Steve Tierney's Soap Box

Crazy Guy In The Corner

I was having a brief and predictable Twitter-joust with infamous Lib Dem Lorna Dupre about the environment. She accused me of being at the “forefront of opposition to all environmental protection measures in Cambridgeshire over the last few years” and I pointed out that she was confusing a love of the environment for a love of stealing money from pensioners and giving it to rich windfarm developers – you know, the usual thing. Pointless argument, nobody really listening, just a series of bullet points and party mantra.

Then Sarah Whitebread (another Lib Dem) chipped in and said:

to which I responded: “But I’m not silent on other subsidies…”   And she came back:-

Sarah is, in my view, one of the really good Lib Dems and this is why.  It’s a fair challenge, an honest challenge.  It’s also clever because there’s no way to respond to this on Twitter with the sort of depth needed to get to the root of the answer.  On Twitter, a smart challenge like this puts the opponent on the defensive and in Tweet-debate that’s one verbal cut-and-thrust away from debate victory.  Of course, Twitter is just a giant echo chamber of people playing word games, but I felt the challenge worth responding to here.

I’m a free-marketeer.  I wont dwell on what that means in depth here – there are plenty of books on what a genuine free market might one day look like out there – but broadly I believe in the power of free markets (which are just individuals, cooperating voluntarily) and oppose the state tampering with those markets wherever I can.  I’m also Libertarian-leaning (I prefer a small state and individual liberty to a big controlling state.)  But a free marketeer is not an anarchist, I don’t believe in no state.

Pure idealists of one school or another believe in pure answers.  If something falls outside what they think is right, they absolutely will not support it.  While I respect that sort of idealism intellectually, I don’t feel that it is realistic in practice.  I know a great many people who believe in one school of thought or other who are so sick of the way our government works that they wont get involved in it at all.  You often hear hard-core Libertarians saying things like: “I wont get involved, they’re all the same,” or “whoever you vote for, you always get the Government” or any of those classic old lines that get trotted out by every “radical thinker.”

The problem with that is that if you get into local politics and try to pursue ideological purity you will usually fail.  Short of forcing your ideas through and becoming exactly the thing you are opposed to – you’ll quickly find that very few others are as radical as you, or radical in the same way as you.  And this is a good thing, because you might not be right.  Yes, I know, that’s fighting talk for radicals.  But anybody who hasn’t passionately believed one thing, only to get a bit older and take a different view, or experienced something which gave them new insight – must be very insular indeed.  With that in mind, believing your ideology must be exactly right seems to me dangerous at best.

So your choice is – abstain from taking part at all.  Sit on your lonely hilltop heaving heavy sighs and believing that you know the answers if only all those others would just listen to your wisdom.  Or take part in the processes as they currently are.

Once you decide on the latter you will often hit obstacles.  Policies that you think are bonkers, ideas that are anathema to everything you believe.  You can oppose every single one of them if you like.  But doing so will alienate you utterly and result in your having no influence over anything at all.  You’ll just become “Crazy Guy In The Corner” who rants a lot.  Or you can engage and argue and take part in the debate.  Sometimes you will win, sometimes you will lose – but at least you are having some influence.

If you do not choose the latter then you are clearing the field for all the people who believe the opposite of what you do. Without you there, making the case, occasionally moderating or even altering their course, they will roll ever onwards with their own weighty ideas.   I therefore propose, good reader, that if you do not take part you will achieve the precise opposite of what you think is best – by empowering those who would otherwise be slowed or defeated by your own arguments.  You become, as they say, part of the problem.

We get to the point, finally:

So Sarah Whitebread asked me why I didn’t oppose “Connecting Cambridgeshire”.  After all, isn’t that a subsidy?

Connecting Cambridgeshire was a County Council led plan to encourage the roll-out of Superfast broadband across Cambrideshire.  The idea was to use a large sum of public money to encourage a broadband provider to connect every corner of the county – instead of just the ones that the broadband providers thought was commercially-viable as might otherwise be the case.

This is an absolutely fair challenge.  Why didn’t I?  Well, in truth, I did challenge the idea within my group.  (Let’s not get into party politics today, we’ve had the argument before and will have it again, no doubt.)  In fact, any local or County Conservative who knows me will tell you that I am so reliable with my free trade dogma that I bore them all to tears.  ”There goes Steve again, waffling on about free markets.”  Sarah is being a little disingenuous, since she also will have heard me rattle out the old Free Market arguments on all sorts of issues in full council meetings in the past.

But there are battles you can win and battles you cannot win and there are only so many battles you can fight so you need to pick them wisely.  The truth is – there is a big difference between Wind Farm subsidies and the Connecting Cambridgeshire plan.  Wind Farm subsidies are a blatant attempt to pretend that a completely unviable energy source might be the solution to our problems.  For scores of reasons I wont go into again – this is a downright lie.  Even the wind energy companies must surely know this – they are taking the opportunity to enjoy government largess created for reasons of ideological argument, not economic good sense.  And people who have to live near wind turbines hate wind turbines.  For a free-marketeer like myself it isn’t the money that really galls, or the undemocratic way they are forced past planning refusals, or even the spin and lies that are used to convince people about viability.  It is the fact that while those resources are being directed towards a bad idea, they are not available for the exploration, creation or action of new ideas that might genuinely work.  In short, we’re propping up a lie at the expense of any chance of discovering the truth.

On the other hand – broadband really does work.  It does what it says on the tin.  It does make it easier for people to connect, both personally and in business.  It does make an area more able to bring in fresh blood – both population-wise and business-wise.  It does give a county an edge in the employment market.

Since I am not an anarchist, or even a hard-core Libertarian, I do accept that the state has a role to play in the provision of certain kinds of infrastructure.  So for me, how strongly to oppose state subsidy is related to how vital the infrastructure is.  In the modern world I think it’s hard to argue that broadband isn’t as vital as a number of other things we consider intrinsic infrastructure.  So, as long as proper competition is in place, and there is no sign or cronyism or corporatism – I’m prepared to raise a bit of a grumble about broadband subsidy but be convinced by my colleagues and constituents that it’s important enough to shut up and get it done.  Which is what happened.  I was uncomfortable about some aspects of it, but convinced by my colleagues to keep my powder dry for darker battles.

In regards to being convinced of the importance of those landscape-blotting, concrete-based, community crushing, bird-smashing, energy red herrings which require constant backup from coal and gas and huge subsidy from the energy bills of each and every one of us or a single one would never be built?   Not so much.

Sarah might suggest that, therefore, I am being inconsistent.  She’s right.  All politicians and activists are, to some level, inconsistent.  I would point out that every sensible political activist must learn when to be rigid and when to be flexible or will just be considered Crazy Guy In The Corner.  And if that feels like I’ve not been ideologically pure to the free market cause?  That’s okay.  Zealotry is a dead end anyway. There’s always room for personal judgement and a little common sense.