Like Apple, Obama’s strength is mostly in the image department …

That may be right on the money about Obama. Don’t know for sure. Don’t live there. But I definitely think it’s wrong about Apple. For me, Apple’s stellar “image” is based on an underlying reality of product quality, not on how nicely Apple supposedly behaves, or did behave until this recent atrocity.

And that is what makes the current UK elections… and indeed the recent US election… so utterly uninteresting.

Political parties on both sides of the imaginary left/right divide are in near total agreement that question at hand is not “how do we change the state of affairs that got us into
...continue A plague on all their houses]]> The economy in Britain and much of the world is in dire straits and it would not be an exaggeration to say we have entered a period of history that far from being a ‘crisis of capitalism’, historians looking back may well call it the ‘crisis of regulatory statism’.

And that is what makes the current UK elections… and indeed the recent US election… so utterly uninteresting.

Political parties on both sides of the imaginary left/right divide are in near total agreement that question at hand is not “how do we change the state of affairs that got us into our current predicament” but rather “how do we manage this crisis best in order to preserve the status quo”. The one thing that everyone in politics agrees on is Britain’s vast regulatory welfare state is an immovable given. This is literally beyond debate and exists at the meta-contextual level …all that is actually up for discussion is how best to preserve it.

Commentary in the mainstream media accepts as axiomatic that the parties represent the struggle between laissez faire and regulation, between capital and labour, between right (whatever that means) and left (whatever that means).

Indeed the parties themselves employ the same rhetorical markers to differentiate their products as they have always done: the so-called ‘conservatives’ speak of “prudence” and “responsibility” and “living within our means”… Labour and the LibDems speak in terms of “fairness” and “equality”… and these terms are simply accepted at face value and repeated by most of the media as if the choices on offer were between chalk and cheese, and as all the parties benefit from this differentiation, this linguistic legerdemain is unchallenged and uncontroversial.

Yet the choices on offer are in truth more akin to that between Coke or Pepsi… the ‘sacred rite of democratic empowerment’ actually comes down to being given the option of selecting rapist A, B or C and then being told not to complain when you get raped because, after all, you got to vote.

And so we see the media portraying David Cameron as Thatcher the Milk Snatcher reborn… a dangerous welfare wrecker when he states that he intends to, and I quote from a Daily Telegraph article last year:

Mr Cameron said he would increase government spending from £620bn this year to £645bn next year – rather than the £650bn proposed by ministers. He warned voters not to expect an incoming Tory administration to slash public spending and cut taxes, saying: “That’s not what they should be thinking. They should be thinking this would be a responsible government that would make government live within its means, that would relieve some of the debt burden being piled up on our children.”

So the Tory party, those slash-and-burn laissez faire wildmen, wanted to take £25 billion more out of the productive economy in taxes so that the state can spend it… at a time when the economy is actually contracting… and somehow that will relieve rather than increase the burden on “our children”. Yup, clearly an ardent capitalist is our Old Dave… it must be so because the media reports him saying he is all for markets largely without comment.

But the core truth here is that if by some dark miracle Brown’s Labour wins, we will have a vast regulatory welfare state. If the even more spendthrift LibDems win, we will have a vast regulatory welfare state. However if Cameron’s Tories win, we will have… a vast regulatory welfare state… oh, and fox hunting will be permitted again.

And yet the idea that there are meaningful differences between any of these gits is a given even though all they are really discussing is how their different approaches to rearranging the same elements can preserve the very state that got us where we are now. Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic comes to mind.

Nigel Farage of UKIP at least talks of sacking two million public sector workers and having a bonfire of the QUANGOs… making him the only half way visible politician making any truly radical statements at all. Sadly Farage also seems to think “quantitative easing”… i.e. just running the printing presses in order to re-inflate the very credit bubble that has been the trigger for much of the current woes, is just fine and dandy, so I do question his grasp of economics, not to mention causality… but by the standards of current discourse he is Ludwig Von Mises reborn and perhaps in time Pearson can smack some sense into him on that score.

But UKIP will not be running the next parliament and so it does not matter which of the three plonkers you vote for because in effect the same person will still be in 10 Downing Street: and that would be the ring-wraith-like presence of Tony Blair of course… or Tory Blair if you like… the name and party hardly matters because that grin remains like some demonic Cheshire Cat in the sky over Westminster.

What did you say your name was again?

- Blognor Regis

If I were this Mrs Duffy person who was slimed by Brown, I’d be thinking of watching my back for a few months. One thing we have learned over the past 13 years is
...continue Samizdata quote of the day]]> “Amazing isn’t it? Not that Labour slimed an ordinary member of the public who disagreed with them. They’ve been doing that since before they were elected in 1997. The lucky ones only found their reputations traduced in the press. The not so lucky ones found themselves dead in a field. No, what’s amazing is that is was caught live and bang to rights.”

- Blognor Regis

If I were this Mrs Duffy person who was slimed by Brown, I’d be thinking of watching my back for a few months. One thing we have learned over the past 13 years is that NewLabour are vindictive bastards.

Update: Janet Daley draws a certain parallel – as well as noting a key difference – in another famous example of a leftist politician blurting out certain comments during an encounter with an ordinary member of the public, the famous Obama/Joe The Plumber exchange.

As this Joe character found, Obama’s attack dogs tried to make life hard for him and as I said above, it may already be happening to the lady who was slagged off by Mr Brown.

- Rachel Sylvester gets lucky quoting a Labour candidate in what used to be a safe Labour seat, just before Gordon Brown calls a core Labour voter a bigot. I reckon he’s cyanide everywhere.

Critics are disturbed by the large and unprecedented role Mr. Obama sees for the private sector in space exploration. For a president who is often accused of being a socialist, he has more faith in the ingenuity of the private sector than his detractors do.

Maybe so. But how could someone so
...continue On the unintended consequences of President Obama]]> Hardly a day seems to go by nowadays without somebody with approximately the same kind of political attitude as me scratching his head, publicly, in writing, about President Obama’s bafflingly sensible space policy, which sticks out like a healthy thumb in an otherwise horribly mutilated hand of policies.

Critics are disturbed by the large and unprecedented role Mr. Obama sees for the private sector in space exploration. For a president who is often accused of being a socialist, he has more faith in the ingenuity of the private sector than his detractors do.

Maybe so. But how could someone so opposed to free market notions here on earth be so keen on them in space? I would like to offer a version of President Obama which maybe makes sense of this puzzle. What follows is sort of a joke. I certainly hope that readers of it will be entertained. But I also think it might be true. I start by asserting that President Obama wants socialism, collectivism, statism, whatever you want to call the opposite of free markets and the free society, to triumph, everywhere, in the USA and everywhere else. I’ll just call it statism from now on. President Obama wants statism, everywhere in the world. Accordingly, he imposes as much statism as he can on the USA, and he defers to and seeks to strengthen it in all other countries.

Suppose further that President Obama thinks that it will be all part of the triumph of statism that the USA should be become a relatively weaker power in the world than it has been for the last century or so. Logical enough. He won’t be President for ever. Not even he can suppose that. Inevitably, people whom he views as rabid free marketeers and rabid anti-statists will be back in the saddle in Washington, again not for ever, but periodically, and more often than in most other countries. Accordingly, President Obama believes that the weaker the USA is compared to the rest of the world, the better for the world, and – same thing – for the cause of statism in the world.

Now, a further assumption, which is that President Obama sincerely believes that free market policies are utterly misguided, and that statism is genuinely a much better way to run things. It’s not just that he is part of the statist team, and that he wants his team to damn well win and himself to get massively more rich and powerful from being one of the key leaders of his team, although I’m sure that’s part of his motivation. What if, in addition to feeling strong team loyalty and seeking personal career advancement, he is also genuinely convinced of the truth of the opinions proclaimed by himself and by his team? What if he sincerely believes that statism is good, and that free market capitalism is disastrous?

Now, what does President Obama want the USA to do in space? Suppose that, in a word, President Obama wants the USA in space to do: badly. What if, to President Obama, current USA space policy is a massive and decidedly successful exercise in USA power projection, of just the kind that he wants reined in, hobbled, even humiliated? What if he wants the USA to fail in space?

What would he do to accomplish such failure? He would impose the very policy that he sincerely believes will contrive such failure, namely free market capitalism, by, as Dale Amon notes in the piece linked to above, appointing enthusiasts for such policies and saying that he favours such policies. On earth, President Obama wants his domestic policies to be successful, and popular and good for everyone, so that US citizens will continue to vote for such arrangements, more often and with greater extremity than they have tended to in the past. And if paying for all this goodness means that the USA has less money to spend on being a great power, so much the better. But in space, there are fewer voters to worry about, and the overall amounts of money being talked about are relatively trivial. So a chaotic and disastrous space policy, that serves to undermine and weaken the USA as a great power, carries little risk of the voters of the USA getting angry and voting foolishly, as President Obama sees it, in the future, in serious numbers. An anti-statist space policy, which he believes will be a failure, will be, for him, pure gain.

The key to all of this is my understanding of what President Obama thinks he is accomplishing with his domestic policies. The claim I hear in my part of the internet/blogosphere is that President Obama wants to steal wealth for himself and his political supporters – for his team, and damn the interests of the USA as a whole, and of all its people aside from a few political apparatchiks such as himself. He wants to weaken the USA by imposing bad – statist – domestic policies. He is, in other words, a plunderer, a cynic and a traitor. But what if President Obama sincerely wants his domestic policies to be successful, and sincerely believes that they will be, in much the same way that sincere free marketeers like me are similarly optimistic about the impact of their (our) policies, if not immediately then in the longer run, and despite all the immediate political opposition that radical change in any direction inevitably stirs up from special interests who will thrive best if the rules are left as they now are?

The usual story I hear, to boil it down to its essentials, is that President Obama, mysteriously, wants domestic policy in the USA to fail, but, even more mysteriously, wants the USA’s space policy to be a success. Why else would he be so predictably and stubbornly stupid and destructive about domestic policy, but yet simultaneously so bizarrely sensible about space? My story says he wants to do well and believes that he is doing well with the USA’s domestic policies, so that the votes keep rolling in for statism in the USA. But he wants to badly with the USA’s space policy, so that more statist states can supplant the USA in space, thereby weakening the USA and strengthening statism the world over.

It’s just that President Obama’s understanding of how the world outside of politics works – he understands how the world of politics works very well – is the opposite of the truth. What he thinks will work, will fail. And what he thinks will fail, will work.

Will President Obama’s much criticised foreign policies, in addition to his seemingly much improved space policy, also serve to make the USA a more powerful nation, I wonder, an even greater great power? By – I don’t know – not getting the USA involved in so many foreign wars? By other nations realising that it is up to them to defend themselves against nearby statist bastards of the kind that President Obama now encourages, and which some future President might encourage yet again, and by other nations then doing a better job of that than the USA could ever do, by trusting themselves instead of the USA? That could also be, I think. I’m thinking: defender of last resort, moral hazard. That kind of thinking has unleashed havoc on the banking system. Cannot the same be said of foreign policy?

To put all of the above another way, and to use a phrase I am fond of in this connection, the best that politicians can often to do for this or that particular activity is to impose upon it a policy of malign neglect. The neglect means that those who choose to be directly involved can get on with it. Malign means that the politician really doesn’t care if everything goes tits up, which means that those directly involved are on their own and are going to be truly responsible for whatever happens. If they fail, they fail. If they make a mess of what they are doing, they’ll have to clean it up themselves, and they all know it, which concentrates their minds wonderfully. Politicians often do their best when trying to do their worst.

I am rather proud of a short story (there is also an html version, but I see that it contains at least one bad mis-copying error of omission and perhaps there are more), which I wrote some while ago. This story told of a man with similar opinions to those I have attributed here to President Obama about how the world does and does not work. But – hilarious twist, ho ho – my guy was also a psychotic would-be mass murderer, on a would-be global scale. Unlike my version of President Obama, he meant really badly. He wanted to kill everyone in the world and have everything for himself. So, he unleashed rampant free market capitalism on the entire world, imagining that this would cause global havoc and global slaughter. But alas for his murderous ambitions. He died a universally acclaimed hero and a miserably disappointed man, having killed absolutely nobody, in fact quite the opposite.

But in another sense, a negative sense, I think that the internet is already having a very profound
...continue The New Media are having a profound effect on this general election (but Iain Dale can’t see it)]]> Ian Dale writes that the internet and all that is having very little effect on this general election. I’m sure we can all see what he means. The politicians strut about emitting their parallel universe proclamations, while the rest of us stolidly refuse to be impressed as we sit about wondering just which big party and big party leader we loathe and despise the least, so that we can humiliate most of them, instead of what we would really like to do.

But in another sense, a negative sense, I think that the internet is already having a very profound effect on this campaign. Put it like this. The good thing about blogs and facebook and twitter and all that is that we can speak our minds. We tell it not necessarily like it is exactly, but how we truly reckon it is at the time or writing. The big cheese politicians? Like I say: parallel universe of staged dishonesty.

Trying to combine doing regular politics with joining in the New Media hubbub means either being ignored as a useless bore, or getting into trouble, for saying something honest and eloquent but verboten. The two just don’t mix. Remember that scene in that great regular politics movie The Candidate, starring Robert Redford, where the Redford character tries telling the truth (as he happens to see it) at a campaign event. His handler just tells him to do up his trouser buttons, grow up, and campaign properly, i.e. go back to emitting the correct barrages of staged dishonesty. As far as the old pro regular politician is concerned, telling it like it is, like you are blogging or twittering or something, is just waving your willy about like a stupid little kid. Honesty didn’t work then for regular politicians, and it doesn’t work now.

But the difference is that the rest of us can now do honesty, and consume honesty. We now have honesty. For several years now we’ve been waving our willies about and having a ball. It’s just that the regular politicians can’t join in without making asses of themselves.

So, one: rise of the New Media. And, two: a general election in which almost nobody looks like they’re going to be happy. None of the politicians, with the possible exception of The Clegg, and none of the voters. Nobody is going to “seal the deal”. It used to be that someone did. Now, we seem to hate them all.

No effect? I think not. I know exactly what Iain Dale means. The New Media aren’t contributing anything positive to regular politics. The New Media aren’t helping regular politicians to canvass, get out the vote, assemble people to mass meetings and get them all excited about their preferred version of regular politics. The New Media aren’t helping to spread barrages of lies, and then cheering like lunatics. They (we) are merely standing at the back muttering to each other that it’s all lies. But just because the New Media are doing nothing positive for regular politics doesn’t mean they’re having no effect on regular politics.

Iain Dale is nearly there when he describes the internet this time around as “the dog that didn’t bark”. But the fact that the dog isn’t barking is highly significant, as Sherlock Holmes himself pointed out in the original story. The New Media dog, from where Iain Dale stands, is doing nothing, and that is what is so interesting.

Can you outdo the humor of Danish cartoonists? Be sure to try your hand at this global effort to raise a scream of maddened agony from people with minds too small to comprehend anything outside of their circularly reasoned unreality.

Be the first on your block to drive a Jihadi so berserk his head spins around and pops like a champagne cork!

Underlying all this, however, is something quite new, which, like the phrase “zero tolerance”, is from across the Atlantic. This is the idea that there is no such thing as an accident — a concept that is heaven on earth for litigators. On the basis of the so-called precautionary principle (which, if it had existed in prehistoric times, would have been bad news for the caveman who discovered fire) governments are expected to remove all possibility of risk from the field of human
...continue The limitations of the precautionary principle]]> Dominic Lawson draws out some perceptive conclusions about the recent volcanic ash problem for the airline industry:

Underlying all this, however, is something quite new, which, like the phrase “zero tolerance”, is from across the Atlantic. This is the idea that there is no such thing as an accident — a concept that is heaven on earth for litigators. On the basis of the so-called precautionary principle (which, if it had existed in prehistoric times, would have been bad news for the caveman who discovered fire) governments are expected to remove all possibility of risk from the field of human conduct. It was something akin to this sort of thinking that caused the British Medical Journal to state in 2001 that it would no longer use the word “accident” because even earthquakes, avalanches and volcanic eruptions were predictable events against which we could, and should, take precautions. We have just seen what happens when the authorities do have a fully fledged “precautionary” volcano safety policy. It does not survive the first encounter with reality.

The problem, alas, is that “reality” is something that many of those in power are uninterested in. As he notes, when the PP is applied to small groups – such as farmers – they lack the political and business clout to kick up a fuss. What really forced policymakers to back down on the airline travel restrictions was the fact that hundreds of thousands of travellers were faced with massive delays and thousands of businesses were affected.

I understand one blessing of the flight restrictions was that this whole kerfuffle prevented Tony Blair from playing more of a role in the election campaign. Silver linings and black clouds, etc. (Excuse the cloud pun). It would be nice to think that this globetrotting parasite could be permanently stuck in a departure lounge.

For some years I have known about the F4F Wildcat which the Ulster Aviation Society pulled out of the lough where it had rusted in pieces for a half a century. I
...continue Bringing history to life]]> I have been rather scarce lately and those who know me well enough probably know some of what I have been up to. Much has been either of little interest to our readership or has had me too busy to even talk about it. However, I have been up to a bit of aeronautical fun the last couple Saturdays which some of you might enjoy hearing about.

For some years I have known about the F4F Wildcat which the Ulster Aviation Society pulled out of the lough where it had rusted in pieces for a half a century. I had no way to get out to the hanger where the restoration work has been going on until last weekend when I finally convinced someone to give me a lift. Once there, others decided they really could use my set of reasonably skilled hands… and the rest is history as they say. Actually all of it is history: this is a genuine British WWII veteran that ditched one winter’s day while out on a patrol from this very airfield.

It has taken them over ten years to get here, but she is beginning to shape up quite nicely.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

My first job was to install a small fitting between the outside and inside of the cockpit, so I had to contort myself into odd positions to ratchet in bolts to re-install a 65 year old part to the restored fuselage skin. I also learned that a 6mm metric wrench does quite nicely on a 1/4 inch bolt…

It is a good thing I got skinny again… I spent a good chunk of the day squeezed in here.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

After accomplishing that small task, the foreman, a retired ATC from Aldergrove (BFS), gave me a slightly bigger job. I was told to pull an aluminum fitting from the cockpit port side where the combination of new and old parts had been pressed in for a fit check, and then to do all the filing, cleaning and priming to ready the part for use.

This will eventually contain some controls near the pilot’s left elbow
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The hanger is itself history. During WWII Shorts built Stirling Bombers here. The Stirling was a big airplane and stood high on its long undercarriage. If you have ever seen a picture of one you will never forget it.

The Wildcat is not the only airframe in this ancient hanger. There is also a Blackburn Buccaneer, a Shorts Tucano, a number of classic helicopters, a Shorts 330, and a few other airframes that are only to be found here. There is even a recently retired RAF Canberra photo recon plane due to arrive any month now.

My second favorite after the Wildcat however is the Suez War veteran Sea Hawk. Even just sitting there it seems to be telling me “I want to fly!!!” The office is quite comfortable but I could not convince them to move all those other aeroplanes out of the way and let me take it for a spin. Well, there is one other problem: someone built a large building in the middle of where the WWII runway used to be. Oh well…

Did you say catapult one or two?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved

The contrast with general elections of an earlier epoch, such
...continue On the impact of opinion polls]]> One of the most striking political developments of my lifetime has been the rise of opinion polls. Now that we are into an election campaign, rival polling enterprises announce results concerning the relative strengths of the various political parties, major and minor, and the relative popularity and performing skills of their leaders, seem to be announced every day and sometimes, when something dramatic like an election debate has just happened, every hour, and become the object of obsessive analysis by the kind of people who like thus to obsess.

The contrast with general elections of an earlier epoch, such as the one in 1945, when the election result, a massive Labour victory and a humiliating defeat for Prime Minister Winston Churchill before the war that made his reputation had even been concluded, came as an enormous surprise to vast numbers of people, not least to the amazed and delighted mass membership of the Labour Party. The Conservatives were gobsmacked. Were there opinion polls then, telling anyone who would listen about this landslide before it happened? My understanding is: not. The only poll that happened then, certainly the only one whose results were widely discussed, was the election itself. Now, opinion polls don’t just happen before elections; they happen all the time.

So what has this change, from pretty much no opinion polls to wall-to-wall hour-by-hour opinion polls done to politics? I am sure that commenters will be able to suggest all kinds of effects that have not occurred to me, but I can certainly think of a few political trends that have at the very least been reinforced by the relentless rise of opinion polling. One trend, I suggest, is that opinion polls have drawn political leaders away from concerning themselves with the opinions of the members of the parties they lead, towards the opinions of voters generally. I’m not saying they totally ignored mere voters way back when, before opinion polls, or that they totally ignore mere party members now, but that is surely the direction in which things have gone. If their members believe X, but it turns out that most voters, especially swing voters in marginal seats, believe the opposite of X, then those party members will now tend to lose out. Opinion polls have discouraged parties from adopting ideologically distinct positions, and tugged them all towards the centre, partly because now they know far better what the centre consists of.

Not only are the opinions of party members now set to one side. These party enthusiasts are no longer even needed as sources of information about what the voters think. So, it is no wonder people have been leaving all the major political parties in their hundreds of thousands. They leave because they have become superfluous to requirements. All anyone asks them to do is shove pamphlets through doors and stuff envelopes. What they think doesn’t matter.

Another effect of opinion polls is that they have turned politics into continuous campaigning. One of the most off-putting features of New Labour’s moving spirits, to me, has been their inability to shake free of their most glorious moment, namely the 1997 election campaign. This was the moment when everything they did worked a dream, and they have carried on with the formula that worked then ever since. The people running the resulting Labour government have remained in campaign mode, behaving in government as if still in opposition, crafting policies and laws and announcements about policies and laws not on the basis of the impact of such policies and laws on the country, but on the basis of what the media will say about these announcements. And hence what the opinion polls will then say. Many, me included, particularly associate this perversion of political leadership with the recent years of the Labour Party, as lead by Tony Blair. But does anyone think that Brown’s regime has been that different in this respect, or that the next government, whatever it turns out to consist of, will be any less media and opinion poll driven? Why do modern governments obsess about opinion polls? Because they can. Because, you might say, they can’t not.

Another suggestion I’d want to offer concerning the rise of opinion polls is that opinion polls have made a nonsense of old-fashioned political demonstrations, and have thus created an atmosphere, and a somewhat misleading one, of political apathy. It’s not that people don’t any longer have any strong opinions about anything. It is more that if you gather up lots of placards and hire lots of buses and descend on London and march through the streets and stop all the traffic, and shout whatever it is that you want to shout, well, so what? How ever many thousands of you think whatever you think. Big deal. Immediately an opinion poll reveals that many thousands of others, often many more thousands of others, think that you and all your friends and comrades are greedy and/or deluded fools. Result: fewer demos of any kind, about anything.

You may reply, but what if your demo aligns with public opinion? Well, if that’s the case, you should simply commission your own opinion poll that demonstrates that fact. If that’s what your demo was supposed to draw attention to, why not simply prove this, and make that your story? Far more persuasive, and far more efficient.

Which brings us to another fact about opinion polls, which is that they are political ammunition. I first learned this when I got to know Dr Julian Lewis (now a Conservative MP) in the nineteen eighties, when he was making it his business to sabotage CND and (as it turned out) helping win the Cold War. Oh, Lewis and his gang of collaborators had great fun ratfucking those CND demos, by such methods as hanging his own signs (saying things like “KGB APPROVED”) above the crowds of his enemies, thereby hogging about half the media attention, and driving the demonstrators mad when they watched themselves on the evening news or looked in the newspapers the next day. But at the heart of Lewis’s operation were cunningly worded opinion polls, the results of which he would then show to the politicians. In the old days, politicians would be mightily impressed by mass demonstrations. What else, other than election results, did they have to go on? But, Lewis argued then, and proved then, opinion polls trump demonstrations. The next generation of politicos who are determined to have some day to day influence on things (such as those who run organisations like this one) have learned this lesson well.

The impact of opinion polls is hard to separate from the impact of that other great game-changer, television. But the impact of television on politics (to say nothing of the impact of television on, in particular, opinion polls and opinion poll results) has been talked about a lot more than has the impact of opinion polls, even before the Kennedy Nixon TV debates, and pretty much continuously since then. Television has also strengthened the hands of political leaders compared to political followers, provided of course that they are leaders who look good on it, because the leaders can use the telly to talk directly to voters (having first checked with their opinion polling what the voters want to hear). They no longer need their own followers to arrange mass meetings for them star in.

How opinion polls would have played out in politics if there had been no television, or how televised politics might have worked without opinion polls are hypotheticals I leave others to ponder. I will content myself with saying that television with no opinion polls would have meant that demonstrating would still now be in full swing, what with television having done so much to encourage demonstrating in the first place. The reality, meanwhile, is that the two transformations have in fact gone hand in hand, or perhaps I mean hand in glove.

Meanwhile, old fashioned politics, the kind where you have opinions of your own, has migrated elsewhere. We manic internetters like to think of the internet and blogging and twittering and all that as very modern, and of course technologically it is indeed the latest thing. But there is also something very old-fashioned about it. The internet, you might say, is where old politics has found a new home for itself, at a time when politics itself had become something different.

And now, this new-old politics is starting to have consequences of its own, maybe not here in the UK yet, but certainly in the USA. To anyone who says that nobody told the Tea Partying tendency that the age of public political demonstrations is over, I would say: yes, good point. But I think I’d want to distinguish between the kind of demonstrations that are merely arranged, in a top-down, organised way, and the kind that erupt from below. The organised kind strike me as the pointless ones, because all that clout can now be better directed to cannier indoor stuff. It’s also worth asking where the Tea Partiers would now be without those plummetting Obama poll ratings. The long-term importance of something like the Tea Party movement is that it will bring together lots of people who will do more than merely demonstrate. If all that those Tea Partiers organise is yet more demonstrations, then they will accomplish little. But now I can feel this argument crumbling in my hands. Time for me to stop, and ask others what they reckon.

So, have opinion polls changed politics? 55 percent say yes, 35 percent said no way, and the rest said sod off you nosy bastard, who gives a toss?, what does it matter what I think?, etc. etc. …