Banging on about Europe (when nobody cares)

By now, any sane person is bored of the tedious debate in Britain about its part in the EU. Yet, Nigel Farage is interminable. The Tory Eurosceptics are having a fit (so most of them). David Cameron, the man who exhorted his party to stop banging on about Europe, is now desperately showing off his Eurosceptic wares, hoping his party buy it, while equally trying to add a great big invisible wink face to his European counterparts. Britain will have a say on a new Europe. Wink, wink. If the Conservatives win a majority in the next General Election. Wink.

Of course, though, while we're all bored of it, we're now approaching crunch point. For all the talk of negotiating a reformed Europe, we are going to face a take-it-or-leave-it from the EU that resembles the status quo. It is on that we will be asked to vote. So, the question might as well be put now: in, or out?

Well, we can all sagely nod and think how very grave it all is or we can look at the reality. Only 1% of voters actually think this is the most important issue in Britain today. (Source.) Yet, setting aside the Scottish referendum, this is the most fundamental question we will be asked in our lifetime. It gets to the heart of what the country young people will grow up to inherit will look like. Both the options in the referendum will constrain their actions and choices in the future.

People shy away from romantic notions of national destiny and all of that, it's a bit American. As the Prime Minister said, we bring a cool head to these things. We talk in wallets and their weights, not in terms of the glory of our history. It's a bit cringey now to talk of finest hours and thousand year histories and all of that lark.

This means that all the romantic notions go onto the 'out' side. In Scotland, the cry of freedom stirs the soul in a way that pointing out economic synergy never will. No such case is yet made for Britain and Britishness. Similarly, UKIP can invoke the British Bulldog, one nation boldly stepping forward into an unknown future ready to demonstrate its unique ingenuity away from the hefty chains of 27 nations. As David Cameron said, there is no such thing as a European in the same way there are Germans.

Similarly, it is unlikely that either side in the referendum will take too much time discussing the geopolitical impact of a closer Europe or the militarily strategic impact of a single European political unit. The debate will be poorer because of it. We will not bring the full significance of what we do or do not sign up to public attention. When the young people of today hit middle age, they will take the lead in the country. The decision we take in this referendum will, either way, constrain their ability to shape the world for their own children. So we are obliged to take this decision in this light.

Of course, this project would be unnecessary if this were reality. The interests of the next generation are sidelined for the interests of the voting generation. So we must do something to communicate Europe to the people at large and young people in particular. They must form their thinking on it now and chip into the discussion (or start one) at their dinner tables and try to influence the outcome that will work best for them.

I can hear the incredulity from here. I know, I know. But let's see if I can condense the European question into a few hundred words. I failed in the first draft.

Let's talk cold, hard jobs. Youth unemployment went up again last quarter, so it's potent.

The 27 nations of the EU form the largest economy in the world. Larger than the United States. Adding in other countries like Norway and Switzerland, the margin is slightly higher. The 17 countries of the euro are the second-largest economy in the world. Still bigger than China, although not for long.

This means that global business have 500 million potential customers, all sitting there and waiting to buy things. Cars, phones, haulage, anything. They're all among the very richest countries in the world, so you can sell them stuff they don't even need. So, where should they headquarter? Where should they (nominally) pay tax? Here are the two choices:

A) Germany, a solid member of the eurozone, EU and single market? Located centrally for easy access to anywhere from Cabo de Roca (Portugal) in the West to Virmajärvi (Finland, I swear I had to look that up) in the East. By virtue of its membership, it has favouable trade deals with all the major markets.
B) The UK, who might have a referendum in 2017 on membership of the EU. An out vote means prolonged renegotation of every trade agreement with Europe to stay in the single market. This will happen on a timescale nobody can imagine with results that can't be predicted. They also have to deal with trade deals with all the other markets you want to sell in (US, Japan, China). Unpredictable population, may actually just leave the single market altogether because of perception of choking regulation from Brussels.

Decisions, decisions! Now, I agree with Nigel Farage that it's ridiculous to suggest that BMW will stop selling us cars, Nokia phones and all of that. Indeed, a similar argument goes like this:

A) Britain, home of the world's largest financial sector. Populist government wants to tax high income at 50p in the pound.
B) Monaco. Taxes? What's the address?

And the evidence suggests there isn't that much moving about by high earners. It doesn't even suggest it hampers business formation all that much. But tariffs imposed do have a demonstrable effect. They tax per unit shifted, meaning they cost more to produce or are less attractive to buy -- the effect is the same: less product gets shifted. So headquartering, if your company is large enough to really have an option, is a big thing.

It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that we wouldn't have access to the Single Market one way or the other. It is unlikely we will have tariffs imposed on us because of our exit from the Union. We may not be so lucky with China, India and Brazil however.

But, equally, we must explain that the outs are being disingenuous already. You can't in the same breath say the following: excessive regulation from Europe is choking the recovery, therefore we should leave the EU so we can get rid of it all and prosper AND say we will not lose access to the Single Market. The regulations form the single market and every member thereof, EU or not, must apply the directives that come through. Simple as.

So, there you have it. The in-out referendum is about deciding the future for the next generations.  On it depends our prosperity, which will be talked about a lot, our freedom of action for the future, which won't. Get buckled in for 3 more years at least of hearing infinitesemally different policies on the sliding scale that exists between Eurofederalism and Brexitism.

On that point, it's already been kicked off and it's like watching the Rolling Stones get back together again. The Rt Hons Tony Blair, Lord Mandleson and Charles Kennedy MP have all weighed in on David Cameron's much-anticipated Europe speech. It's like being back in 2004 all over again. I've come over all giddy.

An Unexpected Turn... alternative approaches (again)

Again on the alternative approaches.

I've laid out my approach before and discussed alternatives. I'll try not to go over all that ground again. Anyway, my proposed approach (which is, to a first degree approximation, a workshop format) is not the most well-received part of my project, I'll admit. It is the first thing that people criticise (albeit constructively) and it is definitely the thing that people, though they universally agree with the motivations, politely suggest should be modified.

So let me use this post to express a principled, respectful dissent against this notion. Then I'll point out some compromises I am having to make in order to progress.

We'll begin with a dialogue:

Me: "So Straight Forward aims to meaningfully empower young people in politics..."

Composite individual: "Gee, that sounds noble!"

Me: "For me, empowerment is being able to have a conversation with a politician as an equal. I suppose the analogue is a conversation about football."

Composite: " Yeah, that would be great! The question is, though, how do we get there?"

Me:  "So I plan to deliver a series of talks which selects five fairly recent events and use them to illustrate the changing nature of the political consensus in Britain. Then, I give people a framework through which to see politics, which is fundamentally about seeing politics through politicians and the decisions that they have to make."

AND… SCENE.

At this point, after some rather ill-explained summaries of those arguments I have about which events should be chosen, how to interpret them and so on, I generally get something along the lines of "Well, what is it that young people get to DO in this project?"

Now, I began this project determined to set up a media outlet for these now greatly astute and shrewd young people. In my vision, these young people immediately wowed their elders and we began a grassroots revolution in society's perception of their progeny.

But this is not a satisfactory answer to the question. People have serious qualms about asking young people to embark on a project where the promise goes like this: "We'll do a newspaper and some campaigning on local issues but only once I have talked for a long time."

I get that the doubt might be in my own abilities to keep the attention of an audience. However, I have managed thus far to satisfactory effect.

Instead, I think the objection comes from a well-meaning place. The objection comes, rather nicely along the way, to this: young people will get bored if they have to listen to someone for too long, especially if that person is not a known quantity. Especially if it is not a subject they are said to traditionally care about.

Now, I think this panders to a certain view of young people that I think is precisely the reason there is no concerted effort to engage the young. That view holds that young people exist in an impenetrable bubble, over which they are sovereign. Inside the bubble, all is sound and light, with a cacophony of alerts and graphics. For all intents and purposes, they are attached by optical nerve or brain stem to the device du jour, using the most trendy app.

Outside the wall is a wilderness of that which is deemed boring. You cannot really get in, you can only maximise your chances of being selected for the bubble. To maximise your chances, you don the trappings of modern technology and use it to amplify, visualise, simplify, app-ify and lots of other mysterious processes to communicate your message. Only in this way do you stand a chance.

Of course this is a gross caricature. But you can't question the appropriateness of the talk as an appropriate medium for this generation without subscribing to something like this. Let me dissent, as I said before.

People, I think, respond to authenticity. More specifically, they respond badly to things that seem contrived. By this token, you have to be careful with your deployment of technology or it becomes gimmicky. By all means, polish the production but sanding the edges off too much leaves you with an amorphous blob.

More importantly, people have to be in the right mood. The mistake is in assuming that people are looking to be entertained all the time. Sometimes they want what they find entertaining to be subverted, challenged, stretched to absurdity. Sometimes, you just feel like you want to learn something. People flit from watching TOWIE to Africa. Moreover, to make this assumption about young people is to ignore reality: young people already pursue interests not in the canon. They do so, voluntarily in most cases, when they go into college in the mornings.

Granted, they get qualifications out of it. But many people do English A Level (and many also go on to take it at degree), when there is no significant earnings advantage to it. Nor does it qualify them to do or be anything more than they are before. Yet they pursue it because they are interested. Politics can be the same. You can give people a working understanding of the issues without committing them to lots of reading or exams.

Now, I said I'd sold out on that. Why? Well, I can't convince people that my format will work in all cases. As a really new project, I don't have any case history to say "Look, this really worked in this way." Nor can I say "this is the finished product, take it or leave it." This isn't a finished product, it's in development in a huge way. So I have to make concessions, or simply have people admiring my intention and agreeing wholeheartedly with the sentiment I'm espousing but then not being convinced I can do it.

So my halfway point is heavily inspired by John Hunter of The World Peace Game Foundation. Hunter created the World Peace Game as a teaching tool for his gifted fourth graders (age 9/10, or the English, Welsh and Northern Ireland year 5). Consisting of five storeys, the game is played over what appears to be the course of the academic year. Players are divided into nation teams, consisting of various Cabinet positions.

They then aim to solve a list of issues which are destabilising world peace - for instance, global warming, poverty and so on. Of course, these issues tilt away from each other and stand to some degree in opposition. The point is that the situations aren't easily reconciled and they are beyond the capacity of any single player. The game is a mainly uncodified pile of differing protocols but Hunter facilitates the games so that they are each unique.

I won't delve too much into the WPG. Go to the website. But what the game provides is a great set of in-game experiences that allow the players to pause the game and discuss the implications of those events and how they relate to the challenges they themselves will face in the future.

Now, my hope is to recreate that discussion in a smaller way over the course of 50 minutes. I call this little subproject "Tension" -- to highlight the tension between the nation-teams' goals and the global goals, along with the opposing demands from the domestic and international front. I slim the game back down to one layer, sadly terrestrial, and set up an asymmetric distribution of power between the nations. I hope that this imbalance, this disequilibrium, spurs action to reach an equilibrium (i.e., attempt to solve the game). Specifically, because unlike many games, the solution is not in the capability of any one player, it should spur discussion on how to co-operate. Once there, the rest should fall into place as each team realises the other's limitations.

This, of course, is the essence of politics. Co-operating within constraints to achieve a favourable outcome.

So, yes, I sold out on my lecture series/workshop format -- I'll be honest. I'm not even sure I've done the right thing. But I think I've gone low-tech enough to be slighly disarming but interactive enough to perhaps create an atmosphere more conducive to questions and conversation -- which is a precondition for what I want out of this.

Sidebar: Gay marriage, or, can God be a bigot?

I continue to read Michael Sandel and have become more than a little enamored with his approach. It's wonderful to show people they're philosophising without realising it.

As an homage to Professor Sandel, I thought I'd be a little cheeky and engage in the sincerest form of flattery.

I'd like to point you to last night's Question Time, which debated the issue of gay marriage. Inevitably, the debate strayed to the general issue at hand, which was: should the State recognise gay marriage? Now, the audience and panel were largely behind the notion, as I am. I won't bore you with my reasoning, it's largely cliché: it's none of the State's business who you love, marriage is historically not the union of one man and one woman but the property exchange thereof. None of that is particularly interesting now that it's a mainstream point of view.

What is interesting is the intervention at about 14 minutes in from the two religious people, especially the woman. She complains that her beliefs aren't being celebrated and that the Church must follow the rule of God rather than the State. She bemoans the situation as though her beliefs are wholly exogenous to her, as though she doesn't make a conscious effort to accept them. She rejects being called a homophobe, 'just because of her beliefs'. Now, my initial response is to say, 'No, you're called a homophobe because your beliefs are homophobic'. But it got me thinking. She argued effectively that she was absolved of the consequences of her beliefs because they accord with the word of God.

The question we can ask ourselves is this: what if God's views are wrong? Can God's views be wrong? Assume a God if you're not ecclesiastically spoken for.

She claims she can't be a bigot if she has views that please God.
If it pleases God, then it is good.
What then, is good? Is good that which God says is good, or does God know what is good and command us to do it?

That last line is Euthyphro's dilemma. If we accept that what God says is good, is good, then we can charge God with being arbitrary. We can then actually put God's views to the test to find inconsistencies or just plain disagree. If we do, God can't argue rationally with us, without appealing to a moral standard higher than himself, such as reason or whatever.

If, on the other hand, we say that God shows us the way to the good, we accept an authority higher than God which again, means we can challenge his conclusions. All of this upsets this notion of God being supreme and omniscient and infallible and so on.

So, for those of you who claim that Question Time is not intelligent debate... enjoy.

Deadlines

It is a strange human thing, the "I can't do it if you're watching" phenomenon. Perhaps this is why lots of people find themselves procrastinating in the face of a deadline.

I'm two days away from giving a presentation and one day away from really having to check it. Yet I'm utterly drawing a blank. You noticed my earlier post, which was long and was basically a week in the making, without the loss of the first drafts included. That literally occupied my mind and stimulated it in a way that the issues I want to talk about and the approach I want to take used to.

I don't know, but would love to find out in comments, if anyone else has this kind of binary focus. When it's on, it's on; it's great. When it's off, it's off and it's bad.

The great irony is I procrastinated from this blog post, itself a procrastinate from the work I need to do, by watching War with Jason Statham in. It did the job of just being completely unchallenging.

Alternative approaches [Long]

So I'm aware of the fact that my approach to this isn't the one people leap to when they think of the best way to go about embarking on a project like this. My approach, as I've  outlined before, is to offer ways of thinking about the subject, rather than the attempts I've come across which try to offer reams of knowledge about the subject.

One of the approaches I wrestle with as an alternative is exploring those arguments that keep coming up once every generation or so. One in particular that's caught my interest recently is the issue of markets. People need stuff, how do we get it to them? Does the rising tide lift all boats, or do markets inevitably tend toward monopoly and become the plaything of plutocrats? I read a lot of pro market literature, more than is probably healthy for me. But I also have plenty of conversations where people conflate the market and what has recently been called 'crony capitalism'.

What Money Can't Buy

One book in particular has got me thinking about this, Michael J Sandel's What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. You can pick up a free sample from Amazon's kindle store, or he's done an interview or two about it on The Colbert Report and BBC Radio 4, whose catch up services are US- and UK-only respectively.

I'd like to explore the substance of the book, because I'm hoping that this post might well form something on which to build. It might not, but again, this blog is about the whole journey, dead ends and all.

Though you might normally roll your eyes or sigh with despair whenever you hear anything about markets, this debate touches everything you do. Because as a human being, you need stuff. Food, water, shelter, education, healthcare and much else besides. However, there is a limited amount of all of this stuff. So how do we get it to everyone?

The fact you're reading this blog post and I'm typing it out in the first place stands as a monument to the market system. It has provided you with at least enough to afford the use of a device connected to the internet. But, as Sandel asks in his book, are there some things that money can't buy? You might not be surprised to find out that he thinks there are.

If I'm going to ask you to take your time to read this post, I should be more precise in telling you exactly what it is Sandel is doing in this book. Thankfully, that won't take long. Ignoring the introduction, it is in the title that we get the jist. He's looking for the moral limits of markets. Rather than what money can't buy, we are looking for things that money shouldn't buy. Sandel promises a framework for debating whether we should or shouldn't sell this or that, which you'd expect might involve some serious moral introspection about what the conditions that make it morally good or acceptable to sell an object or service.

Thankfully, Sandel avoids this, though Deidre McCloskey criticises him for not treating his readers as grown ups. I think it comes down to who this book best serves and for that, we should ask to whom the book is addressed and speculate why it's been written because it's not apparent in the introduction.

This book is written to stem a tide and it is certainly apparent that Sandel wants to push back against something he sees as seeping in where it doesn't belong. But what is it that Sandel is defending against? Getting down to it, he's defending against the naive application of markets to the problems of the world. He does concede that the marketisation of our lives has brought unimagined prosperity to millions. But he thinks that the success the market has had has ushered in an era of "market triumphalism", where pro-market activists have decided that the market will solve all of our social problems.

So who exactly is it that is advocating the positions he's worried about? Well, Jodi Beggs of Economists Do It With Models goes to some great lengths to show that despite frequent references to "economists", Sandel isn't really attacking them. So allow me to speculate a bit about who he might be taking aim at.

Sandel is a Harvard Professor, so you might think this book is meant for his fellow political philosophers and economists to discuss in their lectures. Perhaps it is written with one eye on politicians, whom he takes aim at with a section entitled "Our Rancorous Politics". (pp 11-15) Perhaps, knowing that his students will one day be masters of the universe, it is also designed to be some light bed time reading for those who miss out on his famous Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? course. But I think this book is actually more of an intervention in popular, not academic, debate.

Frequent references to Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, of Freakonomics fame suggest that the real itch that needs scratching is pop economics and economists with book sales in mind. Also, anyone who's only ever taken what the Americans call ECON101. So there are going to be a lot of students, especially in Sandel's own Harvard, that do just take the one class, where introductory materials are likely to be light on the detail and heavy on the easy-going types of materials like Freakonomics.

Equally, I think, he's taking aim at students of business. Perhaps people like Katie Hopkins, of the UK Apprentice, who take the lesson on how taxation discourages consumption and run off with it, straight into a wall. Diedre McCloskey, in a really good article objects to taking aim at these people, because it's like shooting fish in a barrel. But this is mistaken. I believe that many of these views, such as those from Hopkins, do seep into social attitudes. After all, they're present in the media. Sandel is right to not just argue with his fellow professors but with commonly held views too.

Alright, so we know who is the problem, but what is the problem? Specifically, that is. Because it's no good just complaining about the marketisation of everything bluntly. We are promised a discussion as to the moral limits of markets, so we need to explore just that: where the moral argument that justifies markets breaks down.

But before we explore Sandel's objection to market triumphalism, we need to lay out the moral case for markets. This isn't really given a lot of attention in What Money Can't Buy, so I'd like to articulate the case for markets.

The Moral Case for Markets

So the case for markets goes like this: markets maximise the welfare of the participants and require little, if any, regulation. Just by people acting in their own self-interest we've achieved an efficient outcome that allocates goods to the people who have the most use for them. Many, if not all, social problems can be characterised by the misallocation of goods: either people don't get enough of a good, or some people get too much of a good.

The price mechanism resolves this by effecting efficient trades. So, to stop carbon emissions, some countries have proposed marketing the right to pollute. This puts an explicit cost on an activity in the present that only previously had an implied cost for the future. By allocating permits equally across industries, you give carbon-light industries a surplus while giving carbon-heavy industries too little. So industries either have to innovate and invest in greener technologies to reduce their need for permits, or they have to buy the permits from greener firms to pay them to emit less.

To make things more effective, you gradually reduce the number of available permits, thus raising the price and forcing more and more firms to switch to lowering emissions rather than simply paying for permits.

Finding the Limits

So the thesis is simple. The ideal outcome of the free market is not always the moral outcome, against the contention of – among others – Levitt & Dubner, against the lessons we're taught in those introductory economics classes. There are two reasons why this might be the case.

One of the reasons is easily grasped: unfairness. Sometimes, people get priced out of a market of necessary goods. So, the home heating market in the UK puts people into fuel poverty and, before the introduction of a Winter Fuel Allowance, meant that there were routine winter crises as the cold affected the elderly. The second reason is harder: markets corrupt goods. They aren't the neutral catalyst that  economists presume them to be – the introduction of the market changes the nature of the good and its valuation.

It's not really in these two principles that Sandel is very convincing. He is trite when it comes to fairness, frankly. Economists are fully aware that markets sometimes fail to bring about welfare – whether by pollution or because they simply price out poorer members of society. We should remind people that this happens but it is arguable this is not a moral limit of markets, rather evidence the market needs to be restructured.

While it is true that goods such as apologies and degrees are corrupted by selling them, this is not exactly a knock down blow – we resist such markets anyway. It is no good to write a book challenging the spread of markets to where they don't belong if, bluntly, they don't inhabit anyway. The market for human kidneys is another example – Sandel suggests we might object because we wish to keep sacred the sanctity of the human body. But this is an example where we might benefit from the existence of a market

However, Sandel is more convincing when he gives his examples whereby it is not the good that is corrupted but the participants. While economists are aware that participation in a market brings certain values with it, they are not particularly vocal about the 'crowding out' of non-market norms that can occur when a good is priced. In particular, Sandel worries about "The Skyboxification of Human Life". (p. 201)

This is an argument about the externalities of markets themselves, which is interesting and the single most compelling point in this book for me. Markets are presumed to be able to correct externalities – but if their introduction can result in them, then there is an opportunity cost of markets themselves. And, for a book written to encourage a degree of caution when introducing markets, this is the reason to agree.

But hang on. What's skyboxification when it's at home? Put simply, it's the drifting apart of society who are now discriminated against based on their income. Markets encourage tiered service – on trains, planes, in theme parks – and naturally, those with the greatest income to dispose of on these services choose the luxury packages. In isolation, there is no need to worry. Cumulatively, however, as markets exist for everything, it is possible for the rich and the poor to live their lives without ever interacting. They don't queue together, (chapter 1) aren't going to visit the same doctors, (again, chapter 1), aren't educated together (see UK admissions statistics), aren't shopping together (Waitrose's vs Lidl's clientele): in short, never even brushing past each other.

The point isn't that tickets to sporting events are entitlements for citizens. The point is that these goods constitute what it means to be a citizen, i.e., give meaning to the phrase 'national life'.

So I'll leave it there.

Doubt

That flipside of hubris.

Again, this blog is nothing if not a true -to-life representation of the story of this project and,from time to time that means expressing misgivings about your abilities. But doubt is quite deceptive. It isn't always questions and insecurities but often self-criticism. What's the source of my misgivings? | debut this project in two weeks. It goes live, so to speak. lt will be the first time that I leave the security of talking about the project and keeping all my notes to myself and go out to do it. And that's fundamentally scary. Not least because it means that this blog will be over just as soon as it begins! Because if I get up there and there's not a jot of interest, not a smidgen of bother and intrigues are defiantly un-piqued then my entire mission has failed.

Nobody can be particularly disappointed with themselves if they fail at something that can't be done. Nor can they if they give it their all. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of failure these things aren't clear at all. Certainly my project is achievable in my own estimation, or I wouldn't attempt it. The failure would lie in the estimation if my own capabilities, which would feel tragic indeed.

So let me focus on what I think I, or a person seeking to salvage anything from the husk of this project should it fail, need to successfully run a project like this. Then I can use those qualities as a base for me to explore the doubts I have.

The quality I keep coming back to again and again is charisma. Why do I need charisma? Well, if you're going to teach something which is usually greeted with contempt and derision, you need to be able to strike that connection that makes people want to hear you out. Let me take you to my ever giving Muse, TED. Here is a place full of people taking their fields, often obscure and esoteric, to the public. As a member thereof, I can tell you the are subjects that I have openly mocked before watching a talk about them only to be in awe 15 minutes later. Examples particularly pertinent are this talk about classical music, that cliche of irrelevance, or this, connecting the young with performance poetry which is surely the teen's nightmarish vision of hell, combining public performance with authentic self expression. I cringe now at the thought, having left high school a half decade ago. Yet when I watch it, I want a go. I'd put that down to the charisma and charm of both of those people. I could affect their expressive speech but it would not be authentic, which is the difference between being affectatious and truly expressive.

Perhaps because the quality is so... basic to a person. By that I mean it's not so much a characteristic of someone but an emergent quality that comes from a mixing of that person's characteristics. It's a synergy thing. So, ultimately, it's not something you can learn. Like the way you can learn jokes but not to be funny. People of all shapes and sizes can be charismatic, so it's not like confidence, which can at least be projected or enhanced by getting a makeover from Gok. Faking it 'til you make it is not an option.

The other thing you need is good material. You need to make sure you have the right stuff, which is hard for me to discern as it's a skill I will have to acquire having never been asked to do anything original before. With essays and things, you're given a stimulus that can guide you in your pursuit. With this, I'm kind of on my own. This is liberating but the price of freedom is constant terror, to paraphrase. I am simply unaware of anyone or anything trying to do what I'm doing in through way I'm trying to do it. And at this early stage, you won't know how good it is until it's out there. Which is recursively bringing us back to doubt.

Another thing you need is luck, and a lot of it. I've had mixed luck, because I don't have to hand the skills base I need to fully set this up the way I envision it, nor the money to source them. Of course, the good of this is that I have had the opportunity to gain substantial help and expertise from those I hadn't known beforehand. But that serves the point even more. Essentially, you need luck in your potential collaborators (bad luck has meant I am largely alone on the subject matter) and you need luck that you'll have just enough people who are interested in receiving it. In this, I have had some success but that remains to be seen.

The Drawing Board [Long]

The drawing board is the place where things begin, or return to. My project has admittedly come off the drawing board, at least temporarily, and I've taken steps to launch it. But every now and again, you should go back to it and see what progress you've made.

For me, the drawing board comes in the form of a notebook I've carried around. In it, I can track the progress of this idea from almost its very beginnings. In it, I touch on a whole range of diverse areas to do with politics, each one that arguably could produce a book. Of course, I have no intention of writing a book about any of those things. So every now and again you need to do a bit of creative destruction.

The way I do this is to make sure I'm asking the right questions. I know one question I want to answer, and each of them in turn needs to have more supplementary questions asked of it so that you can really drill down to what it is you want to do and can accomplish given your resources.

So, this blog is one the layers of filters that gets applied to the colossus of random scribbles that strike me urgently at unsociable hours to demand that they're written down.

And one of the first things I have to filter is what it is I'm trying to do.

So, the aim of this project is to empower young people in politics. So I have to drill down and find out what that means and how it's best accomplished given the constraints I'm operating in. I want to do that here, so that you have the clearest statement possible about what it is I'm trying to do and the rationale behind how I'm going to do it. I also want this blog to be an insight into the raw process of one person trying to do something, whether successful or not. So, yes, like the actual context of building something, it'll be very non-linear and sometimes it'll roll forward at great pace and other times I'll be pushing up against a wall of some sort. Sometimes I'll roll back and re-imagine the thing so that I take into account what I've learned.

But hopefully I won't do too much of that in any single post, I want them to be fairly linear. Indeed, I want this blog to be a kind of draft of the final products in many cases.

I want to empower young people in politics. The first question you might ask is what that means. So let me define the three key terms in that sentence: empowerment, youth and politics. Once I've done that, I think you'll have the best description of what it is I'm attempting to do. The first two are fairly straight forward as I'm afforded great licence with their definitions. The third one I want to linger on and that's where this post might begin to look a bit like a wall of text. I'll avoid this as much as I possibly can, but I really want to muse on this a bit because it's key to how well this goes.

The Youth

One thing I've had to change is the definition of the youth. Initially, I thought between 14 and 18 or something like that but given the general reception to that idea I've narrowed the demographic to 16-19 – I'm happy to make this change, though I'm less than happy about the presumption that younger people don't want to know.

Empowerment

So let's get the simple stuff out of the way. What do I mean when I say empowerment. Well, the way I see it, someone has power in a relationship when they can influence their decisions. How does one influence a decision? Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat. You could be holding the purse strings, you could be offering a quid pro quo. I also may be naive in thinking that you can influence a decision if you have a good point to make. So, I hope, wistfully, that if you are knowledgeable and open to discussion then people will be receptive to you.

The cynic in us all scoffs at the very notion that politics proceeds according to the results of orderly deliberation. And I would say that between politicians, there is a great deal of justification for this point of view, given the carry on at PMQs and the belligerence and mutual contempt we are routinely treated to on programmes like Question Time. But I think between politicians and the public, the tone is set by the public and we have a reasonable chance of actually having a conversation rather than trying to get them on the defence. So, what we're drilling down to here is: how do we get people to be able to have a conversation with politicians where all the power is in their hands?

See, the public has very little to say about politics in general. It's much like going to the doctor's surgery. We can raise problems but not necessarily discuss the treatment. You really have no idea what medication works for your problem, what your problem actually is as a diagnosis, or anything. Well, I think it's absolutely imperative we redress this balance. If we did so, it would be better for the public, who suddenly would be able to pick the leader they think is most  capable, and in fact for politicians too. Because we set them up to fail. We say to these people, go and reshape the world we live in. Solve our problems. But then we say: you're on your own. We expect to take no further part in the fashioning, or restoration of our Utopia.

Politicians are just people. The problems we face - terrorism, climate change, the economy - utterly dwarf the capabilities of just a set of people smaller than we choose to decipher the problems of producing mobile phones. To be honest, they dwarf the abilities of entire countries. The problems cross borders, but we act like the solutions don't. What's more, we fail to prevent groupthink because our politicians come from such homogeneous backgrounds. So politicians need to be able to have a conversation with us because it takes the pressure off. It relieves the burden.

It also makes the ecosystem a lot more diverse.

But to have a conversation, we need to be more literate in politics. We can't and shouldn't devote all our energies to being political obsessives like me. At the end of the day, the professionals will always have better knowledge of the specifics than you on most issues. It is their day to day reality. But we needn't let that be a huge impediment. If you are literate, you know enough to get on and be able to get a handle on the issue such that you at least know what is being discussed and what is at stake. Beyond that, you may already be familiar enough with some special area to get into the specifics of something you care about, be it geology, physics, education, voluntary sector stuff, which with your political literacy you'll be able to make huge contributions to that area because you'll know the mutual implications of political decisions on your subject and vice versa.

Politics

So we know what it means to be empowered in politics: you should be able to have a conversation with a politician expecting to be an equal, or near equal, participant. To get to that point, we need to educate. So, simple? Well, no. What is it we're trying to educate ourselves in? What is the subject? What is politics?

We all know the famous sayings about politics. Ronald Reagan famously quipped that "It's been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first." Clausewitz also said that politics was "a continuation of war through other means". We're told that it's the art of the possible, Aristotle said it was to be "more prized than medicine". (Given the time period, he perhaps made a good shout.) He also said we're fundamentally political animals.

But what is it? I offer this Aristotle-inspired definition: politics is the art of asserting your version of justice. I appreciate that isn't a clear-cut definition and it isn't supposed to be. Any interaction where you're trying to reconcile two views on the right thing to do on the situation in any kind of structure is political. So, yes, I'm including "office politics", "family politics" and "playground politics" as valid politics. The structure doesn't have to be a parliament or a senate, it could be an office, or even a party.

 Again, I offer this definition because it makes us ask all those questions that we invariably classify under politics. And that is what I spent the wee hours of yesterday morning asking myself. I took that definition to the drawing board, and I came up with a series of colourful mind maps. as I asked the questions, I was able to get to the ones that were most relevant to the project. The ones that need to be asked to make politics accessible to those who aren't already interested.

Allow me to take you through that process.

So how do we explore this?

If we take my definition as a starting point then we're led fairly quickly to ask the following (among other things):

•         What is justice?

•         What is your version of justice?

•         How does one 'assert' social justice?

Each of these questions in turn lead us to ask more explicitly political questions. If we ask how one might assert justice, we can trace out the path to such questions as: What framework should we put in place to regulate these assertions? The options are plentiful. You could say that the correct assertions are those sanctioned by the will of God, which gives you a theocracy; you could say, as we do, that assertions must persuade us, which gives us democracy. Those are just two examples.

Then we can drill even further down. What system best represents the will of the people? Again, there are options. Consistent 50%+1? Or does the distribution of your majority mean that you have the risk of one group of people dominating the other? If so, does this mean that you need to change your system to recognise these distinct communities and give  them a degree of autonomy so that their interests are entertained? (For examples, see Belgium, the US, Spain, the UK, who all have  autonomous sub-entities.)

In fact, in asking this question, we've also begun to approach asking how to assert your ideals in the system.

Returning to the 'top-level' question of what it is that you think is the right thing to do, we can use that to argue about specific issues in politics.  Let's take the Leveson Inquiry, released today. It  comes down to the distribution of power and the optimal distribution of power between the government, the media and the people depends on your ideological perspective as to the ideal functions for each of these things. In a way I'd not like to use as a primary analysis of this situation, I think it's fair to say that a conversation about ideology can be adduced from Leveson. The Labour Party, historically left-wing, wants to stand up to vested interests while the Conservatives are torn between that and the liberal instinct to keep the state out of things if possible. The Liberal Democrats are also obviously torn between these two ideals, as the Deputy Prime Minister began his speech by saying.

But that's for another post, perhaps one of my many sidebars. I just want to use this long, long post to give you a sense of where I'm coming from. Maybe I won't get your attention all the way to the bottom. But stick around!