Following serialisation of the highlights in the Sunday papers, you can now buy Brian Paddick’s autobiography, Line of Fire.

The blurb says:

Now freed of the constraints imposed by his professional responsibilities Brian Paddick reveals the full extraordinary story of his life and career. From early days on the beat, including searing experiences such as the Brixton riots, he went on to gain successive promotions despite what many in such a traditional organisation would have perceived as the ‘handicap’ of his sexuality. And yet he himself would argue it was another characteristic that led him to clash with superiors and ultimately made him conclude his career was over: his honesty. Full of colour, candour and cracking stories, this hugely compelling book provides the missing link between police memoir, true crime and celebrity autobiography.

Buy Line of Fire through this link and the party gets a cut from Amazon.

So says an American psychiatrist in his latest book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness, sadly only available in the United States.

“Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” says Dr. Lyle Rossiter.

For a full, unbiased review, see the scary World Net Daily.

Rossiter says the kind of liberalism being displayed by the two major candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination can only be understood as a psychological disorder.

Sometimes I’m really glad British politics hasn’t quite caught up with the US just yet. (Hat-tip: Joe.My.God)

Shami Chakrabarti, voted by LDV readers as our Liberal Voice 2007, has just been on Radio 4’s “A Good Read” - a programme where a host and two guests nominate a paperback each and discuss whether they liked each others’ choices.

Chakrabarti’s choice was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a book she said had many dark parallels to the war on terror, with kangaroo courts mirroring Guantanamo, owl intercepts getting perilously close to wiretaps and a generally unpleasant High Inquisitor making life uncomfortable for all at Hogwarts.

The book found favour with guest presenter Kate Moss (whose own choice was What was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn) but wasn’t much liked by Carol Klein (who chose Graham Greene’s The Comedians)

Liberal Democrat Voice has asked both leadership candidates to list the five books that have most influenced their political views, along with an explanation for their choice. Nick Clegg’s piece appeared earlier today.

J S Mill - “On Liberty”
This has to be top of any liberal’s list. Mill’s principle that we should be free unless inflicting harm on others encapsulates our respect for different choices. But the essay reveals an inner conflict, as Mill hints that a liberal society also requires the provision of public goods like education.

George Orwell - “Animal Farm”
Animal Farm has it all - biting satire, heart-warming peaks and tragic troughs like Boxer’s death. It is probably the best single demolition of the big state and its lies in print!

John Rawls - “A Theory of Justice”
Rawls relaunched liberal thought for our age. He shows how justice must be understood as fairness - how inequalities create challenges for a liberal society.

Rachel Carson - “Silent Spring”
This was a breakthrough into popular culture for the environmental movement and had a big impact on me providing grist for my perceptions as a journalist and now as an MP. It showed how we had thoughtlessly unbalanced natural systems.

Joseph Heller - “Catch 22”
The anti-hero Yossarian struggles against the bureaucratic rules of the US military, which appear much more the real enemy than the Germans: a classic liberal text pitting the person against an over-weaning system catching everyone in its maw.

Liberal Democrat Voice has asked both leadership candidates to list the five books that have most influenced their political views, along with an explanation for their choice. Chris Huhne’s piece will appear later today.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a home filled with books. They’re a huge part of my life and shaped so much of how I think and feel. But if I’m honest, the biggest political influence in my life wasn’t Mill, Rawls or Berlin, however much I respect and admire them. I became a liberal not in a library, but over the dinner table, in the car, in the park – in conversation with my mum.

My mum spent her early childhood in a prisoner of war camp. Her stories, and those of my father’s mother, who fled the Russian revolution, formed in me an understanding even as a tiny child that freedom matters. And I hope I’ve inherited some of my mum’s unerring compassion, her ability to see potential in everyone, her despair at the class system, and her total belief in justice.

But top of my booklist are:

J. M. Coetzee: Life and Times of Michael K
Coetzee, in my view, is one of the greatest - if also most harrowing - of writers alive today. This book is an unsentimental look at how one individual shunned the violence and politics of a society in turmoil, and kept his dignity throughout.

Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
One of the most powerful books I have ever read. Though short, it casts an uncompromising light on gender inequality and the long road towards the emancipation of women. Her rewriting of the mad Mrs Rochester is one of the great radical subversions in British literature.
 
J.S.Mill: On Liberty
For me, Mill’s the cornerstone of a remarkable tradition of liberal British political thought. There are lots of seminal texts for liberals, all of which have been important to me – Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, and Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty for starters. But Mill pips them to the post.

George Orwell: Animal Farm
There’s no more powerful exhortation of the way the best intentions can be corrupted by tyranny than Animal Farm. Orwell was a powerful visionary, and I also find myself referring to 1984 in my work on the surveillance state far more than I wish I needed to.

Carl Sagan: Pale Blue Dot
I can do no better than quote Sagan, in his response to that picture of the tiny vulnerable world, as seen from outer space. “It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

So, here it is. The volume which will be written up as the liberal riposte to The Orange Book.

It’s going to tell us how we can regain the fervour and the achievement of our New Liberal forefathers – how, in the new millennium, we can protect the inheritance of the welfare state which our party and our thinkers created, and how we can best continue to strive for the fairer society all liberals want. Trouble is, Reinventing the State can’t live up to that billing.

It’s a heavy-weight contender, nearing 400 pages, and with 22 chapters from 21 contributors. It has some excellent chapters: pick it up, turn to the back and read the impressive, clear-headed conclusions by Steve Webb and Jo Holland. If you like your prose persuasively measured, be warmed by Chris Huhne’s liberal narrative, ‘The Case for Localism’. Or, if you prefer a text which is angry and splendidly strident, be converted by Paul Holmes on ‘The Limits of the Market.’ But, as a whole, Reinventing the State is both too sprawling and, paradoxically, too limited to hit the mark.

This is a problem of all books which are somewhere between political thought and political policy: they have to be a snapshot, a work of the moment with in-built obsolescence. They necessarily lack a longer perspective. This does not mean that they do not mention history – the liberal tradition, as defined in its fully-developed form of New Liberalism, effuses this book and, in particular, David Howarth’s knowledgeable chapter.

But what they find harder to do it is to appreciate their own place in that historical context. This matters because, in the case of Reinventing the State, it means what is being said is being undersold.
Read more »

A friend of a friend was on a business trip to London. He meets a beautiful lady in the hotel bar, and the next thing he knows he wakes up in a bath of ice, with his kidneys missing.

We’ve all heard a version of that story. Made to Stick investigates why people remember some ideas regardless of whether they are true.

All of us who have been involved with the Liberal Democrats know the frustration of meeting members of the public who don’t know Lib Dem policies that we’ve been banging on about for years. Or we’ve met voters confused by smear campaigns against us by other parties. For this reason everyone in the Liberal Democrats needs to read Made to Stick.

Made to Stick outlines six things that made an idea memorable. Read more »