a particular sound. It’s just a question of finding it, that’s all.”
“Oh, look – I can’t stand any more!”
[He grabs the fork off him… Chucks it against the wall… And as the Doctor wails, the cell door opens.]
“Jamie! Jamie! …Jamie, you found the right note!”

Confronted with a three-inch-steel door later:

“It’s not an audio lock, is it?”
“No, Jamie, it isn’t.”
“Ah, that’s a relief.”
“Jamie, I think you don’t appreciate all I do for you.”

And there you go – sifting out the good bits of The Space Pirates.

Admittedly I do find one line from the old comedy character without much comedy to him very appealing, too – here’s Milo Clancey up against the New Labour space police:

“You know it’s an offence to operate without a feedback to CFI?”
“An offence?”
“Right.”
“I didn’t realise that, sonny, no. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. There are so many offences these days.”

Bonus Great Patrick Troughton Doctor Who Quotation – The Moonbase

The Doctor had begun as a figure who intended only to observe and who learned only gradually the moral instinct to interfere: moral outrage had long topped non-intervention by the time of his first regeneration, but it’s when the new Doctor (Patrick Troughton) faced the early return of the Cybermen that he gave the clearest declaration that he fights monsters now, and fighting monsters is cool. It’s part-way into Episode 2, with the Doctor and his friends having a bit of a time of it up on a Moonbase about a century after the story’s 1967 broadcast. The base commander is fed up with the Doctor’s antics and wants him gone; the Doctor’s friends are mostly fed up with being injured and threatened and might just do that; but the Cybermen appear to be on the prowl, and the playful Doctor suddenly puts his foot down with sober gravitas and issues his manifesto. This is the moment where this Doctor finds himself. Later Doctors found a more nuanced moral compass, but this one took two very firm and uncompromising if not completely complementary stances: anarchic freethinking meddling; and destroy all monsters…

“There are some corners of the Universe which have bred the most – terrible things. Things which act against everything that we believe in. They must be fought.”

Bonus Great Robert Holmes Doctor Who Quotation – The Time Warrior

One of Robert Holmes more influential scripts, The Time Warrior introduced Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen): in Episode Four, broadcast early in 1974, Sarah Jane has snuck into a medieval castle to knock out a nasty robber baron and his entire garrison while the Doctor deals with the alien in the cellar. It’s a scene that shows how very resourceful she is, how very feminist she is, and how very funny she can be. Caught in the kitchens by Meg the fearsome – well, I suppose in a posher castle she’d be called the châtelaine, but here ‘lead serving wench that bullies the other serving wenches into getting the job done’ – Sarah Jane first bluffs that she’s a lady and will have her flogged, then, that failing, turns on a groat to wheedling pauper needing food and is put to preparing some, after which if she’s lucky she might get some bread, cheese or oatmeal – meat only being for the men. Exasperated at the downtrodden kitchen women, Sarah Jane confronts them about their situation and gets carried away…

“You should set yourselves free.”
“Oh? And how should we do that?”
“Don’t you want to be free?”
“Women will never be free while there are men in the world, girl. We have our place.”
“What subservient poppycock. You’re still living in the Middle Ages!”

Next along, half of what will much later become a famous double act with Sarah Jane…

Extra Bonus Great Robert Holmes Doctor Who Quotation – The Sun Makers

After three sublime years of scaring the kiddies (I was that kiddie) in the mid-’70s, the BBC itself took fright of Doctor Who (and of far right anti-TV ideologues), sacked the producer and demanded a change of tone. And lead writer Robert Holmes, who’d been half of the brilliant creative team behind all the horror, stayed on long enough to come up with the next new wave, too – to use Tom Baker’s enormous charisma as a springboard to a much funnier style. 1977’s The Sun Makers has the iconic line-up: the man in the incredibly long scarf (Tom Baker); the woman in the leather bikini (Louse Jameson); the tin dog (John Leeson). While the TARDIS is still in flight, we join the travellers playing chess. There are other great Doctor-machine chess games to come, from the Doctor’s return match with K9 a year later in which he cheats again but steals from the wrong game, to his playing chess against himself within the Cyberiad just this year, and facing Fenric along the way, but this is the first and, in its own way, as much a statement as the Doctor’s famous line on The Moonbase. The Doctor (Tom Baker) will now be funny and outrageous and often get caught out; K9 will be not just a blaster-cum-database on wheels, but bitchy and pedantic and with a touch of robotic venom when his “master” tries it on. And Leela, moving the pieces for K9, will be the straight man.

“Even simple one-dimensional chess exposes the limitations of the machine mind.”
[The Doctor laughs]
“Bishop to queen six. Mistress.”
“There?”
“Affirmative. Check, master.”
“What?”
“Machine mind computes mate in six moves.”
“Rubbish!”
“…Your move, master.”
“I know it’s my move. Don’t flash your eyes at me.”
“Wrong square.”
“What?”
“Your king, master. Wrong square.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Affirmative.”

Doctor Who and the Double Act

I don’t know which Doctor Who critic first wrote about the “Holmesian Double Act,” but they nailed one of the most striking things about the series’ arguably greatest writer, and everyone familiar with Robert Holmes’ scripts suddenly knew exactly what they meant. Yet these took a little while to appear; you don’t really get double acts in Bob’s two earliest scripts – there are functional teams (the plotters in The Krotons, the police in The Space Pirates), but they’re not amusing and they’re not memorable. The exception is, of course, the Doctor and Jamie (or the Doctor and Zoe), who’d perfected a brilliant relationship over the years.

So, while Bob was finding his voice, I wonder how much he looked at the team he was writing for in 1969 and was influenced by them – with Pat and Frazer’s fantastic on-screen chemistry displaying a great way to bring out character. The Doctor, highly intelligent, easily flustered, always getting his friend into trouble; the young Scot from 1745, uneducated but canny enough to always watch out for the Doctor getting it wrong; both devoted to each other (and with Zoe coming in to be exasperated and constantly one-upping on both).

The way Robert Holmes writes his own double acts is never the same each time, but still distinctive: two people who are clearly meant to be together but through some imbalance of age, position or outlook constantly snipe at each other, which moves the plot along, informs and entertains us and comments on the story. The earliest version is in 1970’s Spearhead From Space with, archetypally, a husband and wife – and once he’d written the Seeleys always trying to get one over on each other, the key to all the rest is that they’re husband and wife / odd couple sketches transposed into a serious setting. And while Sam Seeley was just a bit shifty, a great many of them raise the stakes by being explicitly villains.

The partners in a Holmesian Double Act can be anywhere along the dial from out-and-out comedy characters to comedy-drama to downright dangerous and very blackly comic indeed, from supporting to central characters in the plot, and from ‘loveable rogue’ with ‘disapproving wife’ all the way up to ‘mad scientist’ paired with both ‘war criminal’ and ‘brutish servant’, which makes the insults all the grander and crueller (“You chicken-brained biological disaster!”) and at their darkest where each might grow to regard the other as disposable. Some double acts are only temporary, just for a scene or two within a story, some an inseparable chorus, but many are deeply celebrated partnerships – to the extent that many other Doctor Who authors consciously emulate the idea, with one writer’s best story features not just Bob Holmes Tribute Band double acts of his own, but even lampshades the term (as does later still writer Paul Cornell. In iambic pentameter).

In 1971’s Terror of the Autons, the Master and Rex Farrel (Michael Wisher) get to play master and servant so archly that it’s amazing so few people spot the husband-wife origins, but the point at which Bob really finds his voice and the double act springs fully formed for every critic to identify is 1973’s Carnival of Monsters, in which we don’t just get gossipy alien fascists Kalik (Michael Wisher) and Orum as the villains but dodgy travellers Vorg and Shirna to mirror the Doctor and his companion. As the series gets scarier, the pairs get more serious – Nyder and Davros (Michael Wisher… Look, he’s awfully good, and very versatile, and they did employ other people in the ’70s, honestly) – but there are vestigial double acts even in comedy exchanges that are going to turn murderous like Warlock and Namin in Pyramids of Mars or Federico and Hieronymous in The Masque of Mandragora, soaring to the nastiest but almost the funniest of the lot in The Brain of Morbius, with unhinged Dr Solon sparking off both his brutish servant and his obsessed master. There’s a spin on the buddy movie not with butch young things but cynical old codgers in The Deadly Assassin (plus The Clue of the Murdered Double-Act that we don’t even get to meet), and in later, less serious times double acts with outrageously evil capitalists before Bob launches another fabulous the Doctor and companion double act, this time an impossibly arch fellow Time Lord. And that’s not the half of them.

Still to come in the Fifty: from Bob Holmes’ big comeback, one of several especially nastily dysfunctional double acts – but will it be the disturbed homoerotic one, the other disturbed homoerotic one, the in-your-face twisted and murderous one, or the only one that’s clearly productive until…? Plus Bob’s deconstruction of his own trope and, shockingly, of his own inspiration – and, of course, the most beloved and famous double act of them all, who each try out various partners before finding each other.

Extra Bonus Great Robert Holmes Doctor Who Double Act Quotation – The Ribos Operation

On, for an irresistible last bonus, to one of Robert Holmes’ most celebrated double acts, broadcast in 1978. I know I quoted The Ribos Operation just last time, but full of such marvellous characters and dialogue that I can’t help coming back to it (and beside, Bob Holmes probably didn’t write that bit, but he definitely wrote this one). It’s half-way into Part Four, and scurrilous con-men Garron (Iain Cuthbertson) and Unstoffe (Nigel Plaskitt) are stuck in a labyrinth. Garron has three aims: avoid the big bad soldiers; avoid the Doctor and Romana; get out with the loot. The more innocent young Unstoffe is shocked by the second aim, and to find that his grizzled old partner has none of the ‘It’s not all about the money’ code of Hustle: having teamed up with Romana in order for each of them to find their friends, Garron’s nicked her vital detector and left her stranded…

“Money isn’t everything, Garron.”
“Well, who wants everything? I’ll settle for 90%.”
“…You cavilling old hypocrite. How could you?”
“Well, I admit I had a great trouble with me conscience. Fortunately, I won.”

Next Time… Monsters from the deep. But which?

Labels: Comedy, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Jon Pertwee, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Sarah Jane Smith, The Krotons, Tom Baker

Earlier in the year, I started an occasional series of Liberal quotations that made me think. Perhaps I’ve not been thinking enough, but I haven’t published any for a while. So today I opened Duncan Brack’s 1999 Dictionary of Liberal Quotations at random and found myself nodding at a few thoughts from Ralf Dahrendorf, German, British and European Liberal thinker and politician. Here are three that seem to me to go together:

“Liberty remains a response to the fact that we live in a world of uncertainty.”

“Utopia is always illiberal, because it leaves no room for error or correction.”

“There is no state of affairs in which Liberalism has been completely realised. Liberalism is forever process, the process by which human beings explore new opportunities for more people.”

These three quotations from different times and places – a book in 1975, a paper to the Liberal International Congress in 1988, and one the Dictionary couldn’t pin down – but of all the quotations selected from his works these leapt out at me as part of the same train of thought. Perhaps because I’ve read so many dystopias and remembered that they’re the same thing as utopias (so many people having taken the satire literally), perhaps because my heroes are messy and resist filing, perhaps because I suspect or hope I’d always be the one asking the awkward questions in the ‘perfect society’ and spoiling the party, the idea of utopia instinctively fills me with dread.

These three lines from Ralf Dahrendorf appealed to me because they sum up why utopia’s deadly and why Liberalism is a better answer – because it doesn’t pretend to have all the answers and put aside people who don’t fit into ‘perfection’, and because it’s not so rigid that the whole thing shatters when reality gives it a twist. Freedom is messy and awkward, but it’s both more human and more practical: trying to force people to fit your utopian ideal hurts real people and is never going to work anyway, so you’re better off leaving whatever system you have with room for people to grow into it.

Chiming so much with me, you’ll not be surprised that I’ve written along similar lines before: you can read here my critique of “the end justifies the means”. Like Liberals rejecting the left-right axis for a Liberal-Authoritarian one, I argue that utopians get it wrong even in assuming there’s a difference between ends and means: the ‘end-point’ of utopia is mythical and only means they trample the real ‘ends’ in politics, every unique individual, along the way.



I understand that Duncan Brack and Mark Pack are at work on a new edition of the Dictionary of Liberal Quotations; I’d like to get round to making lots of suggestions, but suspect I won’t (I can see lethargy beating vanity for proposing my own lines). But you might…

Labels: Ideas, Liberal Mondays, Liberalism, The Golden Dozen, Utopia

Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes… Last time I unleashed the scene-stealing megalomania of the seven TV Masters. Who could follow that but the Doctor simply being Doctorish – not rising to universal glory, but an individual who’s endlessly fascinated, fascinating and fun. So here are some tips for whoever gets tonight’s blessing on how to do it… Accompanied by a supporting selection of other Doctorish Doctors that spring to mind (but which?), in the lead today it’s Colin Baker, summing up the Doctor in a perfect moment:

“I am interested in everything…”

It’s been too long, hasn’t it, since the last one of these? And it’ll need more than getting back each Saturday to catch up. But never mind all that – the best thing is just to get on with it. I saw Colin Baker at an event three weeks ago today and he was, as ever, a delight: friendly, interesting and very funny. Today it’s common to praise Colin’s Doctor for his Big Finish audio adventures*, and it’s true that he has a finely tuned voice and an especially erudite way with words (and an occasionally bombastic style that greatly influenced my early public speaking). But it does him a disservice to do that at the expense of his TV portrayal. What’s rarely mentioned is how fabulously watchable he is, not just being one of the sexiest Doctors, not just in big actions, but in small but intriguing moments, constantly worth keeping your eye on – even when, all right, sometimes he has to play against the scripts – in always giving the impression of being interested in everything.

That, for me, is a defining trait in the Doctor, and whenever you watch Colin’s incarnation, you can see it even before The Two Doctors author Robert Holmes (someone who understood the Doctor about as well as any writer ever has) came along to give him lines that went with his flow and then asserted that character point explicitly. And for those who find this Doctor less watchable for one particular visual reason, in this scene he’s even got out of that coat.

Paired with a popular former Doctor, Patrick Troughton, you’d expect Colin’s Doctor either to have the show stolen from him or be frenetically overcompensating throughout The Two Doctors. Instead, he gets to be more confidently the Doctor than in any of his previous stories. It’s not just because Colin’s working harder to compete – while he certainly rises to the challenge, he seems counter-intuitively far more relaxed in his portrayal than he had been until now, and it’s because Bob Holmes instinctively knows how to write for the Doctor and Colin’s happily in harmony with that.

Half-way into Part Two, the Doctor (Colin Baker) has sensed echoes of a previous self (Patrick Troughton) in trouble and leapt, electrified, to his aid. But when the TARDIS materialises rather strikingly in a Spanish grove, the Doctor emerges with his enthusiasm tightly focused. Taking in everything around him, he strikes exactly the right note with a useful witness who takes the TARDIS for a branch of Interpol – a washed-up ham actor and restaurateur, accompanied by his braver and more practical companion…

“Officer! We have to report a tragedy. Stark disaster has struck this – simple countryside.”
“Has it indeed? What manner of disaster, Mr…?”
“Botcherby. Oscar Botcherby at your service, sir, and this dark-eyed naiad is named Anita.”
“Oh, come on, Oscar. There’s been a plane crash.”
“Well, of course, it may not be your department. I – I can see from your raiment that you obviously belong to the plain clothes branch.”

And, all right, I always laugh at that bit. Oscar and Anita are another of Mr Holmes’ sly mirrors of the Doctor and companion – Oscar goes on a bit, and we bet she’s not his girlfriend – but his florid digressions about clothes, groves and moth-hunting give Colin a marvellous opportunity to make his own performance smaller while still fascinating, and as the ‘concerned copper’ prompt the lily-livered thespian’s sense of public service. In my favourite part of the exchange, you can help but know that the Doctor’s reply, though gently guiding Oscar back to the point, is the absolute truth:

“Are you interested in Lepidoptera at all?”
“I am interested in everything, Mister Botcherby – but mainly, at the moment, in this ‘crash’ you heard.”

It’s a small but perfectly formed scene in which I always share the Doctor’s evident delight at having found the trail – and at having found someone else whose life will never be the same again…


*Big Finish have just announced a permanent price cut to some of their ranges, including now offering their first fifty Doctor Who stories at just £5 for the CDs or £2.99 on download: happily if you want to experience the Colin renaissance, this includes several of his very best, from The Marian Conspiracy, an historical adventure that introduces a companion and cake, to The One Doctor, which is an absolute scream, more of his definitive sparring with Terry Molloy as Davros, and of course two brilliantly uncomfortable black comedies from later Doctor Who TV writer Rob Shearman which I would thoroughly recommend – The Holy Terror, just reviewed by Andrew Hickey, and my own personal favourite of the range, Jubilee.

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 1 – Marco Polo

Inspired by tonight – and by being the antithesis of the Master – I let several other especially Doctorish moments simply spring to mind. This one has perhaps my favourite Doctor in one of the Doctor’s first and still most arrestingly unpredictable moments. On my previously long-derelict Doctor Who story-by-story blog Next Time, I Shall Not Be So Lenient! I’ve finally been getting back into the swing over the last few weeks with a preposterously wide array of random one-liners about the early story Marco Polo. In Marco Polo Episode One, the TARDIS has broken down in the Himalayas and the time-travellers’ lives saved by Messr Marco. But, determined above all else to get home to Venice, the self-serving git shows he’s not taken them and the Ship along for altruistic reasons. He wants to bribe his master the Mighty Kublai Khan into releasing him from his service with no less a stolen ‘gift’ than “a caravan that flies”. The thief holds our heroes at swordpoint and lectures them on why his need is greater than theirs, an argument he upholds by refusing to let them answer back. The Doctor’s reaction is much that you’d expect: impatience; blazing fury; incredulity at Polo’s blithe suggestion he can build a new TARDIS in Thirteenth-Century Venice. But after Polo stalks off, refusing to be made to feel guilty merely for committing armed robbery and stranding people, the travelling companions turn to the Doctor (William Hartnell) for an answer. He hasn’t got a clue. So in one of the most endearing moments in fifty years of our hero, they all have to stand by in appalled resignation as he does the only thing he can when faced with such utter calamity: he sees the funny side and collapses into uncontrollable giggles.

“Grandfather – Grandfather!”
“Yes. Go by sea, he says!”
“Why are you laughing?”
“Ooh, hoo hoo hoo!”
“He means it!”
“Doctor, he’s serious!”
“I know he is, yes!”
“But what are you going to do?”
“Oh, ho, ho! I haven’t the faintest idea!”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 2 – The Enemy of the World

By ten minutes into Episode 1, our heroes have landed for a paddle at a deserted Australian beach, found it less deserted when they’re shot at by assassins in a hovercraft and rescued by an even more dangerous woman in a helicopter on orders from a mysterious superior who seems to been in charge of the others, too. So when they take a breather, the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) senses that however friendly she may seem, the band of gunmen may have had an ulterior motive for trying to kill him and she may have an ulterior motive for saving him. He gives very little away until he knows more, and this time he makes her laugh as he cleans her flesh wound while quietly parrying all her questions with an undercurrent of questions of his own – and it’s not long before he finds out just how ruthlessly efficient she is, nor what everyone suddenly sees in him…

“Oh, you’re a doctor?”
“Well, not of any – medical significance.”
“Doctor of law? Philosophy?”
“Which law? Whose philosophies, eh?”
“Oh, I see. You’re determined to be mysterious.”
“Am I?”
“Um… Doctor of science?”
“Septic spray. That should be right.”
“A Doctor of divinity, then!”
“You’ll run out of Doctors in a minute.”

But we still haven’t.

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 4 – The Ribos Operation

The Doctor (Tom Baker) is all set to go on holiday when interrupted by thunder. Well, that much is typical. What’s less typical is that the thunder is inside the TARDIS, and that after the lights go out, suddenly the place blazes with light, organ music bellows, and a mighty voice asks if he really needs to know who’s calling. He might use the name “Guardian”, but we know who this is, and you do have to wonder how much of an influence it was on Time Bandits for a loud, scary God to then be revealed as a quiet, much more scary character actor giving understated orders and threats. That is, if all those people taking him at his word that he is the nice one are right: he is, after all, something of a bastard, and not only does he not offer the Doctor any of the drink he’s sipping, sat on his chair in his white suit and hat, but the green liquor in carafe looks like absinthe, and you know another word for that. But whether to God or Devil, the Doctor’s response is the same – he’d prefer to make his own choices rather than be ordered about, thank you very much. The Doctor is more annoyed by having an assistant foisted on him than by being ordered on a mission: people are more important to our hero than the big things from the first… Our hero doesn’t preen at being chosen as The Hero for a mighty quest; he’s not after glory. He’s after mucking about and seeing what he fancies – interested in everything. The deceptively mild-mannered higher power knows what makes the Doctor tick, too, and in a steely aside, makes one of the most effective threats ever heard in the series:

“Look, I’m sure there must be plenty of other Time Lords who’d be delighted…”
“I have chosen you.”
“Yes, I was afraid you’d say something like that. Ah! You want me to volunteer, isn’t that it?”
“Precisely.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You mean nothing will happen to me?”
“Nothing at all. Ever.”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 7 – Remembrance of the Daleks

The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) has been cross-luring Daleks around 1960s after a terrible Time Lord totem. But he’s at his most Doctorish for me at the end of Part Three, when plans don’t really quite work after all. Thinking he’s got most people evacuated from the dangerous bit of Shoreditch and the remainder safely out of the way in a local school, he aims to let two warring sets of Daleks fight it out for him to deal with later. But even to this day there are few more visually impressive moments in Doctor Who than the Doctor’s getting it ever-so-slightly wrong as a great big honest-to-goodness spaceship comes down in the school playground, not CGI but actually there, blowing out all the windows and blowing his plans. He even has the good grace to blink and duck out of his own cliffhanger crash-zoom.

“Doctor, we’ve had a report of a radar contact.”
“On a re-entry curve from low orbit?”
“Yes.”
“That’ll be the Imperial Dalek shuttlecraft.”
“What? They’re not landing a spaceship here?”
“Here? No. They’re much too far from the main action.”
[Roar of engines]
“You’re sure?”
“Whoa!”
“Ace, get away from the window! Down!
“…I think I might have miscalculated.”

Extra-Doctorish Doctor Who Quotation 11 – A Town Called Mercy

And for the last few minutes when we all think of him as the Doctor (Matt Smith), the marvellously Doctorish current incarnation has been a real pleasure. Not least in strolling through the American Old West, eyeing up the town called Mercy: to quiet, plucking strings, he sees an animal-skull “KEEP OUT” sign and stone-piled boundary and does exactly what the Doctor always does with a boundary. Crosses it, points out the electric street lamp about ten years too early, and as mothers hold their children back in fear at the windows, blazes with enthusiasm:

“Anachronistic electricity; ‘Keep Out’ signs; aggressive stares… Has someone been peeking at my Christmas list?”

Next Time… From The Two Doctors to the double act of double acts.


Update: We’re both absolutely delighted with the announcement of Peter Capaldi. Hurrah! And of course he’s already had a scene for the 50, in at Number 41 – just a shame I didn’t include a photo of him and look as prescient as his character’s daughter, damn damn damn… But it’s not only one of the series’ finest stories, it’s also an impressive source of future casting, isn’t it?

Labels: Big Finish, Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Peter Capaldi, Sylvester McCoy, The Two Doctors, Tom Baker, William Hartnell

You’ll be familiar with “Shag, Marry, (Throw Off A) Cliff” and all its bowdlerised* variations. It doesn’t do a lot for me: it’s judgemental, it’s shallow, and you never get the exact number of people to pass your shallow judgement on.

As Richard drove us through the wilds of Cambridgeshire on Saturday on our return from holiday, I had an epiphany for something more interesting: Yaxley, Stilton, Ramsay.

We were listening to The News Quiz, and as usual groaning or heckling at all the usual tired bollocks. But how to freshen up your reaction to faux-lefty faux-comics with stale material? It’s radio, so you can’t judge which one you want to shag. With their material so tired in just half an hour’s worth, they’d never stay fresh for a marriage (besides, you can kill or shag any number of people – so I’ve heard – but I for one have more exacting standards than a Radio 4 panel to select a partner for life). So isn’t it more fun just to decide, not to punish yourself by inflicting them on you, but what new and exciting ways of punishment to throw at those you’re judging?

As if by magic, the road signs gliding by above our heads kept flashing inspiration:

“YAXLEY STILTON RAMSEY”
“YAXLEY STILTON RAMSEY”
“YAXLEY STILTON RAMSEY”
“YAXLEY STILTON RAMSEY”

Perfect!

Next time you find yourself listening to a terrible panel game, why not delight yourself with the much funnier idea of what to do with each of the most rotten participants?


Throw cheese at them!


(You know what Stilton is)


Throw a carnivorous time-pterodactyl at them!


(Ramsay the Vortisaur, itself a piece of political satire, features in Big Finish’s Doctor Who – Storm Warning and the following three stories starring Paul McGann)


Or, if they’re especially crapulent, throw a Death-Eater at them to curse them in all sorts of inventive ways!


(Yaxley the Death-Eater can be found being rather nasty in the later Harry Potter books and films)


It could be anyone. To take, oh, a random example, you might cry ‘Jeremy Hardavra Kedavra!’

Of course, you could just chuck the cheese and the vortisaur at him as well, to make sure. Up to you.



*But what does it say about the BBC’s attitude to marriage that it’s only as important as snoggage and hiding rather than sex and death, writes outraged of Tunbridge Wells? I demand the next series to be renamed ‘Snog, Date, Avoid’ and its post-watershed equivalent the serious ones. Well, I would, if I weren’t demanding a reformatting as ‘Yaxley, Stilton, Ramsay’ and my royalty payments.

Labels: BBC, Big Finish, Comedy, Harry Potter, Paul McGann, Radio, Top Tips

“Equality is not the same as sameness” was the arrogant war-cry of the Apartheid regime and, shamefully, now of Liberal Democrat Queen Mum-equivalent Baroness Shirley Williams. Reports by Pink News and Lib Dem Voice of grandstanding homophobic actions are finally bringing into the open the unpleasant side of her that many of us have had personal experience of over the years.

There are many things to admire about Shirley Williams, but her ‘commitment to equality’ isn’t one of them. It’s an extremely narrow one: proposing only her own programme of equality for women; and only the ‘right sort’ of women. It’s a great shame but perhaps unsurprising that she’s become so conservative in her years as an unelected, unaccountable peer that no-one can ever vote out. It goes back a lot further and wider than merely leading the charge in the House of Lords to put the gays in their place and propose legal special privileges for – surprise – only people like Shirley Williams.

Shirley Williams – Bully

I’ve never said this in public before. I’m writing now in part because my ever-declining health means I’m unlikely ever to seek any position again within the Lib Dems through patronage or election. I’m obviously spurred by her being not just a quiet fellow-traveller with the House of Lords bigots but appointing herself chief of the anti-equal-marriage legislators. And I regret not having thought about this over the last few months and supplied testimony to the Lib Dems’ independently-led enquiry on internal party processes. Because there is no way on Earth that I would ever trust any internal process led by Shirley Williams. She is the most arrogant and biggest bully I have ever encountered within the party, and the one who was most open about their prejudices and about acting on them.

What particularly sticks in my mind is not just her very prominent and active legal homophobia but her deplorable attitude to young people – patronising, hostile and going out of her way to block their progress within the Lib Dems. I remember particularly vividly her spiteful, patronising and ageist attacks on all the young women who disagreed with this self-satisfied grandee during the party’s debates over sexist shortlists, where any woman with the temerity to disagree with her exact decree of what should be was put down in such ageist and indeed sexist terms that any similarly haughty male Lib Dem peer would have been excoriated for.

I have direct, personal experience of Baroness Williams’ bullying ways, too. When I was young and very active in the party I encountered occasional prejudices and put-downs: certainly, when I was over a decade younger than anyone else elected to the Federal Policy Committee, I was often looked down on and had to work much harder to prove myself. Despite having been very out at all levels of the party I’ve ever been involved in, back when that was surprisingly rare, I’ve experienced very little homophobia (usually discreetly), more often having had people sneer because I had no money and, for example, had to hitch-hike to meetings (at which I didn’t wear a suit). But the overwhelming number of times I saw people try to put me back in my box was for ideological reasons – which was fair enough, as long as we both had an equal say and I could beat them, too.

The biggest exception to all this was back in 1999. Who else but Baroness Shirley Williams was in charge of making sure than all new peers would be exactly the same as the existing peers interviewing all the newly elected members of the party’s first Interim Peers’ List. This was a baby-step innovation in which, against strenuous opposition from the party’s Great and Good, the Lib Dems took a small step towards practising what we preach in electing our party nominees to the Lords rather than leaving it entirely to the Leader’s patronage that appointed the Great and the Good like Shirley Williams from on high.

Believing that the average age and background – and views – of peers should change radically, I and several other (at the time) young people (at the time) put ourselves forward and, of the original fifty, three of us were elected to the panel in our twenties. I have never, ever, been so patronised and discriminated against in the party as by Shirley Williams on that occasion: she made it very clear that she was against the plebs having a vote for Lords selection at all, and that she would do everything in her (considerable) power to prevent any young person being given a place, whatever the mere party members had voted for. It was less an interview than a lecture. She wasn’t openly homophobic to me at the time, but after the second time I’d mentioned my partner with the word “he” and she’d talked about “she” I decided not to bother correcting her again, as there was clearly no way she was ever going to get it.

Afterwards, I met up with another of the three, a young woman who also had never been so bullied and humiliated by anyone in the party as by Shirley, again primarily because of Baroness Williams’ quite open and arrogant ageism. It’s the only time I’ve seen a woman in tears at their treatment by anyone in the Lib Dems.

But she was both a young person and a woman who had the temerity to disagree with the great Shirley, so no doubt Baroness Williams would claim that she treated her ‘equally’ with her longstanding mates who were on the list… Just not the same.

So that’s Shirley Williams: a very, very narrow commitment to equality, for only ‘her’ chosen sort of women. Her latest arrogant moves for legal special treatment for her own special interests and people of her own background, her own interests and her own opinions shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen her commitment to equality for the Great and Good – but not for people who are not the same – at work over so many years.

How Do You Want To Be Remembered?

Update: Inspired by Baron Tony Greaves’ quite staggering degree of self-unawareness on the Lib Dem Voice thread – a Lord accusing a blogger of “using his privileged position… to pursue his personal hobbyhorses” and describing his fellow unelected, unaccountable, unbearable grandees as “good Liberals” for using the law and their ultra-privileged personal prejudices to grind my relationship into the dirt, as they have for many years, I ask a simple question. You might put it, politely, to any Lib Dem peers of your acquaintance.

Imagine a “good Liberal” of, say, the middle of the last century who had an impeccable record in progressive opinion and legislation save that, for reasons of moral concern, and religion, and tradition, they just weren’t comfortable with black people and white people marrying and strained every sinew in their later years to prevent the heinous sin of mixed-race marriage, because “Equality is not the same as sameness”.

Is there any way on Earth that we would remember their legacy as a “good Liberal” today?

How do Liberal Democrat Peers want their legacies to be remembered?

Former self-styled radical Tony Greaves appears to be going out of his way to prove the point that taking a place in a ‘democratic’ legislature from which no mere mortal has the power ever to remove you rots your brain into ‘going native’.

Labels: Bigotry, Gay, Liberal Democrats, Lords, Personal, Shirley Williams

Was the Pet Shop Boys’ single Absolutely Fabulous spoofing Culture Beat’s Mr Vain (or ‘homaging’, or outright nicking)? I doubt I’ve given a thought to the massive Eurodance hit – Europe’s biggest-seller of 1993, Wikipedia tells me – for twenty years, but suddenly hearing it again the other day I thought, ‘Isn’t that the Pet Shop Boys?’ But no: Mr Vain was released in April 1993 and PSB’s Comic Relief single a year later, with a slightly sharper but essentially identical synth riff. Surely a ‘Mrs Vain’ comment on Eddy and Patsy along with all Jennifer Saunders’ spoken pop references and Ab Fab samples on the track. And here I was thinking “Techno, techno, bloody techno, darling!” was the limit of their cheeky borrowings, but no no, no no no no, no no no no, no no, it turns out that in fact there’s no limit. I’d forgotten her singing the actual tune to Ride On Time in the middle of it, too, though they can hardly complain about sampling.

The Pet Shops Boys performed Mr Vain live on their Discovery Tour later that year – mixed into a different one of their songs – which does rather suggest they’d heard of it (or had reached a royalties settlement). And, like the same year’s Girls & Boys by Blur (a song I remember much better), once the Pet Shop Boys did it it sounds like it was a PSB song all along. Of the three versions, I still like the Ab Fab one the best.

So it seems to me the case is proved, but listen to Mr Vain and Absolutely Fabulous and decide for yourself.

This quickie has been brought to you by the Society For Getting Jokes Twenty Years Late.


PS(B): This post was supposed to include an Electric plug, but I forgot. Now I’m not sure where to put it in [enough puns – Ed. Never enough puns! – Alex]. The Pet Shop Boys’ new album is out in a week’s time, and I love their latest single, Axis: not just for its unrepentantly retro synthesisers but for a video that looks like a pure 1980 mash-up of Doctor Who and 2000AD, with dancing Nimon and Torquemada in a time tunnel / Terror Tube. Absolutely fabulous.

Labels: 2000AD, Absolutely Fabulous, Comedy, Music, Pet Shop Boys, The Horns of Nimon

So, Nick Clegg and Mick Jagger: everyone’s quoting the 1967 description of Mick’s views as “straight John Stuart Mill”, but has he done what the rest of us haven’t and convinced Nick of the merits of Lib Dem drugs policy, or further? I only ask (as I did of Nick the first time I interviewed him, to his well-concealed delight).

Anyway, this is only a quickie, but will include the two cooler Lib Dem-pop crossovers and a terrible joke (I can almost hear you sigh). But first, Jennie Rigg’s meme to rewrite Rolling Stones songs for the Lib Dems: fab. I’m especially knackered and in lots of pain this week, so my creative energies are low, but click here to see some of the entries so far.

Just meandering for a moment – were I writing the detailed music-related article I meant to instead of this quickie, it’d be about Tom Robinson. So imagine I have, and that I’ve recommended the newly-released Tom Robinson Band Anthology 1977-1979 (though I want the stuff from 1989-1990 when I was going to their gigs).

Tune into a Tom special on Neil McCormick’s Needle Time on Vintage TV at 7pm tonight, because I won’t have written anything proper by then and you’d’ve missed it.

Back to the story of the week, which is Nick Clegg and Mick Jagger and co having dinner together. Which is cool. And Jennie’s plan to get Mick to guest at Glee Club. Which is terrifying.

Enjoy Hyde Park, Mick, and though today’s may not be as iconic, I bet you all play better this time… Though a better performance than Glee Club isn’t hard.

Rolling Stones Feat. Lib Dems – My Favourite New Entries

Jennie:

“I see a red door and I want to paint it yellow”

Jennie’s concept / Magister’s lines:

Sympathy for the Paddy

“So if you meet me, have some courtesy,
“Have some sympathy and some taste
“Use all your well learnt politesse
“Or I’ll kill you with one hand.
“Because I can, you know. Would you like to hear my joke?”

Nick Barlow’s all-too-familiar title:

Here Comes Your Nineteenth By-Election


But most of all the lovely Andrew Hickey’s massive wins with:

“I know
“It’s only a rogue poll
“But I like it…”

Oh yeah – I meant to write about a possibly rogue poll that was way better for the Lib Dems than anything else recently, but possibly worthwhile as it was polling about something other than the usual. Remind me, reader.

And the outstanding…

“I’m canvassing apartments on the ninety-ninth floor of my block
“I knock on the door looking through the window and hoping the barking will stop
“Then out comes a guy who’s all dressed up like a Union Jack
“And says I’ve won his vote if I’ll just send those immigrants back

“I said, hey! UKIP! Get off of my round!
“Hey! UKIP! Get off of my round!
“Hey! UKIP! Get off of my round!
“Don’t hang around ’cause two’s a crowd”

Finally, Magister for Simon Hughes:

“Start me up!
“If you start me up
“I’ll never stop.”

That’s one for me, too, obviously. Simon and I once did a pair of set-piece speeches to finish a Lib Dem Youth and Student Conference. Everyone missed their trains. Including me (remember, this article is a “quickie”).


On a more critical note, the Jumpin’ Jack Flash (probably my favourite Stones song, along with Saint of Me) suggestions have missed the points – they’re clearly about the wrong ex-MP. Surely…

“But I’m all right now, in fact, it’s a gas
“But I’m all right, I’m jumping lights – flash!
“Step on the gas, gas, gas”

…should make you think of an even more recently ex-ed MP (and a certain Elephant denies all responsibility for that lyric).

Too shuhne?

That Cool Lib Dem-Pop Crossover Chart In Full

Nick and Mick’s new entry only at number 3, I’m afraid, below…

Number 2: Jeremy Thorpe and Jimi Hendrix – when they were both big

(Google for the cool pictures; I’d provide a link, but they all seem to be either scandals or rip-offs, so I’m disinclined to)

And a surprise Number 1: Norman Lamb and Tinchy Stryder

Because mortgaging your house to help launch an unknown rapper’s career and him making it big is significantly cooler than a photo-op or a meal, however cool the star.


*My urge for terrible puns means I was tempted to title this Paint It Yellow Sub-Par Meme, but it’s not sub-par. It’s fab. It’s also the wrong ’60s band, and though it has the major Glee Club advantage that it’s a song everyone can sing, since the Coalition we can no longer sing along to:

“We all live in a yellow squeaky-clean…”

Labels: Liberal Democrat Conferences, Memes, Music, Nick Clegg, Paddy Ashdown, Rolling Stones, Tom Robinson, UKIP

Most inspired political-economic idea of the week: Irish blogger Jason O’Mahony proposes updating a centuries-old idea to capture taxes from offshore corporate tax-dodgers. Governments should privatise the hard-to-land tax liabilities at auction and let the hungriest privateer capitalists harry the behemoths. Memo to Danny Alexander: it may sound like a joke, but how better to harness innovation?

“Back in the day, governments used to issue letters of marque to ships, permitting them to engage in legal piracy against the vessels of other specified countries. Privatising sea war. Hence the phrase ‘Privateers’.

“Hoist the Jolly Roger, and set sail for Starbucks!”

Some privatisations make sense. Some don’t. I quoted Conrad Russell a couple of months ago on how Liberals need to think more carefully about them than Tories or socialists do: what will work? What’s the empirical case economically? Socially? Will it reduce or boost monopolies? I read about two privatisation ideas this week that reminded me of such tests and prompted more: is it politically bat-shit-crazy? And can it do something the state can’t?

Tuition Fees Again? Danny, Please, No

First, and with no pleasure at all, as part of the Coalition Government’s latest spending review, Danny Alexander announced this week that they’re privatising the Student Loan Book. It’s a tiny change to promote off-the-book borrowing that makes little economic and no social sense, and will probably have adverse consequences for students and ex-students. For those reasons alone, Danny shouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole. But in his role not as Chief Secretary to the Treasury but as a senior Lib Dem MP and, having known him for twenty years, a person with a sharp brain, there’s a much more political reason why rather than agreeing to it Danny should have retorted, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’

I disagree with plenty of Simon Titley’s you-have-to-have-been-on-my-side-in-Liberal-Party-infighting-in-1982-for-your-views-to-count school of Lib Dem commentary, but there’s no doubt he got it bang on the money here:

“What political genius thought of this? Yes, let’s pick at some old scabs, shall we?
“…reopening the issue of student loans makes no political sense either. That issue has become a byword for mistrust of the Liberal Democrats. So why revive the controversy?”

The tuition fees fiasco was by common understanding the most politically disastrous single action for the Liberal Democrats since the party was formed (and arguably the most damaging to the British Liberal family since the First World War and Lloyd George’s egomania). The economic effects of this new change are minimal, giving the Tories very little leverage to insist on it as part of the wider plan, but the political effects are pure poison. Why on Earth are our ministers reminding everyone of this Lib Dem suicide pill?

However, while student loans are a very straightforward and easy form of debt for the government to recover – another reason, of simple inertia, not to sell them off – there are other liabilities that it’s a lot harder for governments to recover, and for those, having established the principle that you can sell off government debts just as you split off banks’ ‘toxic assets’, there’s a brilliant case for privatisation…

Labour Government By Debt and Tax-Dodging

Another piece of my reading in the last week – which deserves my coming back to on its own, but just in case, here it is as an aside – is Nick Thornsby’s table of “UK tax revenue and public spending 1997-2012”. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? But – shockingly – in the last 15 years, UK governments have only balanced the annual budget once, relying on massive borrowing in every other year while lying about “prudence”, and dating from a full decade before Labour could blame the international crisis. The thirteen-year-Labour Government’s sole credit year: +£16bn. Biggest debt year: -£186bn. No wonder the deficit’s taking a while to fix.

Labour simply decided that it was better to make people happy with a public and private credit boom, spending oodles of money that they didn’t have long before the financial crisis – in their ten years of power before the storm hit, nine of them were already on tick. That’s the problem with Keynesianism: the broad idea makes simple economic sense, but no-one ever practises it because of the politics. Borrow in a downturn? Absolutely. Run a surplus of taxes when the economy’s doing well? Nah, we’d rather not. And part of Labour’s long-running credit-fuelled feel-good factor was that they laudably wanted to pull in jobs from multinational corporations, so they let them get away with dodging taxes by the supertanker-load.

It’s only since the Coalition came to power that the UK Government’s focused on tax-dodging – partly because the Lib Dems insisted it be a priority, partly because the Tories realised that (for all they wanted to) they couldn’t get away with sucking up to big business like Labour did, and partly because, as even Labour admitted (though not of course that it’s their fault),

“there is no money”

and the Coalition Government now has little choice but to chase the money that Labour nodded and winked at companies to say they needn’t bother with and that’s harder to get even now the Government is actually trying.

But some of the tax that’s been dodged is very hard to get hold of indeed.

From Privatisation To Privateers

As an innovative way of prying taxes out of the biggest avoiders, it’s time to look again at the empirical case for privatisation. Will it work? Does it make economic sense? And can it do something the state can’t? The oft-quoted reason for many Thatcherite privatisations, even those that set up new private monopolies that logic suggested would be worse than public ones, was that even when there was no boost to competition, privatisation would automatically lead to ‘innovation’ and so ‘efficiency’. Sometimes this was true, sometimes not. One where it sounds more than worth a try is a case of very ostentatious state failure – the power of massive multinational corporations to avoid paying taxes. And so I come to my second and far more exciting piece of privatisation reading this week (though it was actually published the previous week, before you correct me).

Jason O’Mahony is a former Progressive Democrat and, if he counts himself as any sort of cousin to the Liberal family, is definitely at several removes from me (let alone Simon Titley). But, cover me in advertising and call me a Thatcherite, I think his “here’s a mad thought” blog post “Want to tax multinationals? How about privatising their tax liabilities?” is a brilliant notion.

“One of the challenges of taxing large multinationals is the fact that corporate taxation is like a war at sea. The fronts keeping changing, and you’re fighting on many different fronts at once. On top of that, the fact is that multinationals, because of the huge sums involved, pay huge money to their tax advisors, and so tend to attract the best. Tax authorities, on the other hand, get quietly competent but under resourced people…

“Auction off their tax liabilities to the highest bidder, as a legally recoverable asset, in the same way banks are selling off distressed, toxic assets. If company X owes state Y a nominal €100 million, auction it off. The state gets a chunk of money with ease, and the asset, the tax debt, becomes a private liability.

“Sure that’s mad, says you. Sure, who’d buy that debt? Some entrepreneur would, at a knock down price, and would pay hotshot young lawyers out of the finest universities in the world big fat bonuses for figuring out ways of recovering the debt. In short, we’d fight rogue tax dodging capitalists with the most innovative, hungry force on Earth: other capitalists.”

And he’s quite right about the counter-argument – people would scream that we’re “losing some of that tax revenue” to “mercenary taxmen”. That’s the tax revenue that we’re not getting. Half of something still being better than all of nothing. Because that’s the beauty of the idea – you only auction off the tax liabilities that you’ve already failed miserably to get hold of. And this way, you don’t have to pay all the lawyers to do battle in court and board the boardrooms. The auction-winners do that. You don’t need to sell off the lot – perhaps just some of the worst, pour encourager les autres – and you can set a ‘reserve price’ at the auction to prevent too big a disparity between liability and profit, or bar the dodgers from bidding on their own debts, or whatever… But it can’t be beyond the wit of government to set rules that are both lucrative for the public purse and exciting for innovators.

If it doesn’t bring in much money for the privateers, governments will already have had their cash up front by privatising the risk, and few will cry about it. If it brings in a lot of money for the privateers, the multinationals might be forced to settle with governments instead and agree to a binding international system of tax in future. And if the privateers’ lawyers hit on innovative arguments that spike the dodgers’ guns and set legal precedents, then government lawyers can move in and capitalise on those to rake in all the other liabilities.

So how about it, Danny? It would certainly bring in vastly more cash – and do far less political damage – than making more students walk the plank and keelhauling the Lib Dem vote.

Labels: Big Business, British Politics, Coalition, Ideas, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Pirates, Tax, The Golden Dozen