I hope we can all agree that it is hard to change someone’s mind using arguments if their understanding of history is very different from yours.
Over the past week, I’ve spoken to people I know who have far more sympathy than I have with the rioters currently disfiguring Britain’s streets.#
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Southport_riot.jpg
A new year thought for you.
The Conservative Home website tells us that nearly 60% of their panel of Conservative Party members now watch the cranktastic hyper-partisan GB News channel — the BBC only just shades the poll for first place.
60.7% watch the BBC regularly compared to 57.21% who tune into GBN in the same way. Sky (31.38%) and ITN (18.54%) both pale by comparison.
As ConHome puts it…
“GB News, in political terms, has settled somewhere to the left of Reform UK (Richard Tice is a presenter) but well to the right of, say, the Conservative Parliamentary Party’s centre of gravity.”
Here are five rules that I’ve drafted that I believe apply to voluntary collective action.
#1: Consensuses are usually weaker than you think.
When people want to change something for the better, they make the mistake of thinking there is a strong consensus around the nature of the problem.
They will also overestimate how much everyone else cares, how much they are motivated to act, and how much everyone else wants the same solution.
There are respectable ways of knowing how things are run and who the beneficiaries are. Over-indulged misdirection about ‘elites’ isn’t one of them.
If you’re looking for good answers to the big old questions around “who runs things around here, and who do they aim to serve?”, then Anthony Downs’ work on ‘rational ignorance’, or Mancur Olson’s on productivity and the logic of collective action from the 1960s and ’70s is a great place to start. Continue reading here.
"The parts of the media that still pay for opinion are publishing this stuff in almost epidemic proportions, swallowing up so much of the public bandwidth that could be filled by a more diverse set of ideas."
https://t.co/nOwDhKWHR1.— Political Innovation (@Innov8Politics) April 11, 2023
We can probably agree that, if someone can exert power without responsibility or legitimacy, we have a moral duty to take it from them in any way we can.
If not, please stop reading now.
On the membership of political parties. https://t.co/TbdHwbm9oG
— Political Innovation (@Innov8Politics) April 2, 2023
Often, when I see points that are made supposedly from a ‘pro-liberal democracy’ viewpoint, I’m reinforced in the view that liberal democracy is not really understood by many of its supposed defenders.
(Yes — this post is prompted by developments in Ukraine).
Liberal democracy has an essential motor that runs it: Representation.
https://twitter.com/Paul0Evans1/status/1496220065343193090
This was published in openDemocracy recently. The only thing I’d change to the idea is that I’d change this from “it could be 100% tax-deductible, or claimable from welfare payments” to “it could be 100% tax-deductible from VAT, because everyone pays at least £50 a year in VAT, right?”
(The average household generates around £4,700 in VAT income to the treasury).
https://twitter.com/Paul0Evans1/status/1435265149468876811
Electoral politics is hugely distorted by the fact that it designed to serve the interests of the political donors, hobbyists and cranks that have the time and energy to dominate the civic space. It doesn’t need to be this way.
As a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (FRSA) I was invited to give a lunchtime talk about this at the Royal Society of the Arts on 17th January 2020. A quick outline is here. I will publish the full text of the talk in due course.
I’m on the Partly Political Broadcast podcast talking to comedian Tiernan Douieb about Think Tank Funding and the Who Funds You website, along with a few observations on democracy in general.
This is the ‘pull quote’ – from about 39 mins in:
“It is a gross error to think that opaquely funded think-tanks increase the diversity of opinions that are available to us.”
Listen to the whole thing – but for reference, I’m on from about 20mins 45secs to 44mins 30secs, and again on 48mins to the end.
My @ParPolBro podcast this week is all about mouldy jam, some last minute stuff on The Independent Group & a chat with @Paul0Evans1 from @WhoFundsYou about think tank transparency. Have a listen at: https://t.co/lfguP2rQUH @acast or https://t.co/TjK9AhNh8E @ApplePodcasts pic.twitter.com/A8ZiL3XhdQ
— Tiernan Douieb (@TiernanDouieb) February 19, 2019