Upon Which Foot is the Shoe?

The USA cannot be miserable at its own majority choice, can it? The Democrats are upset, but they can't, at the moment, claim to represent the USA. In fact, being disabused of the notion that they do represent the USA will, in the end, prove a good thing for some Democrats, as they are forced to recognize that they can't go on simply cancelling those who disagree, and must actually learn to talk to them.

The USA, at least, has the consolation of getting the president that the majority of voters wanted. That is, at least, a democratic choice.

For the time being, on this side of the Atlantic, we are contending with a freak result produced by a defective electoral system, with very little input from the people. (34% of the low turnout vote = supermajority).

I find myself irked by every mention of the word 'mandate' by a Labour minister. UK people certainly voted for change, in that they knew who they wanted to throw out, but who they wanted instead was obscure to say the least. What we are getting now is more partisan than popular.

But we had an opportunity to improve our voting system not that long ago, and we rejected it. It's too late to complain about the rules of the game, but we might take the opportunity to prevent repetitions of this travesty. We won't, of course, because the temporary beneficiaries of a broken system cannot envisage the day when the shoe may be on the other foot.

This is the price we pay for an adversarial party system. Julius Nyerere argued for a one-party state in Tanzania on the grounds that the country lacked the talent needed to waste some on opposition.

 
Loyal opposition, however, which holds the government to account without undermining the state, is an important check upon absolutism. But a loyal opposition has to show by argument why the government has erred, not just throw up its hands in horror.

Aesop's Fable #44: The Frogs Who Desired a King

Some people wonder why the frogs ever asked Zeus for a king in the first place. Were they not happy enough in their original free state? What was so bad about gambolling around in their pond with no-one to tell them what to do?

Most of the philosophers who have considered the state of nature concluded that it was a pretty rough and ready state of affairs, in which the strong preyed upon the weak and the weak had no redress because there was no system of justice. Rousseau, by contrast, imagined a noble savage who lived in tune with a natural world that he understood and in which he felt comfortable.

Well the frogs weren’t comfortable, or they would not have asked for someone to be in charge, who could act as a fount of justice.

Now, when Zeus threw a log into the pond, the frogs didn’t realise what they had been given. This was a nominal chief citizen, who wouldn’t actually do anything, but in the name of King Log, the frogs could have organised for themselves an elementary legal system to prevent bullying and exploitation, while in other respects remaining free. They could even have given the log a name: Emperor Claudius, for example, or perhaps Joe Biden.

But no, The frogs were not satisfied. A King ought to do things. A king ought to be able actively to improve the livelihood of the citizens. Well of course, who would not want that? Did no philosopher frog say, “Hang on a minute, chaps, the power to make moral choices may just as easily result in bad as in good?”

And so the frogs discarded King Log, who had been quite a good king, all things considered, and demanded a replacement. Zeus sent a water snake (or heron, in some versions) which began to devour the frogs.

The frogs complained to Zeus that this wasn’t the sort of king they’d wanted at all, but Zeus replied that they must live (or perhaps die) by the consequences of their own actions.

And Emperor Claudius was deposed and succeeded by Emperor Nero.

The Great Society

 

The day the greatness of a country is judged by the transient matter of who happens to in charge of its government will be a sad one for the world.

The capricious Fates may hand over a great country to administration by a lunatic, an incompetent, a hypocrite a fraud, a megalomaniac or a liar. A cult of personality may be built upon any of these shaky foundations, without elevating anything but the image of the leader in the eyes of the credulous.

We know, whenever we see a historically great country currently ruled by a grasping, mendacious inadequate, just which direction the appearance of greatness is flowing.

I find it preferable to remain within the parameters set by Plato. Anyone who would put himself forward for election is unworthy of being elected. The more a candidate desires election, the less suitable for office he is, until you reach someone who is so desperate for power that he should ideally be marooned on some uninhabited island where his arrogance can only damage himself.

Political leaders in general vary in talent on a scale ranging between slightly more intelligent than the desk at which they sit, to, at worst (as we used to say in Yorkshire), as bent as a nine bob note. (This in an era when the smallest currency note was ten shillings).

The quality of a country’s civilisation, society, openness to new thinking, preservation of civil and human rights without the need for compulsion or oppression, make a country great. Its achievements in arts, sciences, literature, philosophy, and the continuing quality of thought; its ability to educate without indoctrinating and disagree without enmity, make it great.

The greater a society is, the less it needs to tell all a sundry about its greatness.

A country cannot achieve greatness without agreement on, and commitment to, fundamental principles. You cannot achieve greatness by alienating a vast proportion of your domestic population. If you can only win an argument by force, suppressing all opposition, then you cannot win an argument.

Anyone who believes that the best way to establish the truth is to burn heretics is not great; he is a fool.

Editors - Angels or Devils?

When you encounter an editor for the first time, you (author) do not know what to expect. You let an editor get away with messing up your work because you want to be published. You know perfectly well that the story you wrote was better before the editor got his hands on it, but because you are afraid of not being published, you grin and bear it. No, it’s not you, it’s me. Sorry.

Then you will come across a fantastic editor who has ideas that can actually improve your work. There are some of these out there. At the very least, they will ask questions like, “Does the protagonist really have to be an Air Force reservist?” Hell, yeah!

At best, they will say, “Why does MacAndrew give the time-travellers his watch?” That was a brilliant question, as I instantly recognized, and my rewrite made the story publishable.

And then you may be unfortunate enough to encounter the editor who wishes he had written the story himself and proceeds to attempt to do so, line by line. By this time, we hope you have found enough spine to be able to say, “My name at the top; my words underneath. Write your own story.” Of course, you lose the sale. It depends on you whether you think it was worth it.

Ageing Wines

I think we should distinguish between changes in quality that occur naturally over time, even if a wine is correctly bottled and stored, and changes that occur because a wine is incorrectly bottled and / or stored. The former is meant to happen; the latter isn’t.

The initial reactive change after bottling is mostly due to the oxygen present in the headspace, which is the air between the wine and the cork. When that oxygen is used up, only very small amounts will be able to seep through a cork in a bottle that is stored correctly, on its side. Change will now be gradual.

More air will get in if a synthetic cork is used, which is why you don’t see such corks in expensive wines that are meant to be laid down for ageing.

None will get past a screw top, which is why you see screw tops on wines sold young which rely on retaining their initial fruitiness rather than being allowed to develop character by ageing.

“Gone bad” may, however, be the result of excessive ageing. I once laid down a case of an already very nice Vouvray (white) that was expected to be perfect in another four years. I then forgot, and left it eight. The result was considerably worse than I’d started with – vin très ordinaire indeed!

Had it been a half-decent red (the only kind I can afford) I might have got away with it because the best drinking age for these is significantly older than whites. It is however a matter of taste, since the character of the wine is changing all the time and you need to discover the character that you like best, or rely on experts to tell you what you ought to like best. Of course, if you don’t have a cellar, you can only buy the wine at an age when somebody else has decided it’s satisfactory for sale anyway.

If an old red looks brown it may well be on its way to vinegar, but it may still have value to people who like to look at old bottles rater than drink their contents.

Only marginally relevant, but single malt whisky is usually aged in the cask, not in the bottle. Hence when it is bottled, they stick on a label saying “12 years old” rather than “2012” because its still considered 12 years old, even if it takes you a couple of years to drink it. This is not to say it won’t change in the bottle, but that’s not meant to be the object of the exercise. If people find some Islay single malts undrinkable, it’s most likely because they bought a heavily-peated variety when they didn’t mean to. All such bottles should be donated to someone who is more likely to appreciate them.

Me, for instance.

"The Plot" by Nadine Dorries - A Review

I understand why Nadine Dorries’ book “The Plot”, an account of the machinations that removed two UK Prime Ministers from office without recourse to the electorate, should have received a poor overall average rating from reviewers.

We all think we know what happened to Boris Johnson. We think we know what happened to Liz Truss.

Many wanted to believe that Johnson was a liar who believed in one rule for others and another for himself, because they opposed his policy on Brexit and wanted to believe that made him a bad man. The mainstream media certainly made sure that every last ounce of bad publicity was squeezed out of Partygate.

Many believe that Truss crashed the economy, because the media told us so. That she contrived to do this while UK economic growth was topping the G7 in two out of three post-Brexit years can be quietly brushed under the carpet. The left assured us that the economy had been crashed and, unlike the right, they never lie.

So a book aiming to set the record straight is immediately faced with a wall of opposition from powerful people and from general perception. It’s surprising, in the circumstances, that it should make it into print at all.

Then, naturally, it will be read by a lot of people determined to pick holes in it, as well as downvoted by people who haven’t even read it. I mean, who wants to be told that they have been played for fools and that our cherished democracy can be twisted to achieve personal ends, no matter what the public wants?

I cannot claim an open mind. I always suspected that Johnson was brought down by Remainer desire for revenge on the man who personified Brexit. I couldn’t quite work out how they had done it, or how quite so many turkey-like Conservative MPs had been persuaded to vote for Christmas.

I did always think that the Partygate fuss was blown way out of proportion when Currygate was a more serious case of the same sort, and largely ignored. I never expected The Privileges Committee investigation to be unbiased, and was unsurprised when it wasn’t. What I didn’t grasp was that the media would swallow wholesale the nonsense being leaked from Downing Street, or that the leaks themselves were part of an orchestrated programme and not merely random.

“The Plot” makes no pretence of impartiality. Nadine was part of Team Boris, and proud of it. But she was a cabinet minister and in a position to know a great deal more than the average reader, as well as to see the frantic paddling beneath the surface that marked the apparently serene progress of the swan of state.

I found this book an enthralling read. For me, it supplied the missing pieces in a puzzle I couldn’t quite solve.

No doubt others will dismiss it as just another conspiracy theory. And we all know that nine out of ten alleged conspiracies are really just SNAFUs.

On the other hand. We do have to remember that the tenth one really is a conspiracy. And it suits the interests of conspirators if everyone believes that the tenth was just a SNAFU, too.

What's the problem with the ECHR?

It probably gets boring being the European Court of Human Rights. 

I mean, it’s not as much fun as being the Chinese Court of Human Rights, is it? There just isn’t enough to do.

So you have to think of new human rights, such as the right to be protected against climate change, or the right to be put up in a five-star hotel if you are an illegal immigrant / economic migrant, but not if you are a homeless indigenous person. 

Before long, you’ve made yourself the government of Europe! Who knew it was so easy to take over from elected governments?

Wasn't Scottish independence supposed to be the price for Brexit? Why then did the SNP poll badly?

I think the first thing to grasp is that Brexit fundamentally altered the case for Scottish independence. You have to remember that Scotland voted for the UK to remain in the EU, not for Scotland to remain alone if the rest of the UK left.

When both Scotland and the rest of the UK were in the EU, there would have been no customs border between the two, even after independence. After Brexit, for Scotland to rejoin the EU would have meant a customs border applicable to two thirds of Scottish trade.

It would also have precluded continuance of the UK Free Travel Area, since there is free movement of people inside the EU and the FTA would have negated any UK policy to control immigration. Obviously, the UK would not allow this. (Ireland was able to remain in the CTA because as an old EU member it was not obliged to join Schengen; new members are obliged to join).  In other words, Scots could no longer expect to move south freely in pursuit of economic opportunities.

New members of the EU (including Scotland) are also expected to have managed their own currency competently for two years and to commit to joining the Euro. As an old member, the UK had an exemption. Scotland has no currency of its own, nor any separate central bank. Using sterling as a foreign currency would be possible, but would not qualify Scotland for EU admission.

New members of the EU are expected to achieve a fiscal deficit target that Scotland would need about ten years of austerity to achieve, according to the Wilson Report. This would be particularly acute if the UK immediately cut off Barnett funding, stopped military expenditure in Scotland, and declined to continue the currency union, all of which would have been perfectly legitimate.

Thus, it was improbable that an independent Scotland could make a swift return to the EU, and independence would mean standing alone for at least a decade.

In spite of this, the SNP continued to agitate for independence and to neglect the day job of actually running an efficient devolved administration. The results eventually became too obvious to ignore.

Additionally, after the coalition with the Greens, the SNP began to pursue a whole agenda of politically correct policies which did not resonate with the Scottish electorate at large.

To this you have to add the impact of various scandals. The burdens accumulated until they could no longer be borne.

But I think you are wrong to see the Labour Party as pro-Brexit. Starmer was one who campaigned for a second referendum, and is still not trusted to not make unnecessary concessions to the EU in trade negotiations.

In short, Brexit did not figure highly in the list of reasons for voters abandoning the SNP.

The UK General Election

It does seem remarkable that 2019 was Labour’s worst GE since 1932 and interpreted as a public desire for a changed Labour Party. Getting even fewer votes in 2024 than in 2019 produces Labour’s best result ever and is interpreted as a mandate to implement change in the country.

I fear that Apathy is now the largest single party, polling better than 40%. Put that together with two thirds of those who did vote getting not only a government they didn’t vote for, but one with a huge majority, and overcoming the sense of powerless and disillusion among the electorate will be the hardest change that Labour has to make.

Will a Starmer government try to rejoin the EU?

I am among the first of those who would not trust Keir Starmer to put the interests of the UK before the rose-coloured spectacles view of the EU. He was a leader of those who sought a second referendum in defiance of the 2016 verdict of the people. He is, therefore, among those who know better than the people; in other words, no democrat.

There is a significant and influential body of thought that determinedly regards Brexit as a disaster, despite the absence of any evidence for that judgement. These people don’t need evidence; it would only tell them things they prefer not to know. It is enough, for them, that they wanted to stay in the EU and the people decided otherwise. They are resolutely blind to the facts: that the UK’s exports to the EU have already recovered to pre-Brexit levels, that the UK economy has grown faster than Germany since Brexit, and that we are attracting much of the foreign investment that might have been expected to flow to the EU, because we are less concerned to protect existing producers and their status quo methods from new technology and competition. In short, the effect of Brexit is too small to detect in the context of the aftermaths of Covid and Ukraine.

I suspect that Starmer might be emotionally akin to those recusants who still write tediously repetitive letters to The Times to explain (without evidence) that Brexit has failed, the editors who unaccountably continue to publish them, and those columnists who take the same view. I really only read this stuff to remind myself of the proverb about those who will not see. I really should change my newspaper, but I keep hoping they’ll grow out of this.

Fortunately, the facts will interpose between even the most rigid EU ideologue and the behaviour suggested by the questioner. There is, of course, no way back to the series of exemptions that had already made our position within the EU peripheral years before we decided to leave. The UK is now a third country, like any other, and would need to follow the protocol for new members.

The opinion polls that suggest there is majority public support for rejoining the EU take an enormous hit as soon as respondents are informed that joining as a new member means replacing the pound by the euro and accepting the EU’s ridiculous one-size-fits-all monetary policy.

The numbers take another hit when people are informed that free movement of people would be reinstituted.

And that the EU would be allowed to resume their destruction of British fish stocks.

And that we would have to undo all the bilateral and multilateral trade deals that we have achieved since Brexit and throw away the opportunities that they offer.

The UK would also have to reverse the repeal of 1,000 EU laws that it has already achieved and pass thousands of new ones that the EU has promulgated since we left. While leavers deplore the UK government’s lethargy in scrapping economically-damaging left-over EU legislation, from the EU’s point of view we have failed to keep up with their relentless passion for minutely-detailed regulation and bureaucracy and have become deplorably lax.

And do remember that the national veto has not existed in the vast bulk of policy areas since the Treaty of Lisbon, no matter what some EU enthusiasts seem to believe. If the EU passes a bad law, you still have to enact it unamended. In effect, our parliament is reduced to a rubber stamp.

But, of course, that means our mollycoddled politicians would be able to give up their pathetic attempts to think for themselves and resume the comfort blanket of blaming the EU for every badly-judged new rule instead. So we can’t say that nobody would benefit. The politicians would be paid to do nothing.

And you thought they were pretty good at that already? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet!

Identity Politics

 There is an unfortunate tendency in the UK to import social movements from the US, where society, and history, is very different.

Amongst these tendencies has been the substitution of identity politics for community politics. Instead of everyone uniting for the common good, this philosophy incites competitive victimhood amongst arbitrary groupings, focussing on what divides society (or can be made to divide it) rather than on what unites us. The foolish assumption is, that all people sharing a particular common characteristic are the same and have the same problems, needs and complaints.

The secondary, even more insidious, message is that non-members of the said arbitrary group have historically cherished enmity to its members and continue to discriminate against them today.

I cannot speak to the relevance of such thinking to The USA, though it seems to me that it can hardly be constructive anywhere. I do believe, however, that having crossed the Atlantic and found themselves largely irrelevant to British society, such movements have focussed on exaggerating any problems that can be found in order to justify their own continued existence.

Moreover, by taking the sort of public protest action that creates maximum annoyance and irritation to the uninvolved general public, they are succeeding in creating, by way of backlash, precisely the problems against which they supposedly protest.

I am reminded that, over a century ago, Booker T. Washington pointed out what one might today regard as the beginnings of the race relations industry. There were people, he said, who made it their business to complain about problems, but did not actually want them solved, because the problems provided them with influence and income as protesters.

An Election is Announced

(With acknowledgements to Sydney Carter's "Down Below".)


Well you’re working in the dark, when you vote
Not like walking in the park, when you vote
All the bastards lie to you
And you ‘ates ‘em through and through
And they won’t do nowt fer you, when you vote

Oh, they say that things will change, when you vote
Over policies wide-ranged, when you vote
But the fact is you’ll be caught
And your hopes will come to naught
And the only change is short, when you vote.

Oh, they say they’ll turn the page, when you vote
It’s the start of a new age, when you vote
But it’s goin’ to piss you off
When some new throats starts to quaff
And it’s new snouts in the trough, when you vote.

There ain't nobody to trust, when you vote
Cos the bleedin’ systems bust, when you vote
They’re supposed to work for you
But there ain’t one as ‘as a clue
And the truth cannot break through, when you vote.

But we’ll all just go along, and we’ll vote
By the nose be led 'eadlong, ‘til we vote
Then we find the bright new way
Looks a lot like yesterday
And the bastards get to stay, when you vote.

Ladies Day at Perth

It was Ladies' Day at Perth Races on Thursday. You might have been forgiven for thinking you had gatecrashed a Cambridge May Ball. Things have changed, evidently, since I last attended one of these events. 

 

A very high proportion of the gentlemen were wearing three-piece suits! 

 A very high proportion of the ladies were (almost) wearing cocktail dresses, and were well-provided with stiletto heels for walking on grass. I kid you not. 

 Me? Norfolk Jacket (aged about 57 years), Panama Hat (aged about 57 days). Nobody else wore anything resembling the former; two or three of the latter. 

O tempora! O mores! 

But there were some nice horses.

Pantsing Revisited

In the early days of aviation, the newly-invented aircraft had few, if any, instruments, and those they had were unreliable. Early aviators therefore followed the advice of horsemen, who had never had any instruments but their own bodies, and in particular their seat, from which to derive information about how well their horse was going. This meant “Flying by the seat of your trousers” or “pants” in US English meant using your own judgement about how your aircraft was flying.

In the early days of writing, authors had few guidelines except perhaps basic grammar. They wrote how they liked. There was no formula for success, so some succeeded and others didn’t, assuming we are to judge success by popularity.

The increasing popularity of literature as entertainment led to the serialisation of novels in monthly magazines, and authors were obliged to make each chapter interesting, but not necessarily to follow any structure. The crucial thing was never to miss a deadline for delivering an episode to the publisher. This meant paying attention to what was going on now, and letting future chapters take care of themselves.

Later, literature was subjected to analysis and structural forms were identified. Any story had to jump through a series of hoops in order to be considered good. You needed to know about hooks, character arcs, try / fail cycles, etc. You could go to college and be taught creative writing.

Now, some people consider that creativity cannot be taught. What you are learning on a course, they say, is mannerism. You are being asked to ape the modern masters of writing in the same way that the mannerist painters of the post-Renaissance era were taught to imitate the style of Titian or Raphael.

Such writers like to start a tale and see where it takes them, rather than planning out the whole story in advance and then writing it. Those who follow their own instincts are writing’s heirs to the old aviators who flew by the seat of their pants. They are vulgarly known as pantsters and their methods (or lack of method) is called pantsing.

And sometimes it works, and sometimes they come up with something that is highly original. And sometimes they get stuck and can’t even finish. A very few of them will make a major breakthrough. The majority will probably struggle to make money with any consistency, whereas those who follow the ‘rules’ will probably stand a better chance of a regular income. Even they can’t guarantee it, though.

The Prophets of Baal - Audiobook

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Audiobooks

What percentage of GDP should we be spending on defence?

This primitive form of budgeting is essentially targeting the wrong measurement because targeting the right measurement involves too much effort. Even so, differences in counting methods are going to make comparisons between countries unreliable. Not only will some countries classify a given item as defence expenditure, or as internal security, industrial support, technological research expenditure, or whatever according to taste or tradition, but some countries count GDP by output and others by expenditure. The latter inconsistency makes a big difference if governments pay for work that is not done, as happened during the pandemic. So people who advocate such targeting seem to believe that if we express an unreliable figure as a percentage of another unreliable figure, it somehow becomes meaningful at the margin when we are deciding whether a country has spent 1.9% or 2% of its GDP on defence.

Even if it were easy to calculate defence spending as a proportion of national income; what is difficult is to calculate the effectiveness of the spending. I seem to recall that The UK Ministry of Defence employs more administrators than armed forces. Meanwhile it has for decades had absurdly profligate procurement methods. There seem to be innumerable departments, all of which are entitled to demand that a particular piece of kit should be modified in this or that manner, in case of that or this eventuality, so that by the time the kit is actually delivered, several years late and many millions over budget, it has become an expensive jack of all trades, master of none, when it could have been on time, on budget and a master of one. Like the NHS, defence spending has become a sponge that soaks up all the money that is thrown at it whilst simultaneously contriving to produce less and less effective results.

Tactical defence today requires a lot of cheap kit that works all the time, not a little expensive kit that works some of the time when its hugely complicated folderols can be bothered. Consider the impact of drones upon modern warfare. Take a piece of kit that costs next to nothing and blow up something hideously expensive. Take a piece of kit that you can make in a week and blow up something that took several years to build. Figure out how you can get more ammunition when you fired off your entire reserves or sent them as aid to Ukraine. Take a little time to work out why migrants don’t find empty army barracks to be acceptable accommodation (after you’ve figured out why the barracks were empty in the first place). Find some way of noticing that if you can afford an aircraft carrier you need to be able to afford aircraft to sail on it, because it’s not much use without.

And, having done all that, you will be in a better state than if you had met a nominal percentage target for expenditure.

Dialogue in Film and TV

I like well written dialogue.

I like it even more when the actors put the stress in a sentence where the writer intended them to put it. I suppose this is really the fault of the director for letting the actors get away with mistakes. I frequently find myself articulating the interruptions that I feel the director should have made.

If I can remember several lines from the film, in most cases it means the dialogue was good, though in some unfortunate cases it means it was memorably bad.

I like it more still if I don’t need subtitles to tell what the cast are saying. The ability to enunciate is gradually disappearing, sadly, as acting is replaced by verisimilitude (a fashionable word for mumbling). I am not deaf, but I’d often be happier if the film was in French or Italian because the actors would be forced to enunciate better, and I’d have a better chance of understanding them. As a writer, though not yet of film scripts, sadly, I don’t like my work being mangled in the delivery.

One thing that we lack as writers is the ability to transmit our voices as sound. This means we have to communicate expression, stress, and intonation in other ways. Interestingly, one of the things I learned in preparing my audiobook, was that occasionally things that seem to work in text don’t work when you read aloud. I have great difficulty tolerating text-to-speech software, which I suppose does not help. And I can tolerate grammar software for missed commas, but I don’t want my voice standardised, thank you very much.

So, I think it’s an important part of our job to leave as little room for misunderstanding and confusion as possible.

"The Prophets of Baal" Audiobook Pending

 

I am happy to report that a major exercise to produce an author-narrated audiobook of "The Prophets of Baal" has been completed.

The recording worked out a tad short of nineteen hours for approximately 163,000 words. This averages about 143 words per minute, as delivered to the publisher, which I hope listeners will find a satisfactory storytelling speed.

This week, I have received confirmation that the recording passed quality control and the audiobook received approval for release to retailers. I understand that it may take a couple of weeks to become available, and I will let you know when it does.

In the unlikely event that anyone cannot wait to hear a sample of my reading style, you can always check out the recordings of Yorkshire poetry on my YouTube channel.

What do you say about people who use democratic freedom to end democracy? (Quora)

 

This is an old, and complex, question.

It is hard enough to define democracy. Even supporters of the democratic principle have been known to confuse it with the tyranny of the majority. Such a restricted democracy implies the freedom to agree with the majority but not to dissent from it, which is no true freedom at all.

A true democracy implies that freedoms of thought, speech, belief (religious or other), and so on pertain to all citizens and no-one has the right to constrain such freedoms except at the point where they harm, or impinge severely upon the rights of, another citizen or citizens. By such a criterion there exist today very few, if any, true democracies. 

The key requirement of a true democracy is tolerance. This is not an easy concept to explain, and far less easy to practice. It requires patience, understanding, and an acceptance that one is not necessarily always right. It requires one to overcome assorted logical fallacies, especially including ad hominem, and to concede that criticism may be valid, rather than to resort to bombast and abuse when one runs out of reasons. 

Relatively few people today even possess the capacity for reasoned discussion, as opposed to emotional argument. Many people believe in pursuing those of contrary opinion by vilification, harassment, restraint of trade, destruction of property and even physical injury or worse. These people have little or no respect for democracy, or indeed for any view except their own. Often they are monomaniac and incapable of contextualising their own particular passion. They declare themselves the law, the judge, the jury and the exactors of punishment. In short, these people are intolerant, not tolerant, and lack a fundamental grasp of what it means to live in a democracy. 

The problem with this, as has been pointed out by philosophers going back at least to Plato, is that in a conflict between tolerance and intolerance, the latter always wins. Plato believed that all democracies would end in tyranny, which is the worst form of government, because complete freedom of the individual implies legitimising action to restrict the freedom of others. 

Karl Popper is perhaps the best known of those who have discussed the paradox of tolerance. He concluded that a tolerant society could not tolerate intolerance without planting the seeds of its own destruction. Some have quite rightly argued that this makes a tolerant society intolerant (that is, of intolerance). However, that is why we call it a paradox. 

The problem is always going to be where to draw the line. The secretly intolerant, even those who profess themselves liberal, are always going to want the line drawn fairly tightly around their own point of view. The openly intolerant want to enforce their own point of view on everyone else. 

The best answer is a clear understanding of the concept of harm. Tolerance ends where significant harm to others begins. Significant harm does not include hurt feelings or taking offence. Significant harm does not include getting the worst of a rational argument, or being obliged to assert that rationality does not apply to questions where ones own beliefs are challenged. 

I have described above the extent to which some people today believe they are entitled to take the “right to protest”. Peaceful protest is no longer the norm. Intimidation (by behaviour, chanting, placards etc.) is common. The intolerant arrogate to themselves the right to threaten, damage property, disrupt legitimate activities of others, incite violence and so on. There exist no such rights in a free society, and these people are all ignorantly taking democracy down the road to destruction that Plato predicted. 

But those who exploit the tyranny of the majority in order to restrict the legitimate rights of others by law are no better. The fanciful declaration that anything contradicting fashionable moral orthodoxy is “hate speech” is an egregious example of legislative myopia that also cuts the foundations from under democracy. 

If a citizen today must self-censor the expression of his peaceful views because he fears retaliation, either by thugs or by the authorities (who either themselves practise or have yielded to thuggery), then he is not a citizen of a democracy.

History - An Agreed Fable?

Napoleon, of course, was living at the same time that the Romantic Movement was reinventing history and turning it into something literally fabulous.

In particular, in Scotland at this time, Sir Walter Scott was writing the Waverley Novels, in which assorted historical gangsters such as Rob Roy McGregor were turned into loveable Robin Hood style rogues, and the nasty, brutish and short lives of Highland clansmen became rural idylls with hills thrown in. A fictional 13th century Scotland that had never existed was called retrospectively into being and some Norman robber barons, including a murderer called Robert de Brus, (anglicised to Bruce), were reinvented as patriotic Scots.

At this time also, a Scottish industrialist invented the modern short kilt as a suitable garment for workers in the new factories, the army decided that this invention was a suitable uniform for soldiers and adopted it, and the idea that each clan had woven a different tartan into their great kilts or plaids, (a sort of long blanket that was wrapped around the waist and then up over the shoulder and which doubled as a daytime overcoat and night bedding), was invented as one of the first ever tourist scams. Nobody seemed to notice that the science of chemical dyes had been pushed back a few centuries in history to allow this phenomenon.

Now, this was all great fun, as long as it was only used to boost the economy and fool the Sassenachs. (Which by the way was the original Gaelic Highlander’s term for the Saxon (actually mainly Angle and Briton) lowlanders who lived south of Stirling, not in England), and who wouldn’t have been seen dead in Highland attire.) But like many tellers of tall tales, the romantics talked themselves into believing their own fiction. Today the attire that was never worn even north of the Highland Line in antiquity, or south of the Highland Line at all, has been adopted as the national costume, and even some people who live here think that William “Wallace” (anglicised name) went around in late 18th century clothing.

So, in terms of the politics of his age, Bonaparte was correct in describing history as an agreed fable. But when you teach fables in schools for a couple of centuries, they become accepted truth, and when Hollywood takes those fables and turns them into money making blockbusters that masquerade as the truth, there are, sadly, ramifications in the real world. People believe what they want to believe, don’t they?