Person 1: [To Person 2] Do you ever watch that Sunday morning discussion show thing on BBC1?

Person 2: No, I’m usually out then. Is it any good?

Person 1: Why are you out?

Person 2: Well… I go to church.

Person 1: Church?

Person 2: Yeah. Erm, I’m a Christian.

Person 1: [Apparently curious] Right. Perhaps you can tell me something. I’m just curious. But why are you a Christian?

Person 2: Oh. Okay. [Thinking] Well, I guess it’s because I feel blessed by the love of Jesus Christ and inspired to follow his teachings.

Person 1: [Looking a bit determined now] And one of those teachings is that you should do unto others as you’d have them do unto you, right?

Person 2: Yeah. It is.

Person 1: Okay. [Starts getting aggressive] So what if, say, you had a daughter, and she was in hospital dying, because she had something wrong with her heart, and she needed a heart transport, but there were no donor hearts available, and then some Columbian gangsters murdered a nine-year old street girl and stripped her body down for spare parts and her heart was being offered for sale on the black market, would you buy that little girl’s heart from the people who’d murdered her? Which would be basically paying them to kill someone else’s daughter? Would you do it?

Person 2: But… I don’t have a daughter who needs a heart transplant.

Person 1: [Really quite aggressive now] Yeah, but if you did, would you? Would you?

Person 2: [Helplessly shaking their head] Well I don’t know. Anyway, about this Sunday show?

Person 1: [Insistent] I’m just curious. I’m not being nasty. But would you? Would you do it?

Person 2: How could I know? How would anyone know how they’d react in that situation?

Person 1: [Sits back in chair triumphant, as those he's proved a point] Ah. See! And what about…

You’d probably find such an exchange bizarre, incomprehensible, even. On what possible planet is it in anyway acceptable to demand that a complete stranger provide an answer to your bizarre, random, arbitrary, hypothetical thought experiment?

And yet it happens to us vegans all the time. If I had to pull a guestimated fact out of my body’s rear-mounted, downward-firing, solid waste disposal orifice, I’d say that on about 25% of the conversations in which it emerges that you’re a vegan, one of the others persons present decides to demand that you answer a bizarre, random thought experiment, typically involving plane-crashes on Pacific islands populated entirely by rabbits. And of course, if you do try to provide an answer, the person usually takes that as an invitation to badger you about it for the next half hour, no matter how much you say, “Could we not just agree to disagree?”

(I don’t mean that 25% of people react this way. I’m suggesting that in any such occasion, there’s about a one in four chance that one of the several people present will react in this way.)

And of course, although they’re aggressively demanding that you explain to them why you’re a vegan, they’re not actually expecting you to give any kind of logical, internally coherent answers; if you do , that only makes them more aggressive, as they take that as some kind of personal attack by you, on them. It sometimes seems that the only way to make them stop is to either agree to abandon in their entirety your ethical and philosophical beliefs, or just get quite rude and tell them to shut up,  sod off, and leave you alone.

It really pisses me off, and I know from talking to other vegans that it really pisses them off too. It happens often enough that you’re sometimes inhibited about mentioning that you’re a vegan, and instead dance around the subject, as though you’ve got some kind of bizarre eating disorder you’d rather not discuss. It’s important to stress that these aren’t occasions where we’re in any way proselytising, trying to push our opinions onto others. It’s simply situations where us being vegan has merely come up in conversation.

It most recently happened to me, two days ago, at a wedding.

Him: Why aren’t you eating the starter?

Me: Erm. We can’t.

Him: Why not?

Me: Well… We’re vegans, and there’s cheese and honey in it.

Him: [Apparently curious] Right. Tell me this. I’m just curious. What would you do if you were trapped in some woods and there were only rabbits to eat?

Me: But we’re not trapped in some woods with only rabbits to eat.

Him: [Insistent and demanding, if not quite aggressive] But what if you were?

I’m always more than happy to explain why I’m a vegan, to anyone who genuinely wants to hear why. And if you’re curious about the ethical difficulties I face in my day-to-day life, that’s fine too. But please don’t then hit me with the bizarre random thought experiments. I’m not a barbarian living in the bronze age. I’m not trapped on a biologically implausible tropical island. And I’m not living in a near-future dystopia with a sick daughter who urgently needs a heart transplant from a transgenic pig. I’m a middle-aged, twenty-first century bloke on a reasonable income living in an advanced Western democracy.

And I’m also just trying to enjoy the wedding.

Since then, this computerised examination has become a useful tool for lazy journalists and TV programme makers wishing to make some kind of point about immigration and multiculturalism. They will get native Britons to sit down and take the test, react with mock surprise when 90+% of them fail, and then use that to prove some kind of point. The latest of these was the otherwise rather good programme “Make Bradford British”, in which they selected their participants from those who had failed the test. (The idea being to take a bunch of people – white, black and Asian – who apparently needed to learn more about what it was to be British, with their failure in the test being the evidence of this).

There’s one slight problem with this. It’s all complete bullshit. The test has nothing to do with “Britishness” and it never did. The key thing you have to understand is that despite what the government say is its purpose, the test is actually a comprehension test designed to test how well someone can understand written English.

(Social Science / Education) Education an exercise consisting of a previously unseen passage of text with related questions, designed to test a student’s understanding esp of a foreign language.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/comprehension

As with all comprehension tests, you first read a particular bit of text. In this case, it’s the government’s publication: “Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship”. The description of this book’s content includes:

…details regarding the latest changes in UK immigration law.

…full information required for the Life in the UK test including chapters on: How the UK is Governed, Employment and Knowing the Law.

…a chapter on sources of help and information, for example, libraries, the police and the internet.

Then, when you think you’ve adequately memorised the information in the book, you take the test, with that test consisting of a series of questions about the book. If you’re literate, have a reasonable grasp of English, and a fair degree of intelligence, passing the test shouldn’t be too hard, provided you put in a bit of time studying, of course.

When the test was first set up, they could have achieved exactly the same result by using a classic novel as the text – Little Dorrit, perhaps, or maybe Pride & Prejudice – which would no doubt have also produced a tidy saving on consultants. So why didn’t they do that? Why didn’t they just be honest and say that they’d decided that only people who could speak English and be able to read should be able to become citizens? If I had to guess, I’d guess they were scared they might be accused of racism.

(I should point out I have no firm opinion on whether or not citizenship should be restricted to literate English speakers, although I do worry that doing so might sometimes produce harsh and unfair outcomes. But what really annoys me is: a) the hypocrisy in not admitting the test’s true purpose; and b) the way the nature of the test is so persistently misrepresented by the media).

But maybe you don’t believe me that the test is a comprehension test, rather than a test of British knowledge. Perhaps you still feel that this is a test that any native-born British person ought to be able to pass, even if they haven’t read the book that it is based on.

Well let’s look at the questions. If the test was truly based on knowledge of culture and values that a native-born Briton would have acquired, simply by growing up in the United Kingdom, then it would consist of questions like this:

You are queuing at the Post Office, when a man jumps the queue and pushes his way in front of you. Do you:

a) Remonstrate with him.

b) Tut loudly.

c) Do nothing.

(Correct answer, B. Option A would be the actions of an excitable southern European, while Option C would be a spineless act, unworthy of the people whose empire once covered a quarter of the globe).

Instead, you get questions like this:

That a British woman has the right to divorce her husband counts as a knowledge of Britain and its values. When this right was created is a matter of specialised historical knowledge. To expect someone to know the answer to that without having first read the book that contains that fact is ludicrous.

Or how about:

Anyone? I know that the population of the UK is about 60 million. If you asked me what proportion of the population is under the age of 19, I might guess that it would be something like 1 in 5 or 1 in 4. If the options in the above question had been 1 million, 3 million, 15 million and 30 million, then it would be an answer that you might expect people to know. But not the above options, not 13, 14, 15 or 16.

And then let’s go with a third one:

At least this one gives you a 50% chance of guessing right, rather than 25%. But does anyone really expect anyone who doesn’t own a newsagents to know the answer to that? (At what age children can start working perhaps, but exactly how many hours? Really?)

How did I get at all these sample questions? Well I tried doing the sample test on the government’s website. Did I pass? Obviously not. Why would you expect me to pass a test which poses questions about a book I haven’t ever read?

Considering I based through it, got one question wrong because I’d misread it, and had don’t no study whatsoever, I thought 58% was reasonable, actually. (And I’d like to think I’m quite bright).

People just need to stop thinking about this as a test of acquired British values. And next time you see programme makers use the tired old cliché of native-born Britons “failing” the citizenship test, be aware of what you’re watching: lazy, bullshitting journalists who should know better.

I think I’ll end with the conversation I had with a co-worker, when I was discussing this very subject, and the fact that I’d failed the test. I explained my entire theory, including a sample question I’ve previously encountered which asks which proportion of the population of the United Kingdom are Welsh: 2%, 4%, 6% or 8%. (Or something like that). The conversation then went like this.

Him: I still think it’s pretty shocking that 90% British citizens fail this test.

Me: But it’s full of questions like the one about Wales. Do you know what proportion of British citizens are Welsh? Because I don’t.

Him: No. But people still ought to be able to pass this test.

Me: So what you’re saying is that you’re surprised that 90% of people can’t correctly answer a question that you yourself can’t answer?

Him: Well, if you put it like that.

It’s clearly about language. Anyone who denies that is either deluded or lying.

If you’d like to try taking the practice test yourself, you can find it here:

http://www.ukcitizenshiptest.co.uk

1) Make sure your ship has enough lifeboats to rescue everyone on board.

2) Don’t drive your ship at full speed into a known ice-field.

There were other lessons learned, such as the need for a ship’s radio room to be manned at all times – the nearest ship to the sinking Titanic, the Californian, could have saved hundreds of lives had it responded to the distress call. But it knew nothing of what was happening, as its radio operator had gone off duty.

But are there other lessons we could learn?

A couple of months ago, I found out something I’d not previously known about the disaster. My friend Jane was embarking on a craft project to weave a bookmark that recorded the death rates on the Titanic. You can read about this magnificent combination of geekiness and craft at the blog post she wrote about it.

http://jane.dallaway.com/titanic-data-weaving-weaving-project-14

So we were in the pub, talking about the death rates of the various groups on the Titanic. Her bookmark would distinguish between men, woman and children, and between 1st class, 2nd class, 3rd class and crew (the latter having both men and woman, but no children).

In general, the death rates told the story you’d expect. Within any particular group, women and children were more likely to survive than men (although interestingly, children had a lower survival rate than women, at 51% compared with 74%). And course 1st class passengers were more likely to survive than 2nd class passengers who in turn were more likely to survive than 3rd class passengers.

But there was one significant exception, which was in the group who were least likely to survive. You would perhaps expect this to be either third class men, or male crew, but it wasn’t, although both those groups did still suffer horrific casualty rates: only 16% of third class men survived, and 20% of male crew (the latter chiefly being those who manned the lifeboats).

The highest death rate certainly wasn’t first class men: 33% of those survived, almost as high a rate as third-class children (34%). No, the group that statistically were least likely to survive were second-class male passengers, of whom only 8% survived.

This little factoid got me thinking. Was there a larger lesson, from life, here?

It seems to me that throughout history, the upper classes have laid down a definition of what it is to be a “gentlemen”, or an “Englishman”, but have never felt any particular responsibility for they themselves to live up to that definition. Rules are things they define for those lesser creatures beneath them; but those rules need not apply to them.

The upper classes will sneer at the working classes for supposedly all claiming benefits, even while they use dodgy accounting schemes to largely avoid paying any tax themselves.

The upper classes will damn the working classes for supposedly being drunken hooligans and vandals, even while they themselves join university drinking clubs whose sole raison d’etre appears to be the drunken destruction of pubs and restaurants.

The upper classes have always been happy to brand the workings classes as supposedly lacking in morals, even while keeping a mistress and several prostitutes on the side.

When the upper classes defined what it was to be an “English gentleman”, that was never a definition that they felt any need to live up to; they felt they were entitled to the respect a gentleman was supposedly due merely by virtue of the status into which they were born. No, it was the middle-classes who bought into the myth, who believed the bullshit, who thought that they too could be gentlemen if they only behaved as they thought their supposed betters were behaving. It was they who paid their taxes, and were faithful to their wives, and didn’t ever get drunk and smash things up.

Looked at it this way, is it in any way surprising that while the second class men were largely upholding the principle of women and children first, the first class men were more than four times as likely to board a lifeboat?

I should clarify that I can’t and wouldn’t blame any individual for climbing into a lifeboat. To not have enough lifeboat places put people in an inhuman position. And this tragedy was turned into a farce when there were cases of men being needlessly turned out of lifeboats that then sailed away half empty, the places vacated by those men, left unfilled. My interest here is the second-class male passengers’ largely unreported sacrifice and courage.

But is this the full story? I mentioned the above thought to Jane at the pub. However, when she then looked into it further, it emerged that there was perhaps a simpler, less heroic answer, which is contained in the following extract that she emailed to me:

From “The loss of the SS Titanic” by Lawrence Beesley

About this time, while walking the deck, I saw two ladies come over from the port side and walk towards the rail separating the second-class from the first-class deck. There stood an officer barring the way. “May we pass to the boats?” they said. “No madam” he replied politely, “your boats are down on your own deck,” pointing to where they swung below. The ladies turned and went towards the stairway, and no doubt were able to enter one of the boats: they had ample time. I mention this to show that there was, at any rate, some arrangement — whether official or not — for separating the classes in embarking in boats; how far it was carried out, I do not know, but if the second-class ladies were not allowed to enter a boat from the first-class deck, while steerage passengers were allowed access to the second-class deck, it would seem to press rather hardly on the second-class men, and this is rather supported by the low percentage saved.

So maybe there is a simpler message. The upper classes will attempt to divide the middle classes from the working classes by telling the middle classes that they are gentlemen. You are like us, they will say, not like those nasty working class oiks. Work with us, they will say, be our accountants, run our businesses, we’ll do right by you. And they will, right up until the shit hits the fan, at which point it’ll be the classes of privilege and power (them) on one side, and everyone else (us) on the other.

This was perhaps the lesson the second-class men learned when they found that they shared their boat deck with those from third-class. George Osborne et al are fond of saying that we’re all in it together. Well we weren’t all in it together then, and I suspect we’re not all in it together now.

Huge thanks to Jane for inspiring this post, providing the data, and for allowing me to use the image of her bookmark.

In general, all my gophering experience has been at Eastercon. (I did once gopher at Dragonmeet, a games convention). So what I have to say is based on the way Eastercon does it, but I suspect it’s very similar at other conventions, if not identical.

What is a Gopher? Gophers are volunteers, drawn from the convention attendees, who help out with general convention duties. Unlike the convention committee and staff, who’ve generally signed up for the “job” in advance, you can volunteer as a gopher at any point during the convention. The only requirement is that you be an attendee (i.e. member, chap/chapess with a convention namebadge) of the convention.

Why Gopher? Quite simply because without gophers, the convention can’t happen. Conventions like Eastercon are run by a “Committee” under which are a set of people who form the “Staff”. These guys put in superhuman amounts of work, both in the years and months running up to the convention and in the convention itself. But once the con starts, they simply need extra hands, some Indians to their Chiefs. Which is where the gophers come in.

How do you become a Gopher? Well when you sign up, there’s usually a box you can tick saying that you want to volunteer, but the way I’ve always done it is to go to the Gopher Hole (this is a room which will be marked on the convention map in the programme) and say that I want to volunteer as a gopher. It’s quite simple. If you’ve never done it before, they can fill you in on what’s involved, and then you get an extra gopher tag you can wear (I attached mine to my main tag).

What if I’d like to learn about it first? At Eastercon there are usually a couple of panels in the timetable that explain all about gophering. I think this year there was one on the Thursday night and one on the Friday afternoon. If you haven’t gophered before, these are an excellent way of getting involved and signing up. But if you do miss these, don’t worry. You can just go down to the Gopher Hole.

Who’s in charge of the Gophers? At Eastercon, there are two people/positions in charge of the gophers, one male, one female. The man is referred to as “Gopher Mum”. The woman is referred to as “Gopher Dad”. (No I don’t know why it’s the wrong way round. It’s just some sort of tradition –although I guess it’s a good way of guarding against potential gender stereotyping.)

How many hours do I have to work? As many or as few as you like. You only work when you’d like to work. The only (being polite/nice/decent) requirement is that if you say you’re going to do something, you should then do it, but that’s just common sense. You only work when you want to work. (So you can fit it around the panel items and events you want to go to).

What would I have to do? Again, this is up to you. Gophering is on very much a volunteering basis, not only in how long you work and when, but on what you do. You only have to volunteer for roles that you feel comfortable with. It’s my experience that you will never be in any way pressured to do something you don’t feel happy doing.

So how do I volunteer to do work? The way it tends to work at Eastercon is that there’s a grid, with the roles that need doing at any one time along the top, and the hours of the day down the side. If you fancy doing a particular job, you look down the column for that role and find an empty slot which is at a time suitable for you. (e.g. You might volunteer for door duty on the Dealers’ Room between 2 and 3 pm).

Is there any reward? Other than the warm glow of doing good, yes there is. For each hour that you work, you get paid two groats (generally, you claim these by reporting back after a period, or periods, of work to either the Gopher Dad or the Gopher Mum). Groats can be spent in the convention bar, the convention cafeteria, and the Dealers’ Room. Each groat is worth one pound sterling. They can usually also be spent on a limited edition item, of which more later.

What jobs can you do? Gophers can end up doing a whole load of different things. I’ve loaded and unloaded vans, moved things, set up tables for author signings (including one signing, where I then immediately sat down as one of the authors), and helped marshal the queues at an author signing (actually, there weren’t any queues, but had there been, I was ready). You can also man the entrances to the trade hall (a.k.a. be the “Door Nazi?” that Knights of the Dinner Table once described) and the art show, attend panels to do the time keeping, deliver drinks to panels, man the table that sells t-shirts, man the table where people can sign up for events, and so on.

Door Nazi? This involves sitting on a chair outside an entrance to the Dealers’ Room checking that the people entering: a) are wearing a convention badge (i.e. that they’ve paid to attend the convention); and b) aren’t carrying open drinks containers or food. (The latter requirement is because there’s a lot of expensive books and other items on display inside, and someone tripping up whilst holding a beer could literally cause hundreds of pounds of damage). The exception to the drinks rule is people who have a dealers badge, who are allowed to take drinks in (because otherwise they’d die of thirst, and they will be taking them straight to their own table).

Is is all work? No. One perk of being a gopher is that when you’re not gophering, you can hang around the Gopher Hole with other off-duty gophers. This is actually pretty cool in itself and a really good way to get to meet other convention attendees. This is especially good if you’re attending the con on your own. There isn’t really an in-crowd at Eastercon; it’s not that sort of event. But if there was, gophering would be a fast-track to getting into it.

Hanging around the Gopher Hole is also a cool thing you can do to help the convention. Much gophering is based around a fixed schedule, as I described above. But sometimes, someone from Tech or Ops will turn up at the Gopher Hole and say, “We need X gophers in room Y to do Z”, at which point – if you don’t have any panels you were about to go to – you can raise your hand, and say, “Yeah, I’m free.”

It might be a bit of an embarrassing, adolescent thing to admit to, but I find it quite satisfying to hang around the Gopher Hole like some kind of rapid-reaction gopher force.

I’ll never know what it feels like to be a fireman responding to a 999 call. I’ll never be on the flight deck of a C-130 Hercules coming in to land at some disaster zone with much needed supplies. But when the women at the crèche reported that their TV was broken, and a replacement urgently needed to be sent over to them… I was there. I took the call.

(With two others. And a trolley. I mean, it was a big-screen, old-style, CRT set. Have you ever felt the weight of those bastards?)

Are there any other benefits or perks? Actually, yes. There is. Each of the three Eastercons I’ve gophered at have had an offer for some kind of limited edition garment (either a t-shirt, a sweatshirt, or a hoodie) that can be purchased by groats only. This means that it’s only available to volunteers: gophers, the tech crew, the green room staff, the ops guys, and so on.

At the 2010 and 2011 Eastercons, the garment cost 10 groats, meaning you had to do five hours of work. For 2012, the price did increase to 15 groats (or 8 hours), but was it a very cool black hoodie – totally worth it! (It had a black on black design inspired by the black on black controls and dials of the Sundiver starship in Douglas Adam’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe).

So that’s gophering. If you’ve never been to an Eastercon before, I’d really recommend you give it a try. In 2013 we’ll be heading to Bradford for EightSquaredCon, and then in 2014 we’ll be heading to Glasgow for Satellite 4. And if you do go, think about gophering. It’s pretty cool, and not nearly as scary as you might think.

It’s very simple. Latitude doesn’t lie.

The teacher in question was Mister Ready (pronounced “Reedy”), who taught my class for two consecutive years through what we then called third and fourth year juniors (in modern money that would be… counts fingers… year five and year six, I think). So we would have been somewhere aged between nine and eleven.

The lesson was simple, with one objective: to teach us the meaning of the phrase “Chinese Whispers”. I can’t remember why we did this; whether it was part of some wider topic or simply something that he came up with on the spur of the moment are details now lost as surely as Roy Batty’s tears in the rain.

He sat us down in a horseshoe arrangement on the big reading mat in the corner of the classroom, and explained that he was going to whisper something into the ear of the boy nearest to him. I can’t remember who the boy was, but I seem to recall that it wasn’t necessarily someone who had the most tools in his toolbox, if you know what I mean. He then explained that this boy would then repeat to the person who sat the other side of him  what he’d just been told, again as a whisper into the ear, and so on, and so on, until the message had travelled all around the horseshoe.

So Mister Ready whispered for what seemed like quite a time into the first boy’s ear, and then the message started working its way around the horseshoe. I was sat towards the horseshoe’s end, with perhaps seventeen or eighteen people before me, and five or six after. The message seemed to travel very slowly, and I recall being just a bit nervous with anticipation as it approached. I was scared that I might screw something up, and forget a bit, or have to ask for it to be repeated. Something which might make me look foolish. Of course, the further the message travelled with no hesitations, no hiccups, no repeats – the more nervous I got.

Then it was my turn.

The girl sitting to my left whispered in my ear.

“There was a great big man.”

I very carefully turned to my right, and repeated what I’d just heard to the boy who sat there. Word for word, exactly. Within thirty seconds or so, the message had reached the final person in the chain. Mister Ready asked that person to repeat out loud what he’d been told. The boy said:

“There was a big fat man.”

I remember being quite strongly surprised that the message had managed to change so in just a handful of words. After all, the whole point was to listen to exactly what was said and then repeat exactly what was said. Not passing on something that had the same meaning, a similar gist, but that had the same words. This was the sole task we’d been tasked to perform, there were only six words, and someone amongst the five or six people to my left had still managed to screw it up.

But the lesson wasn’t yet over. Because Mister Ready hadn’t yet revealed what it was that he’d originally whispered in the first boy’s ear. When he did I went from being quite strongly surprised to being totally stunned. I obviously can’t remember what is was, given that it’s now thirty something years later (frankly, I think I’m doing quite well to remember the line I passed on and the line that popped out of the chain’s end!) but it was something like:

There was a great big man.

And he was riding along the street on a bicycle.

Then xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx.

And xxx xxx xxxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx.

Basically, it was a little mini story of something that had happened, a good four lines long. And what got out the other end? Merely a mutated version of the short introductory line. That lesson was a revelation. I cannot overstress just how effectively it bought home to me the degree to which communications can be garbled and meanings lost.

Well that, and the fact that some of my classmates weren’t very bright.

“Imagine two men, sitting in a car. The car is in London, and they wish to travel to Exeter. They’re starting at the same location, and going to the same place, but they are nonetheless arguing, because one is adamant that the best route to take is M4/M5, while the other is equally insistent that they should instead go A30/A303.

“To extend the analogy to my case, I wanted to travel to Exeter and felt that M4/M5 was the best way to get there, the Green Party also wanted to travel to Exeter but were proposing to go A30/A303, and the Liberal Democrats were intending to take the M4 all the way to Cardiff. Twenty-five years ago, I chose the party that wished to head down the M4.”

I’ve thought long and hard about whether I should make this post. I really don’t want people to feel I’m in anyway trying to ram my politics down their throats. But this is not a post about politics itself; or at least it’s trying not to be. In fact, I’m going to try to keep mentions of actual policies to a minimum (although I am reserving the right to talk about politics in any comments). Instead, it’s about how I approach politics, what politics means to me, and how those two factors have combined to cause me to switch my political allegiances, from the Lib Dems, who I was a member of from 1987 to 2009, to the Greens, who I joined last week.

Why do I feel the need to write this post? Well when trying to explain my motives, I can’t help but think of the following words:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

(Yes, that is the preamble of the United States Declaration of Independence. I was tempted to put in the preamble of the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence instead, which somewhat clumsily rips off the above quote, just to confuse people – but in the end thought better of it.)

Basically, my feeling is this. I’m a free man, who has a right so support whichever political party he wishes. But I feel that a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that I explain why I’ve stopped banging on (occasionally) about one party and am about to start banging on (equally occasionally) about another.

(Joking aside – I try not to talk too much about politics. But I don’t want to have to keep it a secret either, and I don’t want to feel inhibited from mentioning my opinions about current affairs, for fear I’ll reveal my current political affiliation).

ON CHANGING PARTIES

You see the thing is, I’ve always been suspicious of people who switch from one political party to another. It smacks of opportunism and falsity; how could you last week say that Party A had the best policies, but this week be saying the same thing of Party B? When a number of Conservative MPs, of whom Alan Howarth (now Baron Howarth of Newport) was the first, jumped ship from the Conservative Party straight over to the Labour Party in the mid 1990s, it was difficult to see it as anything but a cynical switch from a dying horse to a fresh one.

I’ve always disliked people who see a political party as merely a vehicle for their personal ambitions, desires or needs; you should support a political party because you think it’s the right one, not because you think it has the best chance of winning. What those Conservative MPs did was the political equivalent of just happening to switch your football allegiance from Liverpool to Manchester United around 1991 or 1992, and I’ve always thought poorly of them for it.

So am I now doing the same thing? Have I realised that the horse I’m riding on is dying, and started looking around for a healthier replacement? I’d like to think not, so the purpose of this post is to defend myself against this charge.

ON MY CHANGE

This isn’t actually a sudden switch. As with many things in life, it’s more complicated than that.

I first nailed my colours to the Lib Dem mast back in 1987, when I was eighteen, and when the Lib Dems hadn’t yet been created. (I joined the old Liberal Party a few months before the merger with the SDP that formed the then Social and Liberal Democrats). I came from a Liberal family; my mum had been a Liberal activist since 1974 and her family had been Liberal supporters since the days of Gladstone. But while I’m sure this influenced me, that wasn’t – I felt – the reason that I’d joined. It was a decision I felt I’d made for my own reasons, and my own beliefs.

I was very active for about ten years, but then disillusion set it, not with the party, and not necessarily with the political process itself, but with the way society saw it. Basically, it seemed like I was slogging my guts out spending every other weekend either delivering leaflets or doing jumble sales to raise money to print the leaflets, for what I felt was a cause that would ultimately benefit my society, just so that people who never lifted a finger to help anyone else could look down on me, and consider themselves superior. (The old “I hate you political people, you’re all self-serving scum” attitude).

So from about 1998 onwards I gradually drifted away, still a party member, still donating money to it via a monthly direct debit, and still voting for the party, but not doing anything else, and gradually feeling less and less involved. In 2009 Jules and I moved to Brighton, and I cancelled my direct debit and let my party membership lapse. This was party perhaps down to apathy and a lack of enthusiasm, but by that point I’d met Caroline Lucas (the Green Party’s leader and then candidate, now MP, for Brighton) and wanted the freedom to tactically vote for her. (As I’m sure is the case with most, if not all, parties, Liberal Democrat rules prohibit members from supporting people who are standing against official party candidates).

I also helped deliver some leaflets, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that I flirted then with the idea of joining them, it did occur to me that I’d rather be in the Greens, if only there weren’t the problem of “disagreeing with half their policies”.

But then in the election something strange happened. I did still vote for Caroline Lucas – and I enthusiastically voted Green at 2011′s council elections – but the performance of Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats in the 2010 campaign seemed to re-ignite my enthusiasm for the Lib Dem cause. (Although not enough, I’m forced to admit, to actually get off my arse and do anything, not even for 2011′s referendum campaign).

THE POST-ELECTION YEARS – THEN AND NOW

I was initially quite enthusiastic about the coalition. Sure, the Tories were not the party I’d have chosen as coalition partners, but in a way, that was the point. I’ve always been a believer in the politics of collaboration rather then confrontation. I think British political culture is poisoned by the “them against us” nature of first past the post politics, creating an environment in which behaviours that other political cultures would see as co-operation and compromise are seen instead as treachery and betrayal.

I would like to have our elections conducted under a system that gives proportional results, and consider the “hung” (a.k.a. “balanced”) parliaments that PR tends to produce as very much a feature rather than a bug. (A “hung” parliament is one in which no single party has more than 50% of the seats). No one party can ever claim to have a monopoly on either truth or sense, and only parliament in its entirety can claim to fully represent the will of the people.

In a sense, that the Conservatives and the Lib Dems were not, at first sight, obvious coalition partners made the situation better. Anyone can have a coalition with a party whose values closely align with their own. But a coalition like this might dispel the two myths that seem to consistently turn the British people away from proportional representation:

Myth #1: A hung parliament, whether the government is a minority administration, or a coalition, will inevitably deliver a weak, unstable and short-lived government.

Myth #2: PR, and its hung parliaments, means that the people have no say in who gets to form the government, regardless of which way their votes might swing. Instead, this decision is entirely in the hands of the minor third party; the government changes whenever they decide to switch their allegiance from one major party to the other, not when the people do.

The election result itself had shot down myth number two. A country might have several decades worth of hung parliaments, but each of those parliaments will have been different, because each election would have delivered a different mix of parties. Not all coalition permutations are possible in all parliaments.

In this election, the Conservatives hadn’t achieved an overall majority, but were far enough ahead of Labour that the only viable coalition was Conservatives + LibDems. (Labour + LibDems would still have been short of a majority). The people had spoken, and they’d put the Conservatives in the driving seat, if not in sole charge.

And if the last two years have proven anything, I think that they’ve proven Myth #1 to be false also. There are many accusations being hurled at the “ConDem” administration, but that it is weak, unstable and about to fall apart at any moment is not one of them.

I knew there would have to be compromises. All government involves compromises. Many Labour activists were very unhappy with some of the actions taken or attempted by the previous Labour government (invasion of Iraq, ID cards, 90 day detention without trial, introduction of tuition fees, part-privatisation of the tube, extensive use of PFI etc.). And that was a single party-majority government. Those were decisions that their leaders took not because they had too, but because they wanted to.

In this case, the Lib Dems were not just involved in a coalition government, they were the junior members. I knew there would have to be some compromises, and that to a certain extent, we were going to get a Liberal Democrat flavoured Conservative government. But I hoped the compromises would be just and reasonable. I understood that the two parties were going to govern in the immediate national interest, pursuing only those polices on which either immediate action was required, or a consensus could be reached.

Then came tuition fees, the cuts, and finally the NHS bill. On each one, I was able to argue a case, but it was with a heavy heart and a worried soul. I went from being optimistic that the coalition might create a new type of consensus politics; to being very worried about whether Clegg et al knew what they hell they were doing; then finally to wondering if the problem was in fact me, and not them.

Bluntly, were the Liberal Democrats still the party for me? Had I changed my policies at some point in the last twenty years? Had they? (Like most committed supporters, I never actually bothered to read any of my own party’s manifestos). Or had the party always been a different beast from what I’d assumed it to be, and it was only when exposed to the harsh light of government that this became apparent.

In truth? It was most likely all three.

BUT WHY THE GREENS?

That I might not wish to remain a supporter of the Liberal Democrats is probably not a point I need to explain. But why I’ve now decided to join the Greens, is. After all, while the Liberal Democrats might not now be the party they appeared to be two years ago, the Greens very much are. Nothing’s changed about them. If I didn’t see them as the party I should support then, why now?

Why not just have a period of no affiliation?

To a certain extent, there is an element here of me not liking the idea of having no political affiliation. I’ve always prided myself on being a political person, of being involved in the political process. When I realised that I could no longer in all conscience support the Liberal Democrats, I felt lost. But that, in itself, is not a valid reason. In fact, it sounds very similar to the metaphor of switching horses I used at the start of this post.

There is more to it than that. Having nailed my colours to a political mast some twenty five years ago, I never re-examined that decision. In a way, I now realise that I was like a football fan, who supports one team, always, right or wrong. I can perhaps understand those Labour activists who’ve stuck with the Labour Party through long periods where its leaders seemed to be following policies entirely at odds with those of the activists.

I’ve already alluded to the tendency of many political supporters to not actually feel the need to have a detailed knowledge of their party’s current, actual policies. But in addition, I think there’s often also a tendency for you to warp your beliefs to fit the policies. This is my party, you think, and this is what my party is proposing, so it must be right. You emphasise those aspects of your political beliefs that match your party’s polities, and ignore those aspects that don’t.

Deciding to publicly disown the Liberal Democrats, as I did a couple of weeks ago via Twitter, triggered in me a process in which I re-examined, from scratch, what I actually believed in. And in the process, I think I think I worked out something quite profound.

That choosing a political party is an exercise in compromise is a known truth. We are all of us different, and no two of us will have identical beliefs or opinions. But we are all required to shoehorn our square-shaped opinions into one of five round-shaped holes: UKIP, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, Labour, the Greens.

But there’s more to it than that. Because if politics can be seen as a journey, than a political party can be judged by either its intended direction of travel, or its eventual desired destination.

Imagine two men, sitting in a car. The car is in London, and they wish to travel to Exeter. They’re starting at the same location, and going to the same place, but they are nonetheless arguing, because one is adamant that the best route to take is M4/M5, while the other is equally insistent that they should instead go A30/A303.

To extend the analogy to my case, I wanted to travel to Exeter and felt that M4/M5 was the best way to get there, the Green Party also wanted to travel to Exeter but were proposing to go A30/A303, and the Liberal Democrats were intending to take the M4 all the way to Cardiff. Twenty-five years ago, I chose the party that wished to head down the M4.

I’ve been choosing the party whose immediate policies were the ones I felt most practical, rather than the party whose desired outcome most closely agreed with my vision of an ideal society.

I’ve often jokingly said that the problem with the Greens was that I disagreed with 50% of their policies, but that wasn’t really true. The truth was that I felt that 50% of their polices weren’t feasible. “That would be great,” I’d say. “But you’ll never get people to vote for that.” Or perhaps I’d argue that a certain policy would be great in an ideal world, but I wasn’t sure that it was possible to get to that ideal position, given that we had to start from our unequal, over-centralised capitalistic world.

But of course, I’d never bothered to find out in any detail what their polices actually were. Now, adrift, lost, forced by circumstance and Nick Clegg to re-examine everything I’d ever believed in, I actually sat down and read a political manifesto – the 2010 Green General Election manifesto – from cover to cover.

And there wasn’t really anything in there that I disagreed with. Sure, there were things that perhaps seemed radical to a point that could be described as highly optimistic. And there were plenty of things that – while I strongly agree with them – I think would be highly unlikely to win votes. (55 mph speed limit on motorways, to risk an actual political example).

In the past I’d felt those to be deal-breakers. But if you were to quiz me on those things now, pointing at one policy and asking, “Is that really feasible?” and then at another and asking, “Would people really vote for that?” I guess my answer now would be, “I don’t know. But maybe we should at least try?”

And beyond this, reading the document as I now was, with an optimistic eye thinking of where I wanted to go rather than how I thought we might get there, there was a lot of stuff in that I really liked. A lot. Really liked. I suspect that I’m still a square-shaped peg, in a round-shaped hole, and perhaps I’ve gone from being on the idealistic wing of one party to the pragmatic wing of another. But like I said, no political party is a perfect fit, but this new one feels a lot more comfortable than the old. (If for no other reason than that the catering at Green Party gatherings tends towards the vegan/vegetarian variety).

When I joined the old Liberal Party back in 1987, I’d had to wait a couple of months until I could manage to catch up with the elusive bloke (his name escapes me now) who was the local party’s membership secretary. He’d given me a little membership card that he’d written my details onto. Joining the Greens twenty-five years later was a little easier. I simply went to their website, clicked on the join button, and filled in my bank details.

I’ll not claim it felt the same, that I felt the same heart-thumping excitement or the same sense of eager anticipation. But I don’t think that says anything about the LibDems or the Greens, or 2012 versus 1987.

I think it’s just about being forty-two instead of eighteen.

Then just the other day, a thought occurred to me, which was there ought to be some reward other than simply points accumulated.

The answer was obvious: a scale of achievement similar to that of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, albeit perhaps divided by ten to make it more achievable.

And you know what? It turns out I’m already a 5th level coffee drinker! Now I just need to avoid listening to my wife’s occasional suggestion that perhaps I ought to, you know, actually cash in my points some time, possibly by buying her a coffee.

The Scale

100 Points: 1st Level

300 Points: 2nd Level

600 Points: 3rd Level

1000 Points: 4th Level

1500 Points: 5th Level

2100 Points: 6th Level

2800 Points: 7th Level

3600 Points: 8th Level

4500 Points: 9th Level

5500 Points: 10th Level

He’s now penned a Guardian piece, following up on his comments then, sounding slightly wounded at the reception they got in the British press. He still doesn’t really appear to address the issue of absolute total 100% difference of opinion between Argentina, that says the islands should be handed over to them, and the people who live there, who are absolutely totally against that.

I felt it appropriate to address my personal belief in the necessity for diplomacy to resolve a deeply held Argentinian conviction of ancestry and sovereignty that was being denied an international forum … the UK has refused to return to diplomatic efforts regarding the status of UK and Argentinian claims to the Malvinas Islands …

He does then basically deny that he denied the wishes of the Falkland Islanders:

the principal re-sculpting of my remarks by irresponsible journalism was to encourage the inflammatory notion that I had taken a specific position against those currently residing in the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, that they should either be deported or absorbed into Argentine rule. I neither said, nor insinuated that.

He might not perhaps have said it, but if you support negotiations to address one party’s claims, you are rather insinuating that you think those claims have merit, surely? But regardless, in this new article he then goes on to mention nothing about the Falklanders at all, save for:

The “Falklanders’” slogan is “Desire the right”. Indeed this is a human desire and not the exclusive domain of Falkland Islanders. And it is the same desire for which so many Chileans and Argentinians suffered and ultimately triumphed. The recognition that the diplomatic process of the 1970s gives to some of the legitimacy of Argentinian claims should not be dispelled or denied by the great United Kingdom through the exploitation of a more recent past, or for the greed of superpowers desperate to control the natural resources of the world.

So it’s basically, “The Falklanders say they should have rights, but hey what, so does everyone else?”

Not once does he mention in his piece that the Falklands are self-governing and damn-near independent under their own democratically elected government. He insists on addressing his entire message to the government of the United Kingdom and the people of the United Kingdom. Would it hurt him, just once, to talk to the Falkland Islanders, rather than about them? As a citizen of the UK, I have no idea why he’s talking to me, when it quite literally has nothing to do with me. Why are you talking to me? Talk to them? To ignore them (the Falkland Islanders) in this way is just staggeringly rude.

But I thought the issues were best summed up in a couple comments. The first, from wryape, neatly sums up the failure of logic in saying that anyone can demand negiations on anything, at any time, and anyone who declines those demands is intrinsically in the wrong:

The second comment is from an Argentine, and seems to me to pretty much sum up the Argentine position:

bobbydasler : you are right. but, kelpers are invaders of argentine territory. they have not right to stay in the island. there opinions no are important. argentina claims for soberania not for the people. excuse me my poor english. [link]

The English is slightly poor (perfectly reasonable, and it’s much, much better than my Spanish) so I’ll take the liberty of rewording it to say what I think it’s meant to say.

The Falklander Islanders are invaders of Argentine territory. They have no right to stay on the islands. Their opinions are not important. Argentina’s claims are for the land not the people.

Let’s just remind ourselves that the people he’s talking about have (as a people) lived there for nearly two hundred years. The Argentines (or at least that one) know that the people who actually live on the Falklands aren’t Argentines, but they don’t care. These are the people whose claims Sean Penn is speaking in favour of. They feel that they have more right to the land than the people who inhabit it, and want to take that land away from the people who inhabit it – and are more than happy to say so.

If that isn’t colonialism, I don’t know what is.

For a couple of years now, a new extension to the station has been under construction, intended to lengthen the Thameslink platforms to take 12 carriage trains. Construction projects sometimes seem to reach their finish with bewildering rapidity, and this one was no exception. It wasn’t that long ago that it seemed to be just a big hole in the ground. And when I was last in work, a week and a bit ago, I’m sure it was still at that “concrete shell” stage.

Then this morning, my train drew to a halt… in a different station from the one I’ve always got off at. No more cramped Victorian brick structure, hello sleek and cavernous white underground space.

I went back at lunchtime and took some pictures (click on them to get larger versions).

There’s a huge white entrance, opposite the existing entrance (which is currently closed while they complete the rebuilding work, but which will then also still be in use).

And that leads to a huge concourse area:

And you then go down to some nice open platform areas, much roomier than the rest of the station:

These are just the platform extensions. You can go back to the original platform area (which is still in use for 8 of the 12 carriages) by walking under what was once the bridge at the end of the station (this is also how you get to the Underground platforms for the Metropolitan, Circle and Hammersmith & City lines):

Finally, they’ve put up a nice couple of posters showing the “before” picture, and the “where they are now” picture:

People are often very cynical about modern things, but I think this is a really nice development. And of course, when Crossrail is completed, Farringdon’s going to be very well connected.