What’s your driving force in politics? What makes you go back to news.bbc or twitter every afternoon/evening?
I ended up in the Lib Dems because of the period in which my political brain awoke. My original activists kernel, the pacifist, environmentalist, egalitarian driving force, was inspired mainly in opposition to Tony Blair who represented everything that was the opposite of those principals.
Over time this kernel evolved (else I might I suppose have joined Labour when Blair stepped down in disgrace,) into something more grounded in principal than mere opposition to Bliarism*. I remember the day I stopped being a pacifist; it was an argument over whether World War Two was justified, in first year at university. My political priorities changed; I began evaluating policy on the measure of personal freedom as well as social justice and environmental impact; and having learned more about the Physics of dynamic systems (and the analogy with market economics and localism) I settled more on the social liberal paradigm; liberal first, with social conscience, rather than the liberal socialist paradigm, which is socialist first. I settled on this having come to the conclusion that equality is worth nothing if devoid of freedom: I would rather live under market liberals than communists.
The most recent part of my kernel development has occurred in the last few months. How would I react to a Tory-Lib Dem coalition? I have voted green, I have voted yellow, in the future I suppose I might vote red. The one party I would never vote for is the blue one. Not only are they economically right wing, the opposite of the egalitarian strain from my earliest political ramblings that has survived pretty much intact to now, but they also have a long and sordid reputation as nationalist (eurosceptic in modern context, and anti-immigration), and authoritarian.
So why didn’t I leave the party in a huff? Well, I wanted to give my ministers a chance to negotiate, I wanted to see what we could do in coalition. Before Ed Milliband was Labour leader there was no reason to jump to the red ship, and I had spent the election period rubbishing the Greens’ policy as only an obsessive politico can. Pluralist, idealist, if anyone was going to give the coalition a fair hearing it was me.
As I watched politics reshape itself around this new political species, the coalition not Eric Pickles, I have seen myself in a mirror. Labour are casting the coalition as a single party, in an echo (or amplification) of the Labservative campaign run by the Lib Dems. Labour activists, and unaffiliated Lib Dem haters, while often in agreement with this blog on policy, have frequently clashed with me on twitter over the role of the Lib Dems in coalition, something not very objectively measurable in spite of at least one good attempt.
What I have learned from the vitriol against the yellows is the unobjective nature of politics, the amount of what I try to articulate to people that is spin rather than substance. The extent to which I mix fact and fiction in arguments, my own duplicity in political antiscience. This process has made me want to be more objective, calculating, economically literate, so that I can face down spin with fully qualified, verifiable facts.
There are of course matters of pure principal to consider occasionally, and I am still a Social Liberal underneath. But we need to start looking at politics, and in particular policy, as a real science again, with answers that are right or wrong, 60% certain to achieve their aims, not “progressive/regressive” or “fair/unfair” which are too wooly to be properly quantified and tested.
So, this is my new political kernel, fresh out of the fires of debate (well, twitter); an environmentalist empiricist social liberal, with a piquant for feminism and world federalism.
What’s your kernel, what drives your arguments, fuels your anger and gives you the energy to blog, leaflet and protest?
*which is like Blairism but with more lying.