July 19, 2010
Anti-Fascism is a Left Wing Issue
I live in graduate accommodation, which I share with a high percentage of overseas students from India and China. The other day I was doing my washing and a group of 6-7 East Asians were in the room at the same time. There was a bit of confusion about a semi-broken washing machine, and the Asian students were all talking to each other in, in part (I presumed) about me.
At that moment a thought popped through my head that shocked me: “Oh for God’s sake speak English, this isn’t bloody China”
It took me by surprise. To some extent I was just feeling irritated about the washing machine being broken again, and nobody likes to be talked about without understanding what’s said. But nonetheless it surprised me how quickly this line – beloved of racists and racist-sympathisers – came to me.
So am I a racist? The answer, I think, is no…but that I could be.
On the one hand I know racism is daft for all the well-rehearsed reasons. That a person’s genetic racial background has no meaningful effect on their character. That whilst different cultures of socialisation may promote different trends of behaviour, the enormous variation within “cultures” makes a mockery of racially-determined personality classifications.
But whilst it’s tempting to say that such high-falutin’ thoughts ensure my non-racism, I suspect it isn’t the whole story. Abstract reflection of such sorts can certainly guard against casual lazy racism (of the “all [...] are [...]” kind, beloved by pub boors and garden variety prats). But what about the altogether more troubling breed of racism; the sort that provokes to anger and hatred, that seeks to blame other races and persecute them accordingly?
A huge part of the reason why I’m not that sort of angry, hateful racist is that I have neither the time, inclination, energy nor disposition to hate other people with such burning prejudice. Hating people takes a lot of energy – and I’d rather expend mine cycling, reading books and going to the pub with friends.
Which is easy for me to say, isn’t it? Because I live on a fat government subsidy and am lower-middle class with financial and emotional security. If, by contrast, I was poor, unemployed (or under threat of being made so), had debts to pay and children to feed, and was living under the constant threat of losing control of my life situation (which was already stressful enough) then I might not be so high-minded. Indeed the frustrations and angers of the daily grind might well be eased by expending energy in the hatred of a suitable blame-group.
What I’m describing is poverty, of course. But what I’m not trying to say is that all poor people are racist – on the contrary, history shows that some of the most committed anti-fascists have been working class. What I am trying to highlight is how much easier it is to be anti-racist when you’ve got security and other, more enjoyable, things to do with yourself.
Which, for me, is a big part of the reason why anti-fascism is a left wing issue. Not just in terms of the on-street campaigning done by organisations like Hope Not Hate and UAF, but from the perspective of removing the long-term breeding grounds for racism. It’s the left that takes seriously – and tries to alleviate – the hardship and poverty of society’s most vulnerable. The right simply does not; empty rhetoric about a “Big Society” notwithstanding as cuts are implemented that hurt society’s poorest on the assurance that the market will sort it out anyway.
Although the BNP is hilariously threatened with financial ruin for a copyright infringement which can only be described as colossally imbecilic, fascism is a political zombie that always comes back eventually. A while ago people like Iain Dale were alleging that the BNP is an “extreme left wing party”. It’s worth remembering for the long-run that this is fatuous distraction from the real issue: that wherever we stick the BNP and its ilk on the political spectrum, those who attempt seriously to neutralise the racist breeding-grounds of fascism are on the broad political left.
July 17, 2010
the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
Weekend fun for all you historians of political thought out there; snapped in Cannes last month but only just remembered:
(It’s a pun, in French, geddit? But it recalls to mind 17th-18th century debates about self-love and the natural sociability of man and…oh forget it).
July 16, 2010
Cable’s Fair Tax
This blog post by Conor Ryan has me thinking about Vince Cable’s proposed graduate tax.
Basics first. Higher education provision is expensive, but it’s also beneficial to wider society (a public good) insofar as it results in a better educated, more productive and perhaps even more culturally sophisticated work force. But it’s also usually an immense boon to the individuals who receive it (a private good), insofar as graduates on average earn higher salaries than non-graduates.
Accordingly, it seems right that society should collectively fund the provision of higher education but it also seems fair that the recipients of such education contribute given the benefits they personally receive.
At present, an enormous spending squeeze is about to hit British universities at a time when many institutions were already warning that they needed to raise fees to meet costs.
We know that on average middle and upper class kids are more likely to go to university than working class kids. At present, however, most students pay the same level of university fees, although the poorer are entitled to grants. Fees are financed via The Student Loan Company, which pegs interest to inflation, meaning that the real cost of a degree does not increase over time (making it excellent value for money, in borrowing terms).
However the student loan does not cover (anything like) the whole of a degree cost, and because working-class kids are less likely to go to university, the result is that the state – by subsidising university places – effectively redistributes from poor to richer, albeit unintentionally. Furthermore, there is an after-the-fact problem of fairness with tuition fees: as Cable puts it, people who go on to be top bankers and lawyers after they graduate pay back the same amount as teachers and nurses, and that just seems wrong.
A graduate tax thus looks like an innovative and fair way to begin to solve both the funding issue and the social justice issue.
Looked at this way Vince Cable seems like he’s at the heart of what Stuart White calls the battle for liberalism within the Lib Dems. Against the small-state, pro-market libertarianism of people like Nick Clegg and David Laws, Cable’s plan chimes more with the “other” interpretation of liberalism. The one with a long and dignified English lineage, but most recently developed by American political theorists like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, advocating the role of the state as an enabling agent compensating for unfair disadvantage, inequality, and the lack of freedom and autonomy imposed by unregulated market systems.
Accordingly, those on the liberal left ought to welcome Cable’s proposal. Both as a matter of fairness, but also as part of the battle for preventing the Lib Dems become nothing but Conservatives dressed in yellow, enabling their hard-cutting ideological agenda.*
But it may not work out that way. Take Conor Ryan – with banners emblazoned on his site proclaiming him a “Top 100” Labour and centre-left blogger – attacking Cable’s proposal using tried and tested right wing tropes. For example, that the graduate tax may lead to a “brain drain” – a stupid argument beloved of the right that I’ve criticised before. He also – unbelievably – makes noises to the effect that it is unfair for those earning more to reciprocate with greater contributions: “What the Liberal Democrats are looking for is a backdoor way of raising taxes further on high earners.” I guess that tagline – “former adviser to Tony Blair” – isn’t there for nothing.
Having said that all the Labour leadership candidates except David Miliband have backed a graduate tax. This further solidifies my preference against D-Mil, but I’ll be interested to see whether Labour – when it gets a new leader – can resist the siren calls from within the party urging an attack on the Lib Dems, and stick to principle despite tribal lines. I’ll be honest and say I’m not particularly hopeful.
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* I accept that some Labour people want that to happen so that the Lib Dems are effectively redundant. That’s possibly a laudable long-term aim, but in the short term anything that can moderate a rampant Tory axe-attach on public spending is a good thing.
July 15, 2010
Why not camping?
When I’ve got my philosophy hat on I tend to side with thinkers like Aristotle, David Hume and Adam Smith, who all urge that instead of sitting in our armchairs thinking about what good boys and girls ought to do if they’re being nice and rational, it’s more fruitful to check our hypotheses and reasonings against the real world to see what people actually do, and take actual human practice as our litmus test and conceptual baseline.
Plato, Locke, Kant and arguably John Rawls disagreed (though of course they wouldn’t have described situation as I do). Such disagreement will likely go on for as long as there are philosophers.
But here’s some support for my tribe. I recently discussed the work of Gerry Cohen regarding an ethos of justice. This week one of Cohen’s other (but connected) ideas has come under the public gaze: the question of camping and communism.
To summarise: Cohen thought that on camping trips everybody automatically and spontaneously fell into communistic social ordering and production, living out the dictum of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. The puzzle for Cohen was why modern mass democratised society did not exhibit the ethos and organisation of the camping trip.
What’s been really rather good, however, is the treatment this idea has been getting over at The Guardian. Personally, I had too-quickly taken for granted Cohen’s premise that collective camping is more or less like communistic society. But Aditya Chakrabortty, in a rather funny little piece, has noted that “A more outdoorsy philosopher might have acknowledged that someone will always turn up on a camping trip without all the kit, while someone else will always skive off.”
Following-up, Mark Wallace is also even more critical of the camping-as-communist thesis:
“We weren’t rich, but that didn’t make us experimental communists. Nor does camping induce a magical, selfless comradeship among those who pitch their tents in the same field. As we swiftly discovered, nothing is quite as funny as picking up someone’s tent while they’re asleep and moving it somewhere inconvenient, or hearing someone woken up by a burly archaeologist falling on to their rickety tent in the middle of the night.
Sure, if someone’s guy ropes break or their tent pegs get stolen, their fellow campers will probably dig out some spare ones to lend to them. There is community on a campsite – but it has far more in common with the old-fashioned workings of a small village. You’re either friends with your neighbours or you’re stuck with them, so you help out when it’s needed.
Communism has always been a daydream rather than a reality, and the same goes for the concept of camping as communism. From a distance, it’s easy to get misty-eyed about shared ownership flourishing under canvas, but in practice it’s still a load of drunk people living in a field.”
You might reply – and you’d be right – that Wallace doesn’t really engage with the core point of Cohen’s argument: that withholding essential goods, monopolising the means of production, and attempting to extract the surplus labour value of one’s fellow campers would all be automatically unacceptable on the camping trip, and thus not done.
But he’s probably still right about the nitty-gritty of camping, and the fact that some of the communistic-tendencies Cohen claims to identify may well be born of necessity rather than anything else. That is, you help out your neighbour because you have to – even when they are letting everyone else down and being a lay-about free rider, but only because you have to. From which an important question follows: what, exactly, is wrong with choosing to abandon the spirit of help-thy-neighbour-even-when-he’s-a-scrounger when it ceases to be a forced necessity – as it is with advanced capitalist society?
It seems to me quite a deep-cutting question. In fact it’s probably essentially the same one that the never-ending “luck egalitarian” debate diligently chips away at. But it’s also one we all have to confront in a country whose politics is apparently dictated by the Daily Mail and Sun’s benefit witch hunts.
On Banning the Veil
UPDATE II: It’s just occurred to me that today is 14th July, Bastille Day. Is it naive, then, to think that it was mere coincidence that the ban was voted-through yesterday, before today’s French public holiday?
UPDATE: Everyone should read Nakul’s excellent comment at the bottom of this piece. Also, the post below may give the impression that all French feminist groups are rabidly in favour of the ban – that would be deeply misleading, see here. Also, I should have mentioned in the OP that a huge part of French paranoia about Muslims stems from collective anxiety about the French-Algerian population, following the fact that Algeria fought a bloody and brutal war of independence post-WWII, something which still dominates French collective consciences.
Yesterday the French moved towards a complete ban on the full Muslim face veil.
Very little is straightforward in the debate on this issue, and anybody who says otherwise is usually confused or lying. But there are a few things that can be said here. (Those wanting a more in-depth account can read this paper by Cecile Laborde, from which I borrow).
Firstly, France has a very specific history regarding the issue of religious dress which is perceived – or alleged – to restrict the freedom and autonomy of women in particular. Modern French politics is heavily conditioned by the formative experience of the 1789 Revolution and the ideals which later emerged in reference to that. In particular, the state is generally viewed as a positive, secular, rationalist, Enlightenment force which delivered individualism and autonomy from the ashes of the hierarchies of the ancien regime, and continued to do so in the face of the Catholic Church.
As Laborde notes, in the early 20th Century, the Catholic nun – her head veiled – was viewed as the antithesis of the republic, “whose irrational religiosity and forced confinement ostensibly symbolized rejection of the republican ideal of secular progress, female autonomy and rationality”. The modern Muslim veil thus cuts deep into the French collective political-historical psyche.
Furthermore, the predominant conception of the state as a positive, secularising force for rational autonomy has led to a long and deep tradition of “Laïcité” in France. A firm division of church and state, especially in matters of education, has long been pursued.
Recently French feminists – of both 1970s vintage and second-generation immigrant background – have united, arguing that the veil is both symbolic of, and essential to, the systematic subjugation of women in Muslim communities. They argue that, in particular, women raised in Muslim communities and forced to adopt the veil cannot get enough critical distance from patriarchal practices to be able to choose autonomously, for themselves, whether or not to endorse such practices. Furthermore, feminist critics of the veil argue that it is in truth a systematic attempt to control female appearance, individuality and sexuality as a product of Muslim males’ loss of identity and self-certainty in a globalised and displaced world.
These concerns are reinforced by an insistence that it is a mistake to simply treat all Muslims as part of a single, homogenous “community” that speaks for itself and asserts “its own” values. On the contrary, they urge the recognition that such “communities” are often given voice by privileged and empowered males who assert patriarchal values at the expense of (in particular) women within that community. (A good case for such an understanding is put forward by Anne Phillips in this excellent podcast).
However, these arguments cannot straightforwardly translate into any ban on the veil. In particular, there is a problem in explaining how it can be that if banning the veil is supposed to increase Muslim women’s autonomy, they have to be forced not to wear it. Thoughts might here turn to Rousseau’s famous paradox – that members of a well-governed republic must be “forced to be free” – but the fact (as Bernard Williams notes) that this is a paradox puts the ball into the veil-banner’s court.
Furthermore, it’s not like real-world French politics is driven solely by philosophical argumentation – indeed far from it. In a country where the racist, anti-Muslim National Front can poll up to 15% of the national vote, and have its leader in the final 2-candidate run-off for the Presidency, the efficacy and imperative for politicians to “clamp down on the Muslims” should not be underestimated.
Similarly, that the increasingly unpopular President Sarkozy habitually attacks French immigrant Arab and Muslim communities whenever his poll ratings look especially low, should not be forgotten or ignored in the context of yesterday’s vote.
And lastly, there is an outstanding problem for all proponents of the ban.
If Muslim women are oppressed and forced into wearing the veil by men in their immediate communities, then forcing them not to wear it is hardly going to end well for many of these women. Especially if the feminist claim is right, and the controlling of female identity is a product of perceived Muslim male emasculation.
If the veil is banned in public, controlled Muslim women can simply expect never to go out in public again. Or what is probably worse, to be beaten and punished for appearing unveiled.
It’s difficult to see that outcome as a victory for secular rationalist feminist humanism.
July 13, 2010
Authenticity and Performance Enhancing Drugs
The World Cup over, I suppose we could all start watching the Tour de France. But there’s a put-off (well, apart from the fact it’s boring): everyone knows that all of the participants are on serious performance enhancing drugs. So serious, in fact, that apparently they have to carry on cycling on indoor rollers to avoid dropping dead.
Which leads to the question: why the ban on performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in sport? Let’s put aside health issues and only consider PEDs that are safe to users. Why shouldn’t we embrace medical advances and reap the rewards of better-performing athletes to watch on our tellies whilst we stuff our faces with chips and lager?
One thought is that PEDs lead to inauthentic sporting achievements. That what we want to see is the peak of human physical excellence in its unadulterated natural form; that we don’t want drugged-up freaks of superhuman power.
But if the latter would lead to better sport to watch, the question is: why not? And if we want to see pure human achievement, why wasn’t the World Cup Final played by barefooted naked men deprived of the artificial advantage of modern football boots?
Authenticity is a tricky value, and there’s no easy route to arguing against PEDs off the back of it. An example from academic philosophy helps to show why and how this can be.
I have in mind a well-known thought experiment originally introduced by Robert Nozick which asks: if scientific advancement resulted in a machine which simulated reality to the extent that you would forget, and never realise, you were in the machine and which would then keep you alive for the rest of your natural life, whilst inducing an existence of (simulated, but from your perspective inside the machine as-good-as real) blissful, self-fulfilled, harmony and joy…would you get in?
Lots of philosophers – as well as ordinary people – want to say “no”. Quite often they will try and cheat, saying that “real life” will always be somehow better than the pleasure machine. But we can defeat those sorts of maneouvres easily, by making it an advance condition of the thought experiment that the pleasure machine just is better (however you want to define “better”) than real life. The question remains: would you plug in?
Many philosophers have attempted to argue (in various ways and in various guises) that the pleasure machine should not be chosen. Quite often the answer revolves around a claim to authenticity: that life is better than a simulation because it is somehow more authentic.
But that to me has always seemed like a fudge, and a bad one to boot. You see, we don’t actually need to use the weird example of a “pleasure machine”. We have various rough proxies for that sort of thing in the real world as it is, and plenty of people choose to “plug in”. These rough proxies are variously known as crack cocaine, heroin and crystal mephamphetamine. Many people in the real world decide that they prefer the imperfect, fleeting and life-destroying moments of pleasure these drugs provide than life without such drugs.
Of course, most people recoil in horror from taking such drugs. Often this is a product of extensive social indoctrination against hard drugs in particular. But it’s more than just that: it’s because most know that serious engagement with hard drugs ruins lives. Most people, however, are fairly firmly-wedded to the lives they currently lead. In Bernard Williams’ useful phrase, their lives exhibit many and healthy “projects and commitments”: deep-running features of their personality and life-experience which shape who they are, what they value and what they want to do in the future. A turn to hard drugs would destroy most people’s projects and commitments – and accordingly most people don’t take the turn.
Yet not everyone is so lucky. For those without deep-going projects and commitments, or whose lives exhibit projects and commitments that revolve around repeat suffering, abuse and hopelessness, the pleasure machine – or in this world, hard drugs – can seem like a very appealing prospect. Or, if you want another Sci Fi example, here’s Cypher in The Matrix:
“I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy, and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”
So here’s an interesting thought. It’s very easy for us – the safely established ones, with healthy projects and commitments – to look with scorn upon those choosing “inauthentic” variations on the pleasure machine. But to those people not in our fortunate shoes that may look very rich indeed. Try living their lives before turning your nose up at escape routes which are “inauthentic”.
Which brings us back to PEDs. It’s all very well for we spectators to decry the use of drugs in sport. But for the athletes themselves – locked in fierce competition and training cycles, who must be the best to earn a living – it may seem very rich indeed to hand down lectures about “authenticity” in sporting achievement. Especially when other athletes may be doping on the sly, meaning that sticking to the rules will be a mug’s game anyway.
Some won’t like these conclusions, perhaps because they lead to “relativism”. If so, two questions:
1. Just because you don’t like apparently relativistic conclusions, does that really mean they’re therefore wrong?
2. What have you got to offer instead?
July 12, 2010
Conservative Wisdom
The Nanny State. With its army of bureaucrats, its forests of red tape, its suffocating reams of cotton wool heralding the world of ‘Elf and Safety Gone Mad! Down with the Nanny State!
Hurrah for Andrew Lansley! Champion of individual responsibility and grown up society!
Who needs a “Food Standards Agency” anyway? At last, adults will be treated like adults. The oppressive tyranny of colour-coded food packaging will be overthrown. No longer will the Nanny State bully people into eating healthily with its ominous and intrusive red, orange and green labelling guide.
Instead, responsible members of the Big Society will have to help themselves, taking the time to calculate percentage intakes of fat, sugar and salt and deciding whether a product is a sensible healthy option or not. Whereas before the life-interfering PC brigade forced people to be healthy with their red traffic lights, meaningful freedom has now been restored.
Whatismore, Sir Lansley (if I may pre-empt the rightfully inevitable) has struck a blow in favour of the other core ideals of freedom: competition and independent production. Rather than the interfering state obstructing the activities of private enterprises with its paternalistic cynicism, companies will now compete freely in the market, securing efficiency and ensuring that rational, responsible consumers can exercise their full freedom of choice.
And with this blessed increase in freedom rational and responsible consumers can look forward to many pleasures.
With the removal of regulation, British meat production can get back to its halcyon days. When companies circumvented restrictions on animal rearing to beat the competition, and fed dead cows to living cows leading to a mass outbreak of BSE. Which was then lied about and covered-up.
Rational and responsible consumers of the big society will be empowered to choose whether or not to eat beef, knowing it might kill them or their families! British farmers will be empowered to decide whether or not to commit suicide following the collapse of their herds and income-sources, as they are abandoned by the companies that earlier demanded they rear cattle in such a disastrous way. As the EU imposes a ban on British beef exports, the entire country can bask in the good economic consequences sure to follow. In a mark of independent self-reliance, Andrew Lansley will no doubt feed a possibly infected beef burger to his daughter in the sort of gruesome propaganda stunt pioneered by his predecessor John Gummer.
In the meantime, parents on low incomes in stressful circumstances will be empowered to make independent decisions when buying food for their children. As there is no such thing as “pester power” – the food industry spends billions worldwide on marketing for absolutely no reason at all – parents can only win.
Restrictions on advertising are nothing but manifestations of an evil, all-controlling Big State Gone Mad. They should be dispensed with forthwith. This will allow the rational consumers of tomorrow to make informed personal choices, via the medium of their parents wallets, enlightened by the merely informational qualities of multi-national advertising techniques.
The Nanny State’s egregious interference – the aforementioned traffic-light package guides – will surely soon be removed forever. And what loss could there possibly be? Lobby groups certainly spent £830million in a successful bid to prevent the traffic light system being introduced EU-wide. But that was just because being such fantastically successful, enterprising, innovating and dynamic corporations they needed something to do for a laugh. No harm can come of such activities, especially as the tyrannous traffic lights were just evil state interference anyway.
With the death of the FSA – saving an enormous £135million in these times of fiscal austerity – the overbearing state will be rolled back. Britain’s independent citizens will once again stand shoulder to shoulder with Nestle, Unilever, Kellog, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonalds, Mars and Burger King.
Freedom will be restored to this benighted isle. Thank the gods for Conservative Wisdom.
July 10, 2010
Heart of Darkness
It has just come to my attention that my friend Will Jones is writing a blog, mostly on Africa and African politics. Or more specifically Rwandan (and Congolese) politics, because that’s where he specialises and was (is?) working.
Jones’ head is already too big, so suffice to say that he’s a man of vaguely-above-average wit who won some competition or something.
I recommend starting with this excellent post about the deep hypocrisy and historical idiocy underlying the recent wave of homophobia across sub-Saharan Africa. Then read this long but very insightful entry debating – in an even handed and intelligent manner – the issue of Fair Trade, and whether it does more harm than good.*
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*Smug moment: I remember a pithy, look-how-controversial-I-am Jones harking on about the evils of Fair Trade (uttered – shock – from a leftist!) at some point about 4 years ago. I am amused to see that he appears to have concluded that although it’s complicated, there’s a lot of good in FT. But that, to be fair, is what makes his blog post worth reading: a sincere recognition of the fact the issue is complicated, and that neat answers are unlikely in any direction. So take that, Cato Institute and the ASI.
July 9, 2010
EDMs, Institutions and Self-interest
Nakul alerts me to that rare thing: an Early Day Motion we should all support.
As explained previously, EDMs are a con used by MPs to make it appear they are being useful when they’re not. So kudos to Graham Evans MP, and his call that they be “reformed or abolished”:
“That this House regrets the continuing decline in importance of Early Day Motions which have become a campaign tool for external organisations; notes the role of public affairs professionals in drafting Early Day Motions and encouraging members of the organisations they represent to send pro forma emails and postcards to hon. Members; further notes the huge volume of correspondence that this generates and the consequent office and postage costs incurred; believes that the organisations involved derive little benefit from Early Day Motions, which very rarely have any influence on policy; further believes that public affairs professionals are aware of the ineffectiveness of Early Day Motions, but continue to use them to attempt to justify their services; questions the value for money to the taxpayer of Early Day Motions of whatever origin; and calls for the system of Early Day Motions to be reformed or abolished.”
What should other MPs do? EDMs are, after all, particularly useful to MPs in marginal seats, and the big parties are favourable to them accordingly.
Indeed it looks at first glance like we have a “tragedy of institutions” scenario at work. These happen when people find themselves locked into institutional structures that they cannot control, but which demand that they do things that have bad, destructive or otherwise undesirable consequences
Thus marginal-constituency MPs might say: “hey, I’ve got to keep my seat and unfortunately that means signing lots of EDMs even though their total cost runs into £700,000+, which is a totally unjustifiable waste of money now that the coalition is slashing spending in ways that disproportionately hurt the poor.”
There situation may look, therefore, a bit like that of Tommy Carcetti.
When elected Mayor of Baltimore Carcetti inherited a hole in the schools budget from his predecessor, about which he’d been completely ignorant. Carcetti was faced with a choice. Either he could fill the fiscal hole by putting up taxes and diverting money from the affluent suburbs, or he could go back on his election promises and screw the poor. The disadvantage with the first solution was that alienating the middle classes would ruin his bid to be Governor of Maryland. The advantage of the latter was that he’d have a shot at the big-time.
In the end Carcetti screwed the poor. But he justified it to himself on the grounds that if he became Governor, he’d be able to help the poor far more than he could as mayor. Or as is more commonly said: the ends would justify the means.
Our MPs might be tempted by such reasoning: “Hey, the work I do is so useful that it’s justified if I perpetuate a system that is wasteful and indefensible so as to help keep my seat”.
But as with Carcetti, this isn’t good enough. MPs have a choice, and it’s one of principle versus self-interest. And we should not lose sight of the latter under a veneer of consequentialist obfuscation.
Quite often in politics, things are not clear cut. But with this one they are: EDMs are unjustifiable, and they should stop. Politicians who refuse to back their abolition are self-interested, and not acting in the public interest.
Which leaves me in the paradoxical position of being tempted to ask you all to write to your MP and ask them to sign EDM 432. But to go some way to solving the paradox, you can also write to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, urging them of the small but wholly justified savings available from abolishing EDMs.
