2015 Election Forecast

Right folks, me and my Casio FX-85 have been busy all afternoon and I am finally willing to put my name to an election forecast.

My projection is:

Con: 279

Lab: 268

SNP: 48

Lib Dem: 28

DUP: 9

Sinn Fein: 5

UKIP: 3

Green: 1

Others: 9

This is my forecast for the make up of the House of Commons as a whole however these figures include the Speaker and the five Sinn Fein MP’s who will not take their seats. Assuming that John Bercow is returned as speaker, which I consider likely, the adjusted the figures will be as follows:

Con: 278

Lab: 268

SNP: 48

Lib Dem: 28

DUP: 9

UKIP: 3

Green: 1

Others: 9

This would mean that the winner would require 323 to form a majority or 322 as in the event of a tie on a commons vote the speaker will cast his vote in favour of the government.

In this projection there will be no major upsets. Jim Murphy and Douglas Alexander, the two most senior Labour politicians Scotland under risk from the SNP will both hold their seats, as will Charles Kennedy for the Lib Dems. Nick Clegg will retain his seat. The most senior politicians to lose their seats will be Danny Alexander in Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey and Esther McVey in Wirral West.

Alex Salmond will win in Gordon, albeit narrowly, and Boris Johnson will triumph in in Uxbridge. Saddam Hussein look alike John Thurso (Whose constituency coincidentally includes the town of Thurso) is no better than evens to hold his Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross seat. Caroline Lucas will represent Brighton Pavilion but the Greens will miss out on a second seat in Bristol West.

I think UKIP will have a better night than many expect. They look like winning Clacton and Thurrock and Farage will win in South Thanet. In Bradford West, although there is a dearth of polling, the betting is strongly in favour of George Galloway retaining his seat so I have chalked it up for Respect.

The other parties include Plaid Cymru, who will hold but not improve upon their tally of three seats, and various Northern Ireland parties.

What’s happening in the Eurozone tonight...

Out of the talks between what was known as the Troika and the new Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras rumours are emerging. The rhetoric is that neither side is willing to budge and that the talks have not reached an agreement, but the whispers are that one is near.

Here is what we know:

1)    The ECB’s move last week to force Greece to rely on the emergency financing had the effect of shortening the timetable for these negotiations to conclude. Several news organisations are now reporting that money is leaving Greek banks at an ever quickening pace, bringing forward the time when they will need refinancing. The Troika imposed reforms forced the previous Greek government to hold some reserves but they are not likely to be that huge. As it stands the Greece could run out of money by the end of March.

2)    No one wants Greece to default. This means that the Greek government is unlikely to want to play this card in the negotiations. The Greek people are opposed to default and, even though default has a worse reputation than it deserves, it would bring immense hardship and the social unrest in the short term. What is more, it looks as though default may not be the nuclear weapon it may once have been. The fluctuations in the Greek markets have not been mirrored outside Greece, suggesting that the markets believe that other European economies are sufficiently insulated to withstand a Greek default. If Greece had defaulted in 2010 or 2011 it would have dragged the Eurozone down with it, not any longer.

3)    Greece wants a bridging package rather than a bailout extension, the Troika doesn’t. The bridging package would be designed to get Greece through the next six months whist a long-term solution was negotiated. Here Syriza may be playing on a loosing wicket, there seems to be no reason for the Troika to agree to a bridging package, the shorter the timetable the weaker the Greek governments negotiating position. In exchange for the bridging loan Tsipras has offered to the run a primary surplus of 2% (rather than the 4.5% demanded by the Troika) and to slow down the implementation of some of his manifesto.

It now looks like there will be an agreement. George Osborne said at the weekend that the Treasury is drawing up contingency plans for Grexit but this does not seem to have been mirrored in Germany, whose finance ministry are on record saying there is no possibility of Greece leaving the Euro. What will almost certainly happen is that there will be either a bailout extension which looks enough like a bridging agreement for Syriza to claim victory or a bridging loan which looks enough like a bailout extension for the Troika to claim that they have stood firm. Given the comparative strength of the negotiating positions the former looks more likely than the latter, although there is no guarantee that the activist core of Syriza would accept this. They may be the wild card in this which no one can control.

What the ECB did in the night

At 11pm Athens time the ECB went on the offensive. Having been slow to respond to the manoeuvres of Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis as he darted around Europe, the ECB finally came out with a meaningful, if not entirely unexpected, response. Varoufakis had stolen the momentum of the renewed Greek bailout debate when he announced that he would no longer recognise the Troika as the single entity but would deal with its constituent parts (the EU, the IMF and the ECB) separately. He then continued to control the debate by making various concessions around the extent to which the total debt burden should be reduced. The action last night (4^th February) is the ECB trying to seize the initiative in the wake of the Greek government getting a warmer hearing than anticipated in Paris and Rome.

So what has the ECB done? Essentially they have lifted a waiver on a credit rating rule which allows European banks to trade their junk loans for credit. Essentially the scheme allows banks to swap debt they will never get back for credit. Normally there is a minimum credit requirement to participate in the scheme, to keep bad banks out, however there was a waiver for Greek banks, which otherwise would not have made the grade and would have been excluded. The removal of this waiver means that from 11^th February Greek banks will not have access to the scheme.

Why does this matter? At the moment there is a high level of uncertainty about the Greek economy leading to a flow of money out of the already weak banks. At the moment these banks have access to capitalisation from the ECB which buys their bad debt. Come 11^th February this stops. If money continues to flow from the Greek banks the banks can either apply to the ECB through an emergency liquidity fund, a far more expensive way of accessing capital, or it can turn to the Greek Central Bank in Athens. If the Greek Central Bank cannot get money from ECB it will have to find its own methods of recapitalisation. This will involve Greece printing its own money, a new Drachma. The action by the ECB makes Greece being forced out of the Euro far more likely if a deal cannot be reached in near future.

Because the introduction of a new Greek currency will immediately be followed by its devaluation, making it impossible for Greece to service its debt, Greece leaving the Euro will result in it defaulting. This nuclear option is the strongest card in Syriza’s hand, but it is one that it is loathe to use. Greeks do not want to leave the Euro and the defaults and currency changes are rarely clean and never cheap. Default is good for neither side economically however the actions of the ECB raises serious questions about democracy within the EU and the Eurozone.

If the ECB forced Greece out of the Euro it would be an instance of a bureaucratic central bank overruling the expressed desire of a democratically elected government. Are we sure this is the sort of thing that we want to allow? In most nations the central bank is under the control of the government and even where it is independent, as in the UK, it would never knowingly act contrary to the interests of the country. The actions which the ECB took late at night were neither desired by the Greek people nor in their interests. Aside from anything else, removing liquidity from a fragile banking system is never likely to encourage economic recovery. The path that the ECB is threatening to go down has not been voted for the Greek people, or indeed the European people. The ECB has pursued a neo-liberal, pro-austerity dogma into an undemocratic and potentially quite nasty cul-d-sac. 

Why we must continue to laugh at religion

In 2012 Stéphane Charbonnier was asked by a journalist from Le Monde how he felt about the death threats he was receiving because the magazine he edited had dared to depict Muhammad and mock the Islamic faith. He famously replied that “I would rather die standing than live on my knees”. On Wednesday Stéphane Charbonnier was murdered by two machine gun wielding fanatics in his Paris office. Thankfully his murderers are now dead, along with an accomplice who shot a police woman in the back and took twenty people hostage in a Jewish supermarket, killing four of them. What did Stéphane Charbonnier die standing for? And would it not have been better to kneel?

In the debate since the Charlie Hebdo offices were attacked there has been a strand on the (presumably illiterate) hard left who believe that the magazine didn’t satirise Islam but race bated muslims. The proponents of this view hold that whilst no one should be killed for drawing a cartoon (they are generous enough to give us that) the cartoons were offensive, racist and should never have been drawn, let alone printed. The people who believe this are apologists for murder and terrorism. No matter how many “no one deserves to be shot” caveats they laden their spineless sentences with what they are saying is that, at least in part, the blame for these murders rests with the murdered and thus not wholly with the gutless psychopaths who carried them out. 

We have heard this before. This is the same dull crowd who believed that every time a lunatic blew himself up in a market in the middle of Baghdad the blood flowed onto the hands of Tony Blair. It is the same crowd who blame the economic disadvantage for the stabbings in Hackney or social exclusion for shootings in Peckham. The fault is never wholly that of the perpetrator, whose failing is merely that he failed to resist the prevailing economic and social conditions which drove him down the path of mindless violence. Such a view is, as the late Christopher Hitchens put it, an affront to the idea of moral responsibility. In the case of this weeks Paris massacre the people who believe such things are not just craven quasi-appeasers, they are wholly wrong.

Most people who don’t crave tyranny would willingly concede that you do have the right to be offensive. As the old adage goes, offense is taken, not given, and you don’t have a right not to be offended. What happens when you try to stop people being offensive was shown by the introduction of Section 5 of the Public Order Act: you end up arresting carol singers and those who are rude to horses. But this was not what Charlie Hebdo is about. It was not a paper which set out to offend just because it could. Charbonnier did not mean we should stand tall and be obnoxious for the sake of it. 

What the murdered cartoonists believed was that religion should be critiqued, criticized and, where if fell short, mocked lampooned and ridiculed. Religion is human. The animals don’t have it, nor do the trees or the rocks. Religion came into the world with humans and will leave it with us, unless we are sensible enough to dispense with it before hand. There is nothing of the supernatural about religion. Religion is manmade and must be seen that way.

People mock everything that is human. I can think of jokes I have heard about the most terrible parts of human nature and history; from cancer to the Holocaust, we mock them because they are part of the world as we find it and as we have made it. Possibly we would not be able to deal with reality if we could not laugh at it. Possibly our existential angst would make life inoperable without humor; we can only deal with the apparent fruitlessness of existence and the finality of death by laughing at it. Laughing makes us who we are; it makes us human.

The second you say something is out of bounds, that it cannot be laughed at, you are saying that it is inhuman, it is higher than us, stronger or better than us. That we should defer to it and revere it. This is the road to tyranny.

Why can dictators not abide satire and people mocking them? Why couldn’t Hitler stand Charlie Chaplin? Why would that silly fat man in North Korea rather start a war than see a terrible Hollywood comedy about him be released? Because their power rests on the belief that they are super-human.

In psychoanalytic theory this is known as belief through the other. I believe in the leader because he knows things that I don’t. In mediaeval christendom the common man did not have a clue what was said when the priest mumbled the mass in Latin, but it didn’t matter because the priest knew, and that was what counted. The belief in God was mediated through the belief in the priest and the church more broadly. It was only with the introduction of the Bible in common languages that this con began to break down.

Likewise, Hitler was allowed to lead the Reich into the abyss because everyone around him believed he had a secret plan which would lead Germany to a glorious victory, it didn’t matter that everyone could see the country steadily disintegrating under a hail of allied ordinance, Hitler would see them through, he was the all-powerful Fuhrer.

The moment that the dictator is exposed as merely human, imbued with all the frailties of the human race, his power fails. This is what satire does. In the hands of the satirist Hitler was a diminutive mustachioed ego-maniac. In the hands of the comedian the Bible is a set of improbable and absurd fairy stories, as much of man as the Brothers Grimm. A satirist exposes the fantasies which surround and support the tyrant for what they are: fantasies. It is not enough that they could be exposed, it is imperative that they are.

Stéphane Charbonnier and his fellow cartoonists knew that the absurdity of religion was not a secret to be whispered between liberals on the Left Bank, it was something to be proclaimed. They knew that We are not free because we have to right to laugh at religion, we are free because we do. That is what they stood for, and that is why they died standing. 

500 Words on the Cosmological Argument

Guys!! I can scarcely believe my stupidity! Having taken about two and a half of your precious earthly minutes to explain the ontological argument I was somehow deaf to your choruses of ‘yes Nick, but what about the cosmological argument?’ So here, to sate your lust, are 500 words on why God is the cause of everything.

The argument is very simple really and dates back to Hellenistic times although it is most famously associated with St Thomas Aquinas.

1) Everything which exists (contingent beings) could, under different circumstances, not exist.

2) It follows, therefore, that there is a reason that they exist as opposed their not existing; they have a cause.

3) This cause must be something other than itself. This is obvious if you think about it: We are talking about bringing things into being. A thing which at one moment exists must have not existed prior to that moment. It cannot have bought itself into existence as to do so it would have had to have existed prior to its existence. You don’t have to be a genius to realise that that makes no sense whatsoever.

4) Other contingent beings alone are not good enough to account for the cause of contingent beings. This is the case because it would mean that there were always objects to serve as the cause of other objects. This would just create an infinite regression and would never explain why the universe exists as opposed to not existing (see premises 1&2)

5) Therefore a non-contingent being must be involved in the cause of contingent beings.

6) A non-contingent being, or a being without matter, is just a posh way of saying God. Consequently God Exists.

Now as it stands this argument looks better than the ontological one, which just goes round and round in circles in a space just left of reality. The most obvious reply to this is that we observe causality by observing things which have causes. As we don’t see the causes of the universe so we can claim that the universe just is. Unfortunately the answer to this is that we see causality in everything else so why should we not extrapolate to the universe, just because we cannot observe its cause doesn’t mean its not there. Put another way: All dogs drink water, just because my dog isn’t drinking water at the moment doesn’t mean that the statement is incorrect. Bertrand Russell does have an answer to this but it is somewhat obscure, so I shall omit it here.

Far more convincing to me is the fact that the conclusions of the argument are contradictory. God is a metaphysical necessity and therefore must exist. Yet this takes us back to premise 1. If God exists then it is possible that under altered circumstances could not exist. Therefore there must be a cause for God existing as opposed to not existing, so God is a contingent being and therefore cannot be a first cause.

Anyway folks that’s me out of words.

500 Words on the Ontological Argument

Hello folks, I thought I would dedicate 500 words (and not more) to the explaining ontological argument for the existence of God. The argument was set down by Saint Anselm of Canterbury in 1078. It runs something like this:

1)  God is perfect. This is true by definition. If the being is not perfect then it cannot be God.

2) God exists in the mind as an idea.

3) A being that exists in the mind is inferior to one that, should all other properties be the same, also exists in reality. For example, think of a spade. If I have a real spade which is exactly like the one you are imagining my real spade will be superior as I can dig a hole with it.

4) Therefore, if God exits in the mind he is not perfect as we can imagine a better God; one that actually exists.

5) But wait! There cannot be a being more perfect than God, therefore amongst God’s qualities is existence. Quod erat demonstrandum: God exists.

There are a number of problems with this as I’m sure you can imagine. First, it draws existence from a physiological phenomenon. If I say “I am imagining the perfect being” and then you say “no you’re not because I can imagine a better one, one which exists” then all that proves is that I wasn’t imagining the perfect being. To confer from this that the being exists is to take unquestioned the premise in point 1, that God is perfect. To say that God exists because he is perfect and that his perfection he exists is entirely circular.

Secondly, The argument, as Gaunilo pointed out, would exists equally well if you replace the word God with a perfect island. Yet no one would claim that if you imagine a perfect island, a more prefect one would be one that was real, therefore the perfect island must exist. The lack of empirical basis for this claim formed Hume’s criticism of the argument for the existence of God.

Meanwhile, Kant pointed out that the existence of God was a prerequisite of the argument working. Take a triangle. It is true by definition that it has internal angles equalling 180^oC and three sides, but that does not mean that the triangle exists. The argument states that if a triangle exists these would be its properties. In the same way that Anselm’s argument states that if God exists this is what he would be like, not that God does exists.

All in all God’s perfection could be a good test of anyone claiming to be God but it cannot be used to prove that he exists.

All in all the ontological argument for the existence of God is an interesting argument which goes round and round in circles in a fashion completely detached from reality.

Right, 500 words are gone so we don’t have time for that Descartes had to say on the matter. But don’t worry it’s not very interesting. 

The Best Books of 2014

It is, alas, Christmas again, which means that the newspapers, at least those which contain words, are full of people telling you which books they have enjoyed most this year. So I thought I would pitch in.

I have read far more books on politics this year than in any year since I started recording what I read. By far the finest is the re-issue of Gyles Brandreth’s parliamentary diaries Breaking the Code. These are the best political diaries I have read since Chris Mullin’s, and are far funnier.

Whilst on the subject of political diaries, the greatest hits of Tony Benn, who left us earlier this year, has been published (The Best of Benn). Ruth Winstone has done an excellent job in editing down the tens of thousands of diary entries, essays, interviews and speeches given by Benn over a truly remarkable life and career.

Other political books I have particularly enjoyed this year include Michael Jago’s Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister and Dennis Skinner’s Sailing Close to the Wind. The Establishment by Owen Jones and Private Island by James Meek made me angry at the elitist clique that runs our lives and has sold us out, and despair at the mountain we must climb to take control. In a case of missing the boat, I cannot recommend Gordon Brown’s My Scotland, Our Britain highly enough. Like his earlier book on the economy, it was thoughtful and outlines the true, patriotic reason for Scotland remaining in the Union and why we should all be so thankful that it did.

Away from politics, this year marked the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War. To mark this I have read a good deal on the War. I write this having just finished re-reading Sebastian Faulks’ masterpiece Birdsong, still the most moving First World War novel I have ever read. I have also particularly enjoyed The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek, the story of the overly patriotic Švejk and his bumbling attempts to reach the front after he is called up to the Austro-Hungarian Army. A classic too little read in this country.

An interesting work on the contribution made by the public schools to the war effort is Anthony Seldon’s book Public Schools and the Great War, it catalogues the horrific losses suffered by junior officers on the Western Front as they led their platoons over the top. One in five former public school boys who went to the Front died there, a higher ratio than any other demographic group. Seldon’s book, as with all his works, is well researched and detailed and challenges the ‘lions led by donkeys’ consensus far more effectively than Michael Gove’s bizarre attacks on Blackadder.

If first hand accounts of the war are more your line of thing then your cannot do better than to reach for Robert Graves autobiography Good-Bye To All That, it may well be the most remarkable memoir I have ever read. Penguin has re-released the original 1929 edition, which is rawer, and what I believe the critics call grittier, than the comparatively restrained, somewhat anodyne later versions.

Two books I was grateful for reading this year were Italio Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees and Tim Parks’ Italian Ways. The former lifted me from a period of melancholy in the spring whilst the latter’s warm and paternal reminisces of journeys on the Italian Railways distracted me greatly and cheered me as we drove around a small corner of that beautiful country in the late summer.

In fiction, The Long Road to the Deep North was a worthy winner of the Mann Booker Prize and a deeply moving story the of human suffering involved in the building of the death railway in Burma during the dark days of World War Two. For my money How to be Both by Ali Smith was the best of the shortlist, an all to rare thing, a novel which makes you see the world a little differently. My other favourite novel I have read this year is The Children Act by Ian McEwan, how it escaped the Booker shortlist I don’t know. For my money it is the best novel McEwan has done for several years and ranks alongside Amsterdam as one of his finest works.

As the New Year approaches I am hoping to finish two books that have dogged me this year, the first is Capital in the Twenty-First Century by the French economist Thomas Piketty and the other is Absolute Recoil by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj žižek both are endlessly fascinating and both are important books but both seem to have back covers which retreat from you.

I also look forward to reading the second volume of Alan Johnson’s autobiography, Please, Mister Postman. The first volume, This Boy, sits half-read on my bedside table and volume two awaits as my reward for finishing volume one.

In fiction, and in continuance of my marking the war, my eye has been caught by Parades End, and All Quiet on the Western Front, both of which have graced by shelves for a number of years now but neither of which I have read.

I also await with anticipation the memoirs of Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Osborne. I hope that the latter part of next year will find them suitably unemployed and at liberty to start drafting.

The book everyone is raving about is The English and their History by Robert Tombs, I wouldn’t resent finding that in my stocking on Christmas morning.

Fiction

The Baron in the Trees, - Italio Calvino, (Harcourt) - http://tinyurl.com/pxfxx8m

Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks, (Vintage) - http://tinyurl.com/obnzc86

Long Road to the Deep North – Richard Flanagan, (Vintage) - http://tinyurl.com/lv3d6ws

Parade’s End – Ford Madox Ford, (Penguin) - http://tinyurl.com/m4asg5h

The Good Soldier Švejk – Jaroslav Hašek, (Penguin) - http://tinyurl.com/lfl7uau

The Children Act – Ian McEwan, (Vintage) - http://tinyurl.com/lhebmwh

All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque, (Vintage) - http://tinyurl.com/kzjek92

How to be Both – Ali Smith, (Penguin) - http://tinyurl.com/kc8vy6o

Non-Fiction

The Best of Benn – Tony Benn, Ruth Winstone (ed.), (Cornerstone) - http://tinyurl.com/npkjrz2

Breaking the Code – Gyles Brandreth, (Biteback) - http://tinyurl.com/n8gt3ad

My Scotland, Our Britain – Gordon Brown, (Bantam Press) - http://tinyurl.com/pnnz3nj

Good-Bye To All That – Robert Graves, (Penguin) - http://tinyurl.com/qfymxcq

Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister – Michael Jago, (Biteback) - http://tinyurl.com/lw7j3vl

Please, Mr Postman – Alan Johnson, (Transworld) - http://tinyurl.com/kxjcwh2

This Boy – Aland Johnson, (Transworld) - http://tinyurl.com/k7cbnuv

The Establishment – Owen Jones, (Allen Lane) - http://tinyurl.com/pmlp4do

Private Island – James Meet, (Verso) - http://tinyurl.com/lroc486

Italian Ways - Tim Parks, (Vintage) - http://tinyurl.com/oa98kjc

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, (Harvard) - http://tinyurl.com/le4p8ak

Public Schools and the Great War – Anthony Seldon, (Pen and Sword Books) - http://tinyurl.com/kxh2erm

Sailing Close to the Wind – Dennis Skinner, (Quercus) - http://tinyurl.com/kaxngan

The English and their History – Robert Tombs, (Penguin) - http://tinyurl.com/mcv9kpf

Absolute Recoil – Slavoj žižek, (Verso) - http://tinyurl.com/pkhw5gj