David Boyle's Blog, page 48

On selling out to Microsoft

At moments like these – moving house – I realise that the real division between rulers and ruled isn’t left or right, public versus private, or any of the other issues that the political class appear to think should motivate us.
It is systematised versus human.  Small scale versus big scale.  Community versus hierarchy.  Rationalised versus personal.
That is the story of people’s real lives, these days, whether those organisations are nominally public, private or voluntary sector.
This came home from me forcibly as I opened my post yesterday.  
Three identical letters from Southern Water in identical envelopes all informed me that the address I had moved into doesn’t exist (though it was actually built in 1957 and Southern Water and their predecessors have been providing it with water ever since).
They told me they are therefore sending an inspector to view the ‘new property’.
It doesn’t bother me except of course for the boneheaded waste, which I will presumably pay for at some point, and extreme lack of common sense.  Looking it up on the internet would have helped them find their own records.  But it reminds me why we mourn when enterprises with energy and intimacy are taken over by great lumbering systems and processes.
Like when the energetic online game Minecraft, which my children adore, was bought by Microsoft this week.
And we know that this spells the end for imagination, flair and intimacy – not because Microsoft are inherently bad or employ bad people, but because they are too big to provide it.
Ironically, it is also partly a side effect of IT which makes this so.  A generation ago, when I started work, I was uncontactable outside the office.  I had to use my initiative to make things happen.  
Now the big bosses can make every decision by mobile phone or by imposing IT systems which regulate their staff and render them incompetent – so that they can’t identify addresses which have been there for half a century.

This is what I wrote about this dismal sell-off in the Guardian yesterday.

Come to think of it, whatever happened to England?

I lived in Crystal Palace, on a hill in south London, for more than half my life.  Now I don't.  As threatened during July, I've moved into a very English small town, nestling in the South Downs, and I have no regrets.

But I am slightly flummoxed and I thought I would share this perspective.  Maybe one of you might enlighten me.

My town is outside the commuter belt, one of the advantages of being impossible to commute from, and it is in some ways a step back into a bygone age.  People are patient and polite in the street.  There are four banks in the thriving high street.  There is an effective and forward-thinking GP practice.  The local library is open six days a week.  There are more cubs, scouts and beavers than most people could count.

I sat in church on Sunday, marvelling at the full pews, the identically dressed, healthy-looking people on final salary pensions, the contingent in RAF uniform for Battle of Britain Sunday, saluting as we sang the national anthem.

I am staggered really that all the promises made to me about my adult life at my expensive independent school appear to have come to pass here.  And they seemed peculiarly old-fashioned even then, when I left in 1976.

But ironically, I get no feeling that this is a naturally conservative place.  There are green campaign groups, farmers markets, more solar panels than I've ever seen before.  It has more community activity than I've come across anywhere.  There is an arts festival and a literary festival.  It is a place that works.

It is certainly middle class but this is no stockbroker belt either.  It is also too friendly a place to be entirely complacent.  I had no idea such places, so overwhelmingly English, still existed.

I'm not saying that everywhere should be like this.  It would send some of my colleagues quite round the twist.  But there is something that makes me cross.

I ask myself the following questions.

How come there are sections of the nation that feel like this, when so much of the rest of us have to live with libraries that open for a few hours a couple of days a week, where the GP surgery is so overwhelmed that you can't get through to get an appointment, where the high street is struggling, and you have to take a couple of buses just to get to the nearest free cashpoint?

The answer I come up with, perhaps because I'm a Liberal, is that it is generations of poor government - of bone-headed conservatives with their economic experiments, of authoritarian, of unimaginative socialists packing people into concrete hutches, and of government by centralised lobotomy.

The real political division, at least since I left school, has not been between conventional right and left, but between an ideology that believes the rich should rule (pernicious and unEnglish) and an authoritarian rival which believes people should be forced into simple boxes to make them easier to process.

That exclusive choice has been the curse of the nation.

I also ask myself, as I did on Sunday, whether my fellow inhabitants realise how much on a knife-edge this civilisation is perching.

The economic trends threaten to sweep it away, as it is busy sweeping it away for the middle classes in most of the rest of the nation, perhaps rather faster in Scotland, depending on which way the vote goes this week.

Because the first defence against the corosion of what makes us civilised, before we can organise ourselves to do anything about it, is to understand what is happening.  May I humbly recommend my book on the subject: Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis?

John Cabot may have been the greatest of all

The discovery of the wreck of either Erebus or Terror, on the ocean floor in the Canadian Arctic, has been widely covered in the media - and not surprisingly, since they have been missing since 1845.

But it has made me think about John Cabot again, one of my heroes. Not least because he was included in the story in the Guardian, since deleted.
This is the conventional account, but it is coming under the spotlight.

We know that one of Cabot’s fleet of five ships turned back into an Irish port. The others carried on, not into the unknown, but in the sure and certain hope that they would follow that strange forested coast all the way down to China - which was actually the purpose, not at that stage the North West Passage.

Then nothing.  But not quite nothing.

There have been rumours of rocks carved on the Massachusetts coast with the names of Cabot’s sons.  Venetian ear-rings found by a Portuguese expedition a few years later.

And echoes of what you might call a violent encounter between English pioneers and Castilian settlers as far down south as the coast of what is now Venezuela

Every nation has its own conspiracy theory about how it was them, really, who discovered America.  For the past century or so, we have what you might call the English conspiracy theory – that America was called, not after Amerigo Vespucci, but after Cabot’s Welsh backer Richard ap-Meric.

Then, a few years ago, a Bristol historian called Evan Jones came up with evidence – or rather evidence of evidence – that Cabot might have survived and come home after all.

It turns out that the great historian of exploration, Alwyn Ruddock, had been commissioned to write a book to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Cabot’s landing.  There were rumours that she had made some staggering discoveries in a series of newly discovered archives.

But she wasn’t satisfied with the book, tore it up and started again.  When she died in 2005, her will instructed her executor to destroy all her notes and research.  More than thirty bags of papers were burned.

Two years later, Evan Jones asked the University of Exeter Press if they’d ever had a book proposal from her.  They had, and it launched a flurry of research in Cabot circles to see if Ruddock’s outline could be proven, still continuing, and with some success.

Because she seemed to have found evidence that Cabot and his accompanying priest Giovanni de Carbonariis reached Newfoundland safely in 1498.  Also that the expedition headed south along the coast of what is now the United States towards some kind of encounter with the Spanish on the coast of what is now Venezuela.

Cabot then struggled north in Autumn 1499 with the remainder of his expedition, presumably riddled with shipworm.

But the real bombshell was that Ruddock believed that Cabot left Carbonariis and his fellow friars on Newfoundland, where they set up the first European colony in north America since the Vikings.

She also believed that Carbonariis sent his own expedition north to Labrador, before the Portuguese, on a ship called the Dominus Vobiscum, possibly sent out from England for the purpose in 1499.

When Cabot got home early in 1500, the political situation in England had changed.  The proposed marriage between Arthur Prince of Wales and Catherine of Aragon was now back on.  The news that Cabot had ventured into Spanish waters, instead of finding China, was a threat to the marriage treaty and was suppressed.  So was his pension.  He died in despair a few months later.

This version of the story looks like a conspiracy theory, and has yet to be confirmed.  But if it’s true, then Carbonariis was the great hero of the 1498 voyage, setting up the first European church in North America, probably in the Newfoundland town of Carbonear, and dedicated to St John

But the idea of Cabot going all the way down the coast of north America suggests that he was in fact the greatest of all the explorers who set out from our shores.  We shall see, but you can find out more in my book Toward the Setting Sun: Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci and the Race for America, now an e-book.

In the meantime, I would have thought Cabot's voyages north were as important as Franklin's in the emerging international dispute about who claims the Arctic.

Public services really need to be flexible

[image error] I note in passing that the new Lib Dem policy paper on public services has now been published. Before I go on, I should issue one warning about it. The name is nearly as long as the paper.

I also need to be transparent about this. I spent many a wintry and spring evening on the committee which wrote the report, and having now re-read it some months later, it is rather better and more coherent – and more radical – than I had remembered.

Lib Dem watchers will know that it wasn’t all plain sailing, or all sweetness and light either, but my friend Jeremy Hargreaves did a huge job pulling it all together, and herding us into vaguely the same place and I didn’t envy him (whatever I might have said at the time).

I write about it now to flag up what is, I believe, a tremendously simple and important proposal: the Right to Request Flexible Service Delivery. This is what the report says:

“An example would be a social care user who might want to request that the support to put them to bed for the night be provided in the evening, and not at 5pm, simply because that suits the service.”

You might add that it would apply to secondary school pupils whose reasonable choice of A level subjects has been stymied by the timetabling arrangements. Or the long-term patient who wants a consultant who will let them ask lots of questions, and many other small flexibilities.

It seems simple enough, and it won’t solve everything. But it is one of those proposals that can give more power to service users, without having to go through an exhausting and expensive structural re-organisation, which never quiet achieves what you want anyway.

It is also a simpler and potentially more powerful route than legislation to give people a legal right to choose. But it would have a similar effect of shaking up the system from the inside.

It was something that I proposed in the Barriers to Choice Review report which I wrote for the Treasury and Cabinet Office last year.

Despite what people say, and as I discovered for myself during the review, ‘choice’ is an extremely popular concept among people, but they are hazy about what it means.

There are, of course, a whole range of ways in which service users are given a choice – two of them are used by the Department of Health alone (the NHS and social care use very different systems).

The difficulty is that, sometimes, formal systems of choice, especially those invented by economists, can render the service even more inflexible than it was before. What people really need is more flexibility to ask for what they need, not what the economists deem is relevant.

That is why the right to request service flexibility is potentially such a powerful tool. It breaks out of people’s set views about formal choice and gives them a far broader choice of options, no matter how inflexible the systems are.

It would be modelled on the Right to Request Parental Leave. Service providers would not be obliged to meet your request, but they would have to explain publicly why they can’t.

It is also an antidote to pile-it-high-assembly line services, which claim to be cheaper but actually just spray costs elsewhere in the system.
I believe it is a human solution in a giant, inflexible system, and much more inflexible thanks to the Blair-Brown years. I hope the party adopts it.

What the Scottish enlightenment would say to us now

Whatever the result of the Scottish referendum, it seems to me that there is now a momentum towards independence, backed by a grassroots movement, an optimistic albeit somewhat vague vision and by the offensive technocracy of Whitehall and Westminster.
It may not happen now or for a generation, but – unless there is a revolution in the administrative relationship between the two nations – I can’t see the debate just withering away.
It would be a pity to lose the union, but it may be the tide of history is driving forward-thinking nations to divide into their constituent parts.  That is the logic of the prevailing market doctrine which now manages the world.
Yes, Thatcherism is the cause of the current constitutional crisis in more ways than one.  There is no point in blaming Salmond or Cameron, who are just acting out the roles assigned to them by the previous political generation – the one that first started testing out their social theories on Scotland.
I can’t think of another threat to the union quite so potent since Prestonpans in 1745.
In fact, the Bonnie Prince Charlie uprising is quite a good parallel.  On one side the rump of the highland clan system, reluctantly taking the field for emotional reasons and for reasons of honour.  On the other side, Butcher Cumberland and the Georgian elite.
Between them, even more reluctant, were the people we ought to be identifying with now – the pioneers of the Scottish enlightenment, barricading Edinburgh and Glasgow against the rebels, and the young James Wolfe, who refused to murder a captured highland chieftain when he was ordered to by Cumberland.
What would our independent-minded forefathers in the embers of the Scottish enlightenment say to us now – Boswell, Kames, Smith, Hume and the rest?
I think they would say this?  Scottish independence would not be the end of the world or the end of the debate. 
Geography insists that there is a huge amount of interdependence among the nations of the British Isles.  Independence simply raises the question about how that needs to be managed: what kind of enlightened supra-national organisation do we need?  What flesh do we need to put on the bones of the Council of the Isles, negotiated during the Anglo-Irish Agreement?
I doubt very much whether there is anyone in Whitehall thinking about these issues – the outlines of a new settlement between the British nations to take us through the next post-modern century.  But I wish there was.

Sceptical about schools that do well in the tables

I'm now living in West Sussex and, every five minutes or so, some kind of comparison with London occurs to me that would make a blog post.  Perhaps the most obvious is in the schools.

West Sussex County Council has put my children in two different schools, which is I suppose a comment on public service choice in education (I know - it's only supposed to be a right to express a preference).  I have no idea what the education is like - though one of them is a very small school, very high on the league tables (more about that in a minute) - but the schools themselves are absolutely delightful.

They are informal and friendly. They are helpful and inclusive, by which I mean they are welcoming to newcomers.  They are not bossy.  They don't talk down to me.  Their walls are full of pictures, not attendence and punctuality graphs. They are about as different to London schools as it is possible to be.

My children are themselves excited to be in a school where they are allowed to talk to each other outside break time.  They can talk in the corridors.  They can learn from each other (the basis of education as far as I'm concerned) by working in groups.

This is unheard of freedom from Gradgrindism and I applaud it.

As I did the rather longer school run yesterday, I happened to listen to a fascinating diatribe by the headmaster of Eton about Ofsted and the examination system.

Tony Little said that the great success of Ofsted is to insist that low standards are never inevitable.  This is correct.  You only have to look back two decades, when Southwark for example (in its pre-Lib Dem period) got only 15 per cent with five GCSE passes in the first league tables in 1992.

He also said the exam and measurement system is archaic.  In fact, he's been leading the assault against measurement over the summer.

In doing so, he is both asserting that the exam system is failing young people, by undermining the way they prepare for the modern world, and also peddling a very traditional message about broad education and its importance.

Perhaps it is inevitable that the independent sector has become a bastion of the case against Ofsted.  It is a pity that they are also allowing themselves to slip out of the hands of ordinary people in the UK - the prices charged by independent schools increasingly make them the preserve of foreign millionaires and the offspring of the financial services.  They are not for us any more (see my book Broke for more on this).

Which is a pity because the case is vitally important.  It is why I am usually sceptical about schools at the top of the league tables.  What does it say about them?  What creativity are they sacrificing to get there?  How are the figures being gamed?

There is clearly a tendency for the schools at the very top to provide the narrowest, Gradgrindian education.  That is the real message of the league tables, just as it is across public services.

We need to be a bit suspicious about any service provider where the output figures look too good.

There is a counter argument, and I'm only too aware of it.  According to the figures, London schools are doing a good deal better than West Sussex schools, even though they are not allowed to talk in corridors.

But we need to be a little bit sceptical of that too, because of the circularity in the argument.  London schools have a more slavish devotion to the tables and the exams, and perhaps they needed to if they were going to drive up standards.  Of course, then, they look better in the measurements that result.

The question is - how much is gaming and how much is real achievement.  It's going to be a mixture, but one thing is absolutely clear: you won't be able to tell from the figures.

The 'deliverologist' Michael Barber says that targets and numerical standards were require to force the system to improve - and they may well be less useful later.  That may be true: but having let Barber's measurement demon out of the box, I'm not sure it is possible to put it back in.

Can nations separate without violence?

[image error] My great-aunt used to say, with some justification, that there was only one kind of nationalism that Liberals could ever stomach. That was Irish nationalism.

I suppose the point is that, while the nationalism of big nations is always abhorrent, the nationalism of small nations or regions or counties, or even put-upon towns and cities, looks like a demand for self-determination.

So there is a Liberal argument for Scottish independence. The trouble is that nationalism usually comes packaged up with a kind of intolerance which no Liberal could stomach.

And now that the pollsters are beginning to say the independence referendum is too close to call, these issues suddenly matter very much. Because I’m not sure that the separation of nations can happen without violence.

There will be unionist groups who regard themselves as betrayed, just as there were in Ireland. Generally speaking, the home nations of former empires do not separate without the risk, at least, of civil war.

But there is another way of looking at this. There is an argument that the division of nations is going to be the predominant force in the 21st century. That is the logic of the prevailing political and economic doctrines that are now mainstream.

In that case, it is hardly surprising that the UK – the great industrial innovators of the world – is leading the way. It therefore matters hugely that this early separation should be carried out in a civilised way, and that we show it can be possible to do so peacefully.

Where we go, the rest of Europe may follow, raising the question of what supranational co-ordination these islands, and this continent still requires.

It has become almost a truism to say that the unionist case has been badly handled. At its heart it is a case for economies of scale, and – although these are clearly possible – they are not clear and not proven.

Quite the reverse, the diseconomies of scale of big, centralised nations are all too obvious.

The looming disaster that the establishment, right and left, are scribbling their columns about is not about economics – it is about emotions and symbolism. The real fear is that it will mean Irish-style civil war (who will wield the Black and Tans this time?).

Unfortunately, the political establishment has already allowed this to become a referendum on the way we are governed, by civil servants, politicians and businesses.

I have just moved house, so I have some insight into this. I have spent days stuck on my mobile phone (BT can’t provide us with a line for three weeks) in call centre hell, as business after business betrays its customer service promises.

I haven’t been able to get through to Eon at all, even to tell them I’m switching to a sustainable energy supplier. As for BT, I felt like scrubbing myself clean after my conversation with them.

There is a parallel here with the establishment’s case for continuing the union. It has all been threat, bluster and bribe.

The assumptions of BT is that I am able to be nudged by small sums of money, which they dangle before me, and by little else. They assume I have no ideals, no objectives and that I am some kind of utilitarian machine able to experience only two emotions: fear and greed.

That is how we have come to be treated by those who rule us, and by those whose services we are forced to buy from. Those are the trappings of modern, rationalised centralisation.

Will voting for Scottish independence allow the Scots to escape from this? I very much doubt it – because independence is almost meaningless in a world of increasing interdependence (except to the constitutional lawyers, who will be raking it in).

The basic problem is that big, centralised systems tend to treat people with contempt. They reduce human beings to make them easier to process.

Devolution of power is a real antidote to that, but clearly the case has yet to be made as powerfully as it could be.  Nationhood is a dangerous concoction of emotion in comparison.

When what you see makes people uncomfortable

[image error] I realise that political people are not supposed to be interested in the folklore of fairies, and yet I am. This blog may require me to hand in my political blogger's licence, but so be it. The die is cast.

I have been sent the most extraordinary book, largely because of my last foray into the world of fairy beliefs online, when I unexpectedly found myself quoted in Folklore, the academic journal of the Folklore Society.

That in turn derived from a visit I made to the Society, then in an underground bunker under University College, London, when I was trying to develop a television documentary about fairies some decades ago. I was given an address outside Dublin, the last known contact for the Fairy Investigation Society, which had by then escaped seriously underground.

I wrote to the address and was told they had gone, but they also weren’t interested in talking to me. This was something of a contradiction, and was one of the many reasons I have stayed interested.

Because of what I wrote about that, I’ve been in touch with a folklorist and academic, Simon Young, who has researched the Society and written about its strange history. He has also written the introduction to the newly published book by Marjorie Johnson called Seeing Fairies .

Marjorie Johnson began collecting first-hand accounts of sightings or experiences of what people choose to call fairies in 1955. She was then 44 and she didn’t finish the book until 1997. It was published in German and Italian before she died in 2011, aged 100, so she never lived to see it published in a language she could understand.

It has now been published by Anomalist Books in San Antonio, and we can all read the 500 or so incidents she collected from people. It is true that you don’t need to plough through all 500 to get the general idea, and I haven’t quite finished doing so myself.

But there is a fascinating shift apparent for the folklorist. The incidents span about a century from the 1890s to the 1990s – that’s what comes of writing a book for 60 years – but the vast majority are described as wonderful, shining, uplifting experiences, deep somehow in nature.

The influence of Rudolf Steiner is apparent. So is the influence of J. M. Barrie (some of the fairies have wings).

They are a million miles from the stories of the 1850s and before, when fairies were frightening, troublesome, meddlesome, amoral things which you encountered at your peril. Something has shifted.

But there is another reason for being interested, and it is why I suppose I am. People are relatively open about seeing ghosts, and they seem unable to stop telling people if they have seen UFOs. But they keep quiet if they interpret their peculiar experiences as fairies. These are not socially acceptable oddities to have run across.

To see so many of these experiences side by side makes me realise that stories that fly in the face of accepted reality tend to get suppressed – not just fairies but anything that conflicts with conventional belief or widely accepted scientific paradigms. It takes a lot to make people re-consider.

I am not suggesting that what people say they saw was somehow objectively the case. I am saying that, despite what we might imagine, people’s experience of some kind of natural phenomena they call fairies is actually surprisingly common.

You wouldn’t think it, would you.

What has this got to do with politics? Well, everything, actually. It is all about looking the truth squarely in the face. Noticing what conflicts with your ideas, even if it is uncomfortable to do so.

These skills are equally in surprisingly short supply (cf. the current controversy about Rotherham).

When health professionals threaten parents

I met a woman once with an exhausting history of mental difficulties who was married to a headteacher. Her husband had charge of her medication and she told me she couldn’t help noticing that, when they had any kind of argument, he increased her dose.

I mention this now because it is one of the unwritten rules of public services that people in a pseudo-parental role can often get carried away – muddled about the boundaries between their opinion about the good of the person in their care and an over-riding moral imperative.

That is, anyway, my explanation about why the health authorities – and the Crown Prosecution Service – could have been so mistaken about their arrest warrant for the parents of Ashya King, the boy with the brain tumour.

You might imagine them intervening in the case of feckless parents who didn’t care. But to have the loving parents of a very ill child put in jail in a foreign country, forcing them to abandon their child alone in hospital there, just because of a disagreement about the best treatment – that really takes things to an extreme.

Nick Clegg was the first of the government leaders to speak out on the issue, and he has a sure touch on family issues – as he had here.

There is something about the way that ‘safeguarding’ has been interpreted in public services which is occasionally tyrannical to loving parents who see the world differently to professionals.

And often, bizarrely, the child seems to be the last person to be considered, such is the zeal among the safeguarding industry to punish. Ashya King gets abandoned in hospital. The daughter whose mother lost control, and hit her with a hairbrush – an isolated incident – was removed from her parents. The supposed victims of satanic abuse in the Orkneys (a phantasm, as it turned out) were seized from their beds by police in the middle of the night.

The real problem here is that there is something about the current regime which has strengthened the Philip Larkin tendency in childcare (“they fuck you up, your Mum and Dad”) which is deeply suspicious of everything unofficial and unbiddable, like parents.

It is this tendency which has happily decanted children into care homes, where – as we know now – the real abusers lurked.

There is a Liberal issue here, which is why the Birmingham MP John Hemming has so bravely taken up the cudgels on behalf of children wrongly removed from loving families, often – as it turned out – to meet targets for children taken into care.

This is not a fashionable point of view, but the case of Ashya King is not as isolated as it seems. If you are not articulate, or middle class, you often find yourselves regarding professionals as a threat – and the sad thing is that, sometimes, you would be right to.

Carswell and the prospect of a thoughtful Ukip

Years ago, when I was a reporter in Oxford, I remember a curmudgeonly old Labour councillor who used to put post from his constituents unopened into the bin, if they had the temerity to write to him at his home address.
We’ve come a long way from the days when the public weren’t allowed to attend council meetings, let alone contribute to them.  The fact that we have moved on since the days of Local Government Life on Mars is largely down to the revolution wrought during the 1980s and 1990s by the Lib Dems.
It was their collection of radical devolutionary ideas that provided the necessary edge to the local government revolution.  It was a revolution that was long overdue, and they were the Chosen Instrument of its coming.
I’ve been thinking about this since the news of Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip.  The truth is that I’ve always rather admired Douglas Carswell.  Not that I agreed with him on everything, by any means, but because he was a thinker and a radical (and may still be).
Westminster has shied away from any uncomfortable thinking about the design of money, but Carswell didn’t.  You would find him popping up in a range of less than popular radical causes, because that was where his thinking had taken him.  It was refreshing.
Everyone has been discussing the implications of his defection for the Conservatives, and of course there are some.  But I’ve been wondering about the implications for Ukip and for that Liberal radicalism that once turned local government inside out.
Carswell may well lose the by-election which he is bravely fighting, in which case perhaps this doesn’t apply.  Farage is a shrewd debater, but the party does seem to be short of radical thinkers. 
Quite the reverse, they seem to be populated by venal types from the John Major years, mixed in with a rather exhausting collection of very angry people who hate what they suppose people like me stand for.
Their stance on the future of the UK seems barely to have been thought through at all.  They are obsessed with the tyranny of Europe and apparently blind to the tyranny of the USA or the global trading system as a whole.  They appear to be characterised mainly by what they hate; it isn’t at all clear what they are for.
But Carswell is different.  He is another radical devolutionist.  He is clearly no Liberal, but his commitment to people power is important and far more thoughtful than Farage’s.
And here again, the debate misses what for me is the main point.  Will Ukip target Labour voters?  Quite obviously, they will.  It also seems to be obvious to most political commentators that they are hardly going to target Lib Dem voters.
Yet with people like Carswell, thinking through a powerful potential set of radical democratic ideas, they are nonetheless a major long-term threat to the Lib Dems.
Not perhaps for the votes of the disaffected – they already have those – but for the theft of the main Lib Dem purpose for existing: as a radical democratic force, capable of putting a coherent set of new ideas into practice. 
There is an antidote.  For the Lib Dems to be a good deal more angry themselves, a good deal less safe and to remember the urgent job that needs doing: to renew democracy now that it is so seriously under threat from the two ends of the spectrum - medieval terrorists and technocratic corporate power.