HEARING VOICES, POLITICALLY SPEAKING<= /u>

Farel Bradbury, January 2009, revision January 2010

Uni= versity of Sussex, Life History Researc= h MA

My objective for this dissertation is to:

… elucidate the relation between the individua= l and society, the local and the national ... with ... self representation ... wi= th the potential for advocacy and empowerment ... [1]

Knowledge and understanding of the past has a profou= nd impact on contemporary social and political life. Though the use of recorded interviews is not necessarily a radical historical intervention in itself, = many oral historians aim to transform history and society through their work. Or= al testimony is frequently used alongside other sources to recover neglected or silenced accounts of past experience, and as a way of challenging dominant histories which underpin repressive attitudes and policy. Some oral histori= ans involve interviewees in the process of interpreting their lives and develop= ing strategies for personal and social change. And oral historians have been engaged in the truth and justice processes of societies that are coming to terms with histories of conflict and oppression.[2]

INTRODUCTION

The oral testimony referred to in this quotation is but rarely heard in its oral form. In life history research it is usually the product of a face to face interview, recorded and subsequently transcribed = and disseminated in its (presently) more convenient written form. The voice, in= its spoken form is, by this process, short-lived and is generally heard in its metaphorical form as speaking out of the printed word. Nonetheless, these metaphorical forms of ‘voice’ have, in the political arena among many others, an acknowledged force. Whether heard or read, life history research has a propensity toward the ‘ordinary’: to allow the voices of the forgotten or overlooked, the unrepresented in the mundane rea= ches of human history to colour in the interstices left between the great figures and events. Many voices are heard in the broadcast media, either audibly in= the utterance or metaphorically in the report. Such voices may have a profound = influence in our lives, shaping our future, taking our taxes, raising our ire or our indifference as we trace the ‘fault lines’ through the crazed eclecticism of our heterogeneous society. In looking at the ways in which ‘voice’ may be expressed – and heard – I shall also consider how its qualities contribute to its audibility and how it may be transformed by transcription and reproduction.

Finding the voice

The following story is recou= nted mainly from my memory although I have checked important dates from documents and reports.

An arm reached in through the sunroof and Sharon fed a leaflet into its clutching fingers. The arm withdrew to be replaced by another, and another. I opened = the car door and stepped into the road. Sharon handed me a bundle of leaflets which I distributed among the small but grow= ing crowd clustered around my Reliant Scimitar. It was May, 1975 and I had pull= ed up in Princes Street Edinburgh to change drivers for the f= irst leg of our long journey back south. A passer-by had recognised Sharon and the cro= wd had quickly gathered.

The night before, Sharon had been featured in Scottish news broadcasts and it had so happened that t= he only other popular television channel had been off the air at that time. The result was that her voice was heard and she was seen all over Scotland at the peak listenin= g and viewing time of the national and local news bulletins. The whole country wa= s in the throes of the campaigning for the Common Market referendum and we had p= ut the cat among the pigeons by establishing the “Don't Know Campaign= 221;. At that time strange political affiliations were being formed as politicians jumped into bed with their natural enemies in the “Yes” and = 220;No” campaigns: the media saw the DKC as a bit of light relief.

This madcap adventure entailing six weeks of hectic television appearances, radio and newspaper interviews for our “magni= ficent seven” campaigners had started, as might be expected, as something of= a joke. I was running a small group of businesses, based in the Wye valley but with an office in London, when I asked a business friend if he had read the Treaty of Rome.

“Of course not!” he exclaimed. =

Neither had I.

Running a small business keeps one on one's toes. A co= nstant eye has to be kept on developments, decisions have to be made, procedures observed and care taken with the fine print on agreements and contracts. We deal with a lot of officials, authorities and inspectors. We read things be= fore we sign them. Britain had, in fact, already signed up to the Treaty of Rome= on an occasion marked by the famous incident of a bottle of ink being thrown at the then Prime Minister Ted Heath. The UK government had changed and Tony Benn took issue with the new incumbents of office to contest the ratification of Brita= in's membership of what was then the European Economic Community. The upshot of this infighting was the calling of a referendum whereby the electorate would be allowed to say “yes”= or “no” to the deal: “Do you think that the United Kingdom should stay in= the European Community (The Common Market)?” Politicians divided on the issue, formed campaigns and trudged around the country beating their sundry drums. The referendum in the end changed nothing and I suspect, because it = was claimed to be advisory, not mandatory, that would have been the case even if the count had gone the other way. The results, taking the whole of the UK electorate, was a 43% ‘yes’ and a 21% ‘no’. I think Tony Benn owes us the ten million pound cost of the whole show.<= /p>

“Well,” I replied to my friend “I gu= ess that makes me a genuine Don't Know.”

“I'm afraid I would have to confess to that sad = state, too” he said, and added “there ought to be a campaign for us. It’s not apathy: it’s just being smart”

“Tell you what,” I said, “I'll print= up a leaflet and run it past you to see what you think.” We had a small publisher in our gr= oup: the necessary resources were to hand.

The result was the “DKC” proposal form whe= reby signatories confirmed that they had not read the Treaty of Rome and supplementary documents and that they paid taxes for such matters to be dec= ided with skill on their behalf. The form concluded with the statement that the = buck should be passed back where it belonged.

Although this was circulated, initially, privately, the press soon got hold of the story and we were inundated with requests for information and a small amount of donated money even started to flow in. Sharon and her brother John from Monmouth and Fran from Stockport joined the effort and backed by a small team in my Monmouth office with communications coordinated in our London office, we got the show on the road. Although the Don’t Knows were the natural (‘silent’) majority, our request for official funding, = as given to the “Yes” and “No” campaigns was ignored: = the “Don't Knows” were not to be given an official voice. Although we must have = been a pain in the sides of the establishment bodies, the media were delighted w= ith the news angle and Sharon, who proved to be an adept debater and sharp-witt= ed interviewee, made most of the appearances and her voice became familiar on = many radio programmes, news bulletins and phone-ins.

This was a time of great excitement, there was a buzz = in the air, people walked with a spring in their step and there was lively discuss= ion everywhere: the nation had become a switched-on to the issue; to politics. I decided that we ought to try to get some evidence as to what people felt and knew about the issue. I devised what I still claim to be the world's first = and last apathy survey - and that's an oxymoron if ever there was one. There we= re two questions:

“Can you please tell me what the letters EEC sta= nd for?” This was asked as= if the interviewer didn’t know. And:

“Do think you will vote on June 5^th (= either way)?” The ‘either way’ option was to be used if the interviewee seemed to think we wanted to know how they would vote.

This was all brief enough for the interview to be cond= ucted while a driver was waiting for lights to change or while the interviewee was boarding a bus. We only separated men and women and asked people who looked= old enough to have the franchise. Based on about a thousand street interviews i= n London, Edinburgh, Stockport, Bristol<= /st1:place>, Monmouth and the Symonds Yat holiday resort, conducted between 24^{th
and 27^th May, we concluded that 51 per cent of people in general=
did
not know the meaning of the letters EEC and that 31 per cent would be unlik=
ely
to vote. Seeing that we undervalued by 5% (on all-of-UK turnout) of the fin=
al
outcome on this last figure I would submit that the first figure must at le=
ast
be reasonably accurate or, possibly, similarly undervalued. The cross-compa=
ring
of results within these categories yielded further useful information: 75% =
of
those knowing the EEC meaning suggested they would vote while 46% of those =
who
didn’t said they would vote.}

If it had been our intention to “pass the buck &= #8211; back where it belongs” and with a thumping majority abstention to for= ce the government to make, with the benefit of such wise counsels as were at i= ts command, the decision on our behalf, then we failed. The DKC was never form= ally acknowledged to be a credible political force with a viable policy: it just appealed to a widespread honest feeling amongst those who thought about it.= The abstention 36% was significant and I think we proved that few people knew t= he first thing about the issue on which they were being asked to decide. The ‘No’ Campaigners went off to lick their wounds, the ‘Yes’ people crowed – after all, they won a two-to-one result. The ‘Don’t knows’, who came a convincing second, = were simply ignored and, as is the habit of politicians who have totally failed = to acknowledge the significance of a low turnout at the polls, were written of= f as apathetic. This silent voice is either consciously ignored or induces propo= sals for compulsory voting.

No; the most significant and surprising but wholly understandable discovery from the campaign was that people did want to have= a voice. They might not know a great deal about the issues of the day but they did want their existence in the equation to be recognised and their feelings acknowledged: to matter in thin= gs that affected their lives. Don’t we all feel that? I had found, in my business, that allowing employees to participate in the operation of the company, the shaping of its products, its successes and its dealings with others, was both good for morale and mutually profitable. Clearly, this con= cept should be extended into a political world in which power goes to the loudest voice, where mechanisms are constructed specifically to give that louder vo= ice, and where the agenda might be known only to small coteries and have only re= mote connection to the relevant issues. How could any change of the system be implemented against the perceived interests of those who both benefitted fr= om the status quo and controlled it? The DKC merely echoed the voice of many lobbyists and thinkers with a firm indication that reform was needed.

All this changed my life.

I then set about a series of experiments, exercises and full-scale trials with the publication of discussion papers, to discover how people – every individual – might participate constructively in= the governance of their communities and nations. Initially called ‘Voice = of the People’, a ‘preferendum policy voting system evolved which joins other work in what is termed ‘direct democracy’ and is the basis of this dissertation.

THE QUESTION<= /span>

How may ‘ordinary’ people – those wh= o are not actively involved in politics – be given ‘a say’ in t= he world around them and on those issues that change their life history, or in= volve them, and for which they pay in taxes? The counterpart to this question is:= “How can ordinary people be heard?” My thesis is that this is possible, economically feasible and desirable. I consider the procedures and mechanis= ms (methodology), and the safeguards, counterchecks and accountability that ma= y be needed. On the way to my conclusion, I test a number of hypotheses on the viability of systems devised to give this ‘say’, their assessme= nt, and the credibility of the ‘voice’ so produced, the acceptability of reforms (by whom) and their cost.

AN INTEGRATED REVIEW OF REFERENCES

In the following sections I review my principal refere= nces and outline particular detail of those elements and aspects from which my argument is backgrounded or from which key evidence is derived or confirmed= . I also use these references to test some of the hypotheses leading to the conclusion of my argument.

Part 1: politics

The voice of Lord B= lake:

My Lords, there are a good many elements in the decl= ine which I, for one, see in the condition of the nation. … But I think t= hat the increasing defectiveness of the British parliamentary system, once one = of our most glorious ideological exports, is contributing in some degree to our poor economic performance.... the whole field of economic planning has been subject to … changes - likewise pensions, labour relations, education= and land. As for the history of steel nationalisation, it is too well known. The mere mention of this list shows how great an area of our national life is n= ow regulated by governmental action.... in general they are the result of party policies and programmes which are much more extreme than the vast majority = of the electorate desire.... our electoral system produces single-party governments based on a minority of voters, alternating in power because of = very small shifts in opinion....[3]

I had established my small business in London in 1962, initially consulting in control systems design and branching into = the Wye Valley at Monmouth for the manufacturing and marketing of specialised control components. The advanced communications needed for international operations= in a small but sophisticated market enabled me to open a London business services agency sharing= these facilities. Our location was most desirable and accessible (before yellow lines, parking meters and hideous traffic congestion) at numbers 5 - 9 Bead= on Road, just off Hammersmith Broadway and out of my office window I could see, beyond the Metropolitan railway terminal, the back wall of Joe Loss’s famous Palais de Dance.

At that time I had not heard of the respected historia= n, Lord Blake, but I found myself enmeshed in the imposed political climate in which business had to operate and was well aware that a vast, gooey, inflex= ible net of officialise was doing its best to strangle innovation and enterprise= . In How to Fire the Taxman (1977), I wrote:

A visitor from another planet discovering our tax convulsions would find it difficult to believe that they were self-imposed = and could be forgiven for reporting our sad state as due either to universal and certifiable madness or that we were weighed down with obligations imposed u= pon us by enemies. (p iv)

The nature of my activities brought me into contact wi= th business people from all over the place. I remember a senior European businessman telling me that he estimated that 80% of all business decision = was tax-oriented. All this has a huge effect on the lives of ordinary people fr= om the migration to tax havens, inducing the ‘brain drain’ and oth= er distortions of creativity. There were destructive official interventions li= ke the removal of roofs, rendering derelict any vacated industrial premises wh= ere the owners could not meet property tax liabilities, to the driving out of h= is occupation of a talented but illiterate young farrier [4] as Value Added Tax made its intrusive demands. We also lost the Whitchurch vil= lage furniture and antiques shop to this latter impost.[5]

It is necessary, at the risk of being polemical, to co= nfront this murky world of politics and to consider how this bears upon our life histories in general and mine in particular. It must be borne in mind that politicians shape our lives for good or ill in many direct and indirect ways and we pay for our politics – as I write this to the tune of half a trillion sterling pounds per year. Yet we live in a time when child poverty= and homelessness are prevalent and the gap between rich and poor yawns wide. Im= position, legislation, regulation, war declaration and social and construction develo= pments are all performed over our heads, in our name and under the catchword ̶= 0;democracy”. Interested or not, we cannot escap= e and, while there are benefits (under pressure) there is visible misery and injus= tice in a system of questionable competence.

As Lord Blake pointed out, it was clear that only a sm= all shift in the political climate induced radical changes – then referre= d to as “the yo-yo effect”. Indeed, for much of the 20^th Century, the margin of difference between the two largest political parties took place within a 4% swing either side by the active elements within the total electorate. The percentage average vote for each opposed candidate of= the winning party, whether Conservative or Labour, between 1945 and 1970 was: 5= 0.4, 46.7, 48.6, 50.2, 49.6, 43.4, 48.7, 46.5.[6] Clearly, the people are more stable than their oscillating governments. Such statistical, ‘quantitive’ data can only take a broad view but t= hose interested in qualitative analysis will note that important results are dependent upon small elements: a particular characteristic of life history research. Lord Blake’s speech (above) to the House of Lords was made shortly after the publication of a report which addressed this issue.

The Report of the Hansard Society Commission on Electoral Reform

In 54 pages, a committee cha= ired by Lord Blake and constituted of people eminent in political, academic, commer= cial and public affairs, reviewed the constitutional history of British governme= nt and set out options for reforms in the electoral system aimed at the correc= tion of the observed anomalies. As is to be expected, this work defines the difficulties, obstacles and conflicts of interest to be encountered in any reform: aspects of the problem that have to be taken into account, and set = out some objectives. These objectives are, broadly:

1 = Single-party government but with limited pow= er if supported by “considerably less than 50% of votes cast”.

2 = Small parties excluded by a low vote unless = of nation-wide identity

3 = Major parties to have representation in area= s of minority support

4 = Close relationship of MPs with their constituents

5 = A simple system with minimal changes

6 = The role of the individual voter should be enhanced

It will be noted that this approach is largely oriented towards the political parties, which come first, and are seen as representatives of the people who come last in this list. From where I was, toiling among the grass roots, I saw things from the other end and had concluded that the key to the problem lay with the British political party system, and, quite specifically, the way they imposed their ideas, their policies, upon us.

The Changing British Party System, 1945 – 1979 (S.E. Finer)

And

British General Election Manifestos 1900-1974 (F.W.S. Craig)

Lord Blake, in his State of the Nation speech had quot= ed Professor Finer’s take on the British governing system as:

A stand-up fight between two adversaries for the fav= our of the lookers-on... with two rival teams of politicians in open contention wh= ich goes on before an election, during an election, and - above all - continues after the election in the form of a continuous polemic across the floor of = the Commons where a powerless Opposition confronts an all-powerful government in the hope of winning for itself a more favourable verdict at the next general election.

Finer’s book is described by its reviewers as &#= 8220;sharply critical”. However, the criticism is backed by some cogent and illuminating evidence, drawing on Craig (q.v.). At the heart of Professor Finer’s reasoning is the scope of the power claimed by elected partie= s in government and the increasing polarisation between them in an essentially adversarial system. He shows how the claimed authority is increasingly base= d on “manifesto” commitments espoused by a party “… which indicates to the candidates what they must not promise, and which the party expects to be judged on at the next electi= on.” [7] He goes on to demonstrate how, over time, the manifestos have become “lo= nger, more specific, and … unrepresentative”. By way of measuring this trend, Finer quantifies the number of manifesto commitments:[8]

Election &= nbsp; &nbs= p; 1900 1924 1974 1979

Number of = Conserv= ative 3 17 87 74

manifesto policies &= nbsp; &nbs= p; Labour &= nbsp; 12 = 72 133

Stating that “the commitments made in the manife= stoes are unrepresentative of many party identifiers and even more unrepresentati= ve of the voters at large”, Finer cites Problem of Party Government[9] and other sources, with tables,= in which survey data compares voters’ support or opposition to some of t= he main parties’ policies. The commitment to party government, which considers itself bound by its complex manifesto on which the voter has a sa= y on an ‘all-or-nothing’ basis, appears at the least arbitrary and at worst disastrous. It is difficult to obtain exact figures of the paid-up membership of political parties but I have seen reasonable estimates that p= lace the total – all added together – at less than 3% of the elector= ate although this figure does exclude the trades union membership of those unio= ns affiliated to the Labour (Co‑operative) party. Very few party members contribute to or decide on the inclusion or exclusion of policies set out in the manifesto on which a ‘mandate’ may subsequently be claimed = and forced through to legislation. Finer, in delineating alternative ‘hypotheses’ for interpreting the British governing system does= not mince words:

There is a fourth line of criticism [hypothesis][10], not yet espoused by any significant body of opinion, and put forward here f= or the first time. This stresses the system's poor performance of the representative function, and sees the parties as self-appointed busybodies = who have brazenly arrogated to themselves the right to say what shall all shall= not be a political issue, and in consequence have forced unwelcome measures on a muzzled and sullen public. This is the elitist hypothesis. The remedy it proposes is not so much the referendum - which is one of the devices canvas= sed by, for example, proponents of the dictatorship hypothesis - but the popular initiative.[11]

The procedure I have described as a preferendum and de= tail below conforms closely to Professor Finer’s remedy. The essence of &#= 8220;initiative” is all pervasive: an initiative is taken by those standing as candidates and proposing policies and an initiative is taken by voters if they choose to comment on any of the policies proposed. There is little experience of the referendum procedure in the United Kingdom but the indication is that a question is devised by the government as a whole and submitted to an entire electorate on a yes/no basis. There is the tacit assumption that that the results would be regarded as legally binding, i.e. as mandatory, but the constitutional workings of Parliament, which regards its freedom to act at = need in any way its desires, suggest that this would not be the case. The result would have to be so overwhelming that each elected Member of Parliament wou= ld fear for the loss of their seat if they opposed such a result. When debating the issue of referendums politicians have been inclined to resist such a dilution of their ultimate authority. This has been an important considerat= ion in the design of the preferendum in that the policy proposals have to come = from the politicians themselves. Furthermore local interests are served by ensur= ing that the proposals are attributed to a candidate and, in theory, provide sc= ope for that candidate to oppose, omit or modify policies laid down by a Central Office of his or her party.

Manifesto of Man= ifestos, 1974 -2001

Working professionally in the field of systems analysi= s, and being personally impacted by the political world around me, I started to analyse some of the factors which determined our system of government. I wo= rked independently and it was only some years later, when my ideas had started to formalise and be published that I came across the works of Blake and Finer = and others concerning governance. Whilst I could see the political parties as a= key element in the problem, it was also clear that they fulfilled an essential = role in the system:

The political parties created democracy and … = modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties.[12]

I had concluded that the origin of misrepresentation w= as to be found in the manifesto and the policies presented in these esoteric, unreadable and largely unread documents. I started analysing manifestos and= , in order to ensure consistent and non-partisan interpretation, I devised a set= of rules which I published appended to the policy lists. These appeared in a series of publications under the title: Manifesto of Manifestos. From these I can extend Finer’s table of “Nu= mber of Manifesto policies”:[13]

Numbe= r of policies proposed or implied in political party manifestos

Election = 1974* 1979 1983&nbs= p; 1987 n/a 1997 2001

Conservative 60 85 115 <= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> 197 = 218 96

Labour = 125 148 435 172 = 242 264

Liberal (Alnce/S/LDP) 31 80 179<= span style=3D'mso-tab-count:1'> 311 = 233 399

National Front &= nbsp; 159

Green Party = &nb= sp; = 326

Total counted &= nbsp; 1073 1236 1388 &= nbsp; 1304 1594

*These policy counts taken from= my article “Democratic accountability and the votes for nuclear energy&#= 8221; in Science and Public Policy, O= ctober, 1980, pp 346 -355.

The numbers in 1974 and 1979 differ slightly from Finer’s and Craig’s figures. A ‘policy’ is not alwa= ys easy to identify. In my ‘rules’ I defined a policy as an instru= ment entailing (a) the expenditure of taxpayers’ money and/or (b) imposing social change. I omitted statements of intention, review or aspiration. I a= lso omitted the establishment of new departments or organisations where these w= ere linked to specific policy proposals. For example, 53 public bodies to administer the offered policies were proposed in Labour’s 1983 manife= sto – described by commentators at the time as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. I have also indicated in the table the parties proposing the largest number of policies submitted in these elections. These suggest they want to do the most to or for us but are more likely vote-catc= hing nets. It is, of course, likely that the increasing complexity of the manife= stos mirrors an increasingly eclectic society into which the former simple broad-based regulation of stable, clearly defined and occupationally limited communities is unable to fit. This, however, further endorses the point that the electoral system in its old 19th century form was not only becoming more inappropriate as the 20th century unfolded, but that power, in the hands of= the powerful – those who control the system of their own appointment R= 11; behaved gravitationally. Government, constituted of generalists (ministers = swap offices largely regardless of their qualifications), notionally advised by specialists, attracts to its mass more mass as it becomes more massive.

It is most important to remember that the elector̵= 7;s one vote not only ‘approves’ the whole of a selected party̵= 7;s manifesto policy list but is deemed, by that party, to ‘reject’= all the proposals of all other candidates. It is not difficult to find groups of polices selected from the different opposing manifestos which would, taken together, appeal to many voters. There is no ‘proportional representation’ of the parties by even the most elaborate system of voting for candidates which can solve this policy dilemma: that is, while t= he number of policies proposed by each candidate exceeds one. This dilemma is = not eased by the ambivalence on the question of ‘the mandate’ displ= ayed by politicians who, themselves, benefit from any ‘elasticity’ in the system which empowers their ‘interpretations’. I quote from= my editorial in two editions of Manife= sto of Manifestos.

On 16th February 1983 the Right Honourable Eric Heff= er, MP [a former Minister of State at the Department of Industry] stipulated in a radio interview that votes for Labour Party candidates would be construed as votes to leave the EEC. If a Labour government was elected there would be no popular referendum before withdrawal. I wrote asking how he would distingui= sh between the anti-EEC votes and those expressing rejection of cruise missiles [another Labour manifesto policy]. Is it possible for anyone to vote against the basing of cruise in UK whilst preferring us to remain in the EEC? To date there has... been no rep= ly from Mr Heffer. [14]

(Labour did win the election and there was a referendum.) And

The Right Honourable Sir Geoffrey F. Rippon, Q. C., = M.P. Was asked in a radio interview about “rate-capping” on 28th Mar= ch, 1984 by Robin (now Sir Robin) Day:

But why are = you so violently opposed to the bill because you fought on the last election manif= esto for the Tory party which said, and I quote: ‘We shall legislate to cu= rb excessive and irresponsible rate increases by high-spending councils...R= 17;.

Sir Geoffrey's reply:

“Well = of course we're not bound by the doctrine of the mandate, and the fact that something is slipped into the manifesto at the last minute doesn't mean that you've got to accept every line of it...”...

I wrote Sir Geoffrey on 18th May that year posing the question: Would you please tell me = how the electorate is to know at the time of voting which items in the manifesto will be rejected by the candidate subsequent to that candidate being successfully elected?... Sir Geoffrey replied on 11th July, 1984 giving= the answer: By asking the candidate= .

... his reply, if believed, can only mean that the p= arty manifesto is valid as a “promise” only if every line has been verified, not by the elector who is deemed to vote for it, but by each candidate who is thought to have proposed it to his or her own electorate in the first place. [15]

In the light of evidence of this nature I felt that I = had, intellectually, a strong case for the much-needed reform of our electoral system through the policies rather than by shuffling the politicians around as by proportional representation (PR). In a string of publications I developed and set out proposals for improving democratic representation based initially on ‘policy voting’ and, latterly, on the ‘preferendum’= . To a certain extent this was breaking new ground and, perhaps unsurprisingly, received little support from any political body. Politicians, like most peo= ple in the professions or vocations, do not welcome incursions into their field= of expertise. Therefore, while procedures of social consensus, group decision = and employee participation are well documented, the extrapolation of these procedures into the political forum was novel and outside the range of work= s on voting systems. These other systems aimed at reform through the election of representatives (of political parties) as distinct from allowing a public v= oice on the issues. The ‘leadership tradition’ is a strong one and i= t is only in our developing history that the patronage of ‘we know what is best for you’, ‘these things are too complicated for you to understand’ and the culture of secrecy are becoming unacceptable to an increasingly enlightened and articulate population. I was also, in this wor= k, departing from the more acceptable quantitative (positivist) opinion survey= s of conventional pollsters.

=

Science and Public Policy, October 1980 =

In a 10-page article under the title “Democratic accountability and the votes for nuclear energy” I argued that, in effect, the more policies that were included in a manifesto, the more dilute the ‘mandate’ for each policy must be. I extended this argument across the 1974 and 1979 manifestos concentrating on the issue of nuclear energy and setting this against the count of the votes cast for each party: i.e. for each manifesto. I argued that, flimsy as it may seem, this was the= only information of ballot box qua= lity on which public wishes could be known from the election. On this issue the manifestos made no difference: Conservative won, so all the other proposals were dismissed, and the Conservative proposals (‘coordinated energy policies’ and ‘public participation in formulation of energy policies’), in the end, were ‘forgotten’.

I was receiving huge encouragement for these ideas as reflected in the SPP article although very little from political activists. Indeed, as I was researching the policy lists for the Brecon and Radnor experiment (below) the Liberal-SDP Alliance election agent threatened legal action if we listed their policies and circulated the publication. Conserva= tive said: “Yes” and did nothing. The Labour agent, exceptionally and graciously, sat down in his busy campaign office and wrote out a list of 34 ‘one-liner’ policies (which did particularly well in the subseq= uent policy ‘vote’). The most important aspect of the SPP article was that I was able to formalize the policy voting system by defining its decis= ion points.

A series of questions encompasses these key elements i= n a system to ‘give voice’ to an entire population as might be expressed by the electorate who may, among their number, responsibly speak = also for those under-age and others who are unenfranchised.

= 1.&n= bsp;     Where do the policies come from? That is:

= 1.1.=    How is the need discovered?

= 1.2.=    What is the intention?

= 1.3.=    Who are the beneficiaries?

= 2.&n= bsp;     Who decides if they are:

= 2.1.=    Workable?

= 2.2.=    Affordable?

= 2.3.=    Desirable?

= 2.4.=    Equitable?

= 3.&n= bsp;     Who is accountable for their:

= 3.1.=    Interpretation and introduction?

= 3.2.=    Administration?

= 3.3.=    Development or curtailment?

= 4.&n= bsp;     What qualification is needed in the

= 4.1.=    Proposers?

= 4.2.=    Decision makers?

= 4.3.=    The individual: the voter?

= 5.&n= bsp;     What changes are introduced by the policy in

= 5.1.=    Procedures?

= 5.2.=    Establishments?

= 5.3.=    Organisations?

= 6.&n= bsp;     Are these changes

= 6.1.=    feasible?

= 6.2.=    desirable?

= 6.3.=    affordable?

= 7.&n= bsp;     Is anyone able to do anything about it?

= 8.&n= bsp;     Can we trust anyone to do anything about it?

= 9.&n= bsp;     Would reform mess up a tolerably acceptable system?=

= 10.&= nbsp; It is better to leave things as they are?

Of such complexity is the nature of reform. That refor= m is needed is fairly widely agreed: witness the report of the Hansard Society Commission on Electoral Reform. The questions give strong indication that t= he whole system is dependent upon numerous establishment bodies which (we hope) input the necessary specialist skills and flash the appropriate warning signals, and key decision-makers who weigh the options wisely. It is not surprising that the voice of the ordinary individual is blanketed out: repressed into the ‘silent majority’. However, question (10) is looking increasingly fragile as public body after public body make disastro= us mistakes and huddles into ‘learning mode’.

Setting these questions against the Hansard Commission objectives we understand the sense of objective (5) for simplicity with min= imal changes while wondering how simplicity may be achieved without drastic chan= ges to an inordinately complex establishment. However, objective (1), by retain= ing ‘single-party government’, subject to certain constraints, does= suggest development rather than revolution. We can, therefore, suggest that policies come from the political parties whose contact with ordinary people, and the= ir ‘ear to the ground’ should enable them to detect the needs and, more-or-less deal with questions (1) through (2). The first real obstacle is encountered as ‘dogma’ rears its ugly head throwing up the relevance of questions (3) and (8). A party wins its sectarian support with declared objectives like ‘soak the rich’, ‘nationalise the commanding heights of the economy’, ‘enforce vegetarianism̵= 7;, ‘laissez-faire in the City’, ‘market in health care’, ‘evict immigrants&#= 8217;, ‘leave Europe’ and so forth. Thus, if there is one thing that t= ruly identifies a party and its intentions it is in the policies it proposes. The policies are the distinguishing featu= res of both extremism and moderation. It is through the policies that democratic control of power may be implemented. By ‘voting’ on the policies, as distinct from but as = well as voting for the politicians proposing them, we satisfy objectives (2) and= (3) because we can vote for a policy without voting for its proposer hence givi= ng a measure of support to small and large minority parties. Objective (4) is satisfied by leaving unchanged the single-member constituency as at present where the serving MP is responsible to all his constituents. The single-mem= ber constituency meets objective (5) which would be blown out of the water by t= he ‘multi-member’ constituency of some reform proposals. The role = of the individual voter is very considerably enhanced with a several ‘sa= y’ on policies, so meeting objective (6).

We still have a number of unanswered questions though.= As I have already indicated it is not the easiest thing to define or set out a policy proposal in a “one line” statement for presentation in a list to a voter. However question 3.1 is answered if the policy proposal is identified with a specific candidate, even if the candidate's political par= ty has devised the policy. The subsequent process of parliamentary debate, wat= ched by the press, will then determine meanings and feasibility while, during the election process, the voter would have access to the candidate, the candida= te's agent or the candidate’s election address if clarification was needed. The political party will, by its own procedures, which are ultimately accou= ntable at the ballot box and open to public scrutiny through the working of the pr= ess, seek to put forward the most suitable candidates so answering question 4.1.= The press is active throughout. Questions 3.2 and 3.3 and 4.2 and 5 should be answered if this improved accountability and transparency wins a competent administration and where the executive is held to account by a parliament w= ell informed on the acceptability or otherwise of the issues it debates. This leaves the vital question 4.3. The voter cannot be assumed to be an expert = on the countless issues presented at the time of elections. A “yes/no= 221; format is simply not feasible. The option to approve a policy has to be just that: to approve it or leave it. At a stroke this removes the fertile ̶= 0;don't know” ground over which politicians wrangle endlessly. Furthermore, by this procedure, no policy is specifically rejected, so leaving Parliament f= ree to decide at need. The only real qualifications needed by the voter are the entitlement to vote and an interest in the issues before them: expert knowl= edge is a bonus.

It will be seen that policy voting requires hardly any changes to our existing “first-past-the-post” electoral system = so satisfying not only the Blake criteria but answering question 9: principall= y, the provision of suitable racks in polling stations for the return of policy ‘schedules’ and some football-pools-type counting machinery. As= to question 8, we have reached a stage in our political life where it is serio= usly questionable whether the entire might of government could be trusted to tel= l us when it was safe to cross the road or, as a colleague of mine put it many y= ears ago, to run a rice pudding. Now that politicians feel shamed by their expen= ses scandal, and pay even more lip service to the need to listen to their const= ituents, reform may be in the air. It is difficult to see how any party coming out w= ith a proposal to let people have more ‘say’ could seriously be opposed: that might deal with question 7. They may go further, however, and carve up our Parliament between their own parties, undoubted minority cliqu= es, by some form of (PR). If that still left us voiceless on the fruits of their dogma the answer to question 10 should be to leave things as they are becau= se the plethora of substantially unapproved polices among the ‘accommodations’ of multi-party minority government is unthinka= ble. It is, however, theoretically possible to combine a policy voting procedure like the preferendum with the PR election of candidates. Once the policies = have been separated out, the identity of the proposing parties seems less import= ant: why not vote simply for the best candidate? The policy vote is= separate and should induce reforms firstly to simplify the inordinately complex arra= y of policy proposals at present offered “top down” and to moderate = the more extreme dogma of virulent minorities. If a policy should be widely approved but was proposed by someone who failed to get elected (as by David Sutch in the Brecon experiment, below) then the successful candidate may ar= gue: “But you elected me and I didn’t propose that!” Perhaps, = as an MP, some ‘reflection’ will take place but, at the very least, the member will be better informed about his constituents’ wishes.

Not the least of the advantages claimed for the system is that it infor= ms the electorate in a succinct and simple manner of what the politicians would like to do to and for us if we elect them. Thus a dialogue is created betwe= en electors and the elected: a voice is given to electors and candidates that = they don't have now. In the Brecon experiment it was calculated that, by giving = the electorate the option to approve any or all of 253 policies, their voting power, to achieve any required objective, was increased by a staggering fac= tor of many millions. This figure, however, is more a measure of our impotence under the present system.

The Brecon Mandate

In this publication I reported on the first full-scale experiment in policy voting – strictly, described as a policy survey because we had no means of passing any approved polices through to enactmen= t. This took place at the parliamentary by-election for Brecon and Radnor of 4= ^th July 1985. As publishers, my firm had sponsored the printing, household dis= tribution and return postage of over 25,000 ‘tabloid’ sized sheets, with = the set of 253 policies proposed by six candidates printed on each side. The invitation was ‘tick any you like’ (otherwise ignore it). That = gave an ‘envelope’ of returns total= ling over 13 million possible approvals. In the event, my team processed 159,137 approvals: just over 1.2%: people seemed to like it; some sent money.

I didn’t know it at the time, but my analyses of= this rate of return, regarded as pitifully small by conventional quantitive (positivist) methods, developed a qualitative procedure which transpired as remarkably accurate. By setting individual policy voting preferences against the localized background of ret= urns, I was able to demonstrate the power of the ‘small voices’ relatively. Subsequent events showed this to be far more accurate than conventional ‘positivist’ polling. The pollsters clocked up an appalling 17% eve-of-poll error by predicting a Labour victory: Liberal Alliance won. I proved that this was quite clearly a naturally ‘Old T= ory’ (pre ‘privatization’ and ‘market in health’ policie= s) constituency and Conservative narrowly won at the following general electio= n. By then the Conservatives were becoming wedded to ‘monetarist’ policies and Liberals subsequently took the seat and have held it ever sinc= e.

Amongst the many forms of analyses performed on these returns - assessing groups of policies in health, transport, agriculture et= c - I was able to consider them in relation to their locality. The constituency= is, or was, I believe, the second largest in the United Kingdom by geographical area. The postal returns therefore carried the franking marks from no less = than 10 distinct areas and, although this was not an infallible proof of where t= he respondent lived it must certainly have had some connection with where they lived, worked or where friends or relatives who posted the returns for them lived, worked, shopped or visited. These are, of course, qualitative considerations and would be considered far too tenuous to be taken into acc= ount in a positivist survey: such realisations - at least expressed in this mann= er - are but one of the fruits of my life history research studies at Sussex. Be that as it may, amongst hundreds of permutations and combinations of res= ult I analysed from these returns, I was surprised to note an apparently disproportionate support for public transportation right in the middle of t= he constituency. This bore no relationship to any of the returns from anywhere else and the actual number of returns from that area was very small indeed.= I made inquiries and discovered that a small privately-run railway, the Severn Valley Railway, had transformed the economy in that valley. A similar level= of support was clearly expressed in the region of St David's Hospital whose fu= ture had come into question as a result of assorted politicking (BM p 78).

However, perhaps, in the context of this dissertation,= a most interesting set of analyses considered the overall “bias” = of each returned form. A degree of partisanship could be detected from the selection of policies “ticked” by the respondent. A few forms carried ticks for all the policies of only one of the six parties' policies listed from which it would be safe to assume that the respondent was a keen supporter of that party and had no time for any ideas emanating from the others. As it happens, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party policies whe= re positioned on the form immediately under the Conservative Party policies an= d, apart from the heading identifying the origin, the “one-liners”= had similar visual impact. On one or two of the returns we noticed that the col= umn of continuous bold ticks against every Conservative policy carried on down through all the Official Monster Raving Loony policies. Although David Sutch did get one of his policies into the top 10 and another into the top 40 on straight count, it seems fairly clear that these are examples of bigotry on partisan lines with, obviously, no attempt to actually read the policy proposals. The number of those respondents approving the policies of only o= ne party amounted to around 13%. Most of the forms showed intelligent selection across the party lines with an average of about one third of policies appro= ved. Some policies were proposed in the same terms by more than one party and the approvals count for each were almost identical. This demonstrates a remarka= ble degree of discrimination particularly because of the very small print that = had to be used to compress all 253 policies on to each side of the form.

I make no apology for drawing on my own pioneering wor= k in this field but have listed only a few of my many publications on this subje= ct which joined a vast array of proposals for electoral reform, expositions of other established voting systems across the world, and sophisticated analys= es of governing systems by many political pundits.

The Horne Experiment

An extract from a report on an experiment in ‘po= licy voting’ for the purpose of conflict resolution is appended to The Brecon Mandate. The experiment= was conducted at a weekend workshop “Politics in the New Age” held = at Horne Farm, Crowborough, Sussex, 21-22 July 1984. At t= hat time the system was identified as ‘V2P’: voting for policies as well as for politicians (V1P was a plebiscite system and V3P included a vote for a party selection for the second chamber). The workshop was attended by= an eclectic gathering of around 20 men and women: Greenham Common women, communist/Marxist, sundry protest groups, right wing, nationalist and other ‘fringe’ activists and free thinkers. In general, emphatic views were strongly held and expressed. Part of my conclusion to this report:

The pattern of voting [*]... shows that while both p= arties have a few keen supporters prepared to approve most of the policies (up to = 90% of Conservative proposals and up to 75% of Labour proposals), these are democratically insignificant [approximately 6%]. The greatest weight of pol= icy support tends to be clustered about the average return for each policy [22%= for Labour policies, 47% for Conservative policies].

[* everybody present in the workshop participated in= the experiment and therefore the voting return was 100% i.e. all voting slips w= ere returned.]

It is the clear pacification of vehemently expressed v= iews as the participants claimed a measured voice that convinces me that this procedure would be effective in conflict resolution.

http://www.hydatum.com/page26.html (Manifesto of Manifestos)

This website publishes the results of t= he ‘preferendums’ run at the 5 May 2005 UK general election, with an interim report. This exercise in giving the people a voice by having a say = on the individual policies as proposed by their election candidates, built on = the experiences of Brecon and Radnor. There were differences. It was conducted = on a massive scale with over half a million policy survey (voting) forms distrib= uted to every household in fifteen constituencies selected from Northern Ireland, Wales and London. The policies listed were not extracted from the manifestos but were taken from those reported in the media, principally the BBC,[16] and are therefore the more clearly stated, predominant policies of the principal parties.

The most important difference from Brecon was to ask respondents to meet the cost of return postage: they would have to buy their own postage stamp. The cost, however, was not the primary consideration beh= ind this decision. If half a million forms where returned and postage charged to the sponsor, a very considerable sum of money would be involved. However the Brecon experience indicated a low rate of return because of the lack of political credibility behind the exercise. Then, it was clear that the surv= ey was being conducted independently by a publishing house with a view to publication of the results and that political implementation was not intend= ed. In 2005 the exercise was sponsored by the “Make Politicians History&#= 8221; party under the patronage of “Rainbow” George Weiss and thereby entered the fringe of the political arena. The advantage of this arrangement was that, with candidates standing in these constituencies, huge costs were saved by using the free mailing of their ‘election addresses’. George had met all the printing costs and had not demurred at the prospect = of the relatively modest return postage costs that might realistically be expe= cted but, by this time, I had realised that the system depended on a certain = 220;resistance” to participation. This is not the kind of survey where someone is stopped in the street and their opinion solicited.[17] I reasoned that that this resistance would be provided, albeit to a modest extent, by requiring respondents to stump up 24p for their political say. <= /p>
Unlike the traditional positivist survey, the “p= referendum” benefited from the qualitative characteristic of a small return of individu= ally well considered preferences. In the political arena it is the loudest voice that is heard provided it is uttered with conviction. Simply going for the largest possible number of returns would merely create “noise” = in the system – especially if responses are solicited. The procedure I u= tilised is known as ‘contract in’. That is, at every stage the participation is voluntary: no coercion; no hints; no contrived context, location or timing. “If you want to have your say, here’s your chance. If you’re not fussed, drop the thing in the bin.” This conforms to the nature of politics: you choose to vote, you choose who you = vote for, or you let others make the decisions. The preferendum, with its long l= ists of policies, has some natural deterrence but most importantly it allows the= several consideration of policies = which is impossible in the process of choosing a representative.

An example of the information obtained from the 2005 operation takes the issue of identity cards. The Labour Party, subsequently successfully elected to government, proposed the introduction of identity c= ards in their manifesto. This proposal was opposed by other political parties an= d in the “policy voting” returns for Cardiff in the 2005 general election th= is issue was put before the electorate by four political parties. Shortly after the election I wrote the leader = of the House of Commons suggesting, in effect, that his claim to have a mandate for the Labour Party manifesto policies was questionable. I append the full tex= t of this letter but copy the relevant section here:

I refer now to the results of the “preferendum= ” run in a number of constituencies during the May 5^th election. I take the example of “ID cards.” The Labour government proposed,= in the manifesto you say it intends to implement, to introduce them. This prop= osal won the approval of 29% – more, you will note, than the government itself. However, three parties (in the Cardiff preferendums) proposed in their manifestos “no ID cards”: LibDe= ms, Plaid Cymru and UKIP, and won approvals of, respectively, 36%, 38%, and 36%= of the same voters [cohort: some will have ‘ticked’ the same policy appearing in the different candidate lists]. Given that LibDem gained Cardiff Central and that the votes there for these three parties amounted to over 80% compared with the Labour vote, it seems clear that, to= put it modestly, not all Labour manifesto policies are favoured by that elector= ate. Of course, government may, because we have no check on it if it “owns= ” the House of Commons, decide to rule on this “lesser of evils basis&#= 8221; vote and to ignore the clear will of the people. I would hope, however, that any true parliamentarian would seek to test any government attempting to pu= sh this, or any other policy, through the House, just “because it was in= the manifesto.”

Some politicians and parties are better than others at replying to such correspondence from a non-constituent. In this respect I m= ust pay tribute to the somewhat notorious Tony Benn who seemed always to be abl= e to find time to reply in more detailed terms than: “What you have to say= has been noted with interest,” and has, in this way contributed to the formulation of the policy voting concept (e.g. on the issue of the nationalisation of the shipbuilding and aircraft industries issue). However, Geoff Hoon did not reply. It is difficult to see what he could say. Extraordinary as it may sound, I had, little as it was, more information of ‘ballot box’ quality about his proposals, and those of his opposition, than he did. Subsequent developments have served to confirm tha= t in the ‘business’ of government the voice of the people is largely immaterial and, at our expense, this issue has struggled, mutilated, tardily and, four years later, inconclusively through the Westminster Act factory.<= /p>

A Unified Theory= of Voting (Merrill)

This is a learned attempt to find a model on which to predict the “interdependence between the decisions made by parties and those made by voters.” [18] It is included as part of my backgrounding of the whole question of governa= nce, representation and hearing the voice of the people. The authors: “= 230;envision a voter as preferring a candidate who proposes to move policy in the direct= ion desired by the voter.” [19] However, the quest for a (unified) model also considers the reverse: i.e. h= ow the party is influenced by the voter:

“… distinguish between the Downsian mode= l in which ‘parties chose policy in order to win elections’ and a partisan model in which ‘the parties want to be elected in order to chose policies.’ … optim= al party strategies lie intermediate between those implied by pure vote seeking and pure policy seeking.[20]

This work obviously sees a cohesive link between party organisations and the outside electorate and also that policy is implemente= d by choice of candidate rather than, as I see a viable and simpler alternative,= by allowing the voter a direct say on policies severally. The authors pose an interesting, if complex definition of ‘democratic politics’ whi= ch, the world being as it is, one would do well to observe:

… democratic politics is about the interactive= links between party platforms, government policy performance, voter preferences a= nd voter choices. [21]

AN INTEGRATED REVIEW OF REFERENCES

Part 2: life history research and method

Listening to His= tory (Lummis)

Giving a voice to the voiceless has been a strong im= pulse in the development of oral history. … although elite groups are still researched, the study of non-elites is now central to oral history througho= ut the world.[22]

Thus I extend my argument to include an electorate whi= ch, if not entirely voiceless, is constructively inarticulate when it comes to the ballot box. An electorate is essentially ‘non-elite’ and yet th= is ‘base of the pyramid’ contains the wisdom, the life experience = and day-to-day knowledge, instinctive or cultured, which powers but does not control the life and the economy of a nation. Adam Smith in = The Wealth of Nations describes an economy as made up of the myriad transactions of countless individuals in the market place. Here are to be f= ound the individuals who make the economy and those who ‘slip through the nets’ and who feel the hurt and see the anomalies entrained in unaccountable ‘macro’ legislation and regulation which attempts ‘blanket’ control, arms length, from the top.

Lummis in Listening to History is focused on th= e oral interview, that is, the face-to-face exchanges between interviewer and interviewee. My hypothesis is to suggest that to establish a credible ̶= 0;voice of people” the interview takes the form of a standard list of propositions and that the ‘virtual’ interviewer or interviewers= is or are the posers of those propositions. This methodology removes the direct human interface:

Thus there is a minimum danger of miscommunication w= hen someone is discoursing fluently and a maximum danger when they are borrowing from the vocabulary of their interviewer. [23]

while retaining the named and known identity of the ‘interviewer’, and serves to give a level of consistency needed= for aggregation (see below). This hypothetical concept moves me towards my thes= is by allowing that this is an equivalent, if unspoken, response to an interviewer’s question: an utterance of the ‘metaphorical voice’. This is set up as an entirely voluntary approval or non-appro= val (without the option to disapprove) by an individual faced with an option freely to look at and respond to, or dis= card the virtual (but accessible) interviewers’ formal propositions. Altho= ugh limited by not allowing (much) flexibility in responses and virtually no adaptation of the interview ‘question’ (as arises face-to-face), this method allows almost unlimited ‘scaling up’ across large communities without attempting in any way to instigate a large response rate – so maintaining the life history experience of the essential thought= ful quality of individual responses from their own ‘circle of influence’:
In theory, therefore, even one interview can reveal = that relationships experienced by those sharing similar time, spatial and social locations. [24]

In many respects, allowing ‘ordinary’ peop= le a say from within their circle of influence is more reliable than drawing sensible assessments from the ‘elite’:

For example, if one was interviewing Cabinet ministe= rs, high civil servants and similar elite personages about a history of a particular political policy, very little would be liable to emerge unless o= ne was thoroughly informed on the likely role of various personalities, the sequence of events, and had detailed knowledge of the workings of the polit= ical and governmental machine. [25]

The level of interview expertise implied by Lummis in = this quotation - and needed for the effective face-to-face oral history interview – cannot feasibly be applied if we are attempting to hear the ‘= voice’ of an entire community and make it credible to others. And yet we know that= an individual voice can be remarkably accurate in depicting the circumstances = and events in the background of history. It is also in wide commercial use in t= he product testimonial: witness the television advertisements in which Gloria = Hunniford tells viewers how she has introduced three people last year whose cholester= ol has reduced by the regular consumption of the product she was promoting. Set against the millions of the product consumed in this time, the testimonials= are statistically worthless. The fact that hard-headed business people, from the now classic the Pear’s soap [26] advertisement down to the present day, pay large sums for such promotions is itself a testimonial to the value of the qualitative sample.

... the intrinsic validity of a single testimony is = of considerable import.[27]

Politically, such minority voices tend be drowned out = other than in special circumstances which are considered later along with positiv= ist and post-modern aspects of information sources. Meanwhile, Lummis goes onto say:

... I cannot doubt that oral evidence collected with= in the framework of certain methodological guidelines and an informed historical imagination is a more useful and better historical source than ill-informed practice. [28]

The consideration of methodology brings us to the ques= tion of sampling. Lummis again:

Sampling is a highly developed procedure in the soci= al sciences: but just as an awareness of social science methodology can enhance the practice of oral history, too much attention to it would be unduly inhibiting.... use of sampling techniques can guide our efforts to include = all types of experience..... the value of any one such interview is greatly enhanced if it can be placed into comparative context with others. … = Briefly and technically put, ‘the theory and methods of sampling are based up= on two concepts - that of the normal distributions, and that of independent random sampling - and u= pon theorems derived from these two concepts’ [quoting Roderick Floud: An introduction to quantitative method= s for historians, Methuen 1973 page 162.]

... the most widely known application of these proce= dures is by political pollsters. Although they interview comparatively few people= they are able to generalise their findings from the opinions of a given number of individuals to claim that they represent the views of a particular constitu= ency or even of the country. [29]

These sampling techniques quite specifically avoid the qualitative self-selection but are nonetheless only selectively acceptable. Politicians may respond to those they found favourable but will, more generally, claim to ignore or at least not to be swayed by them. In the July 2009 “expenses scandal&= #8221; surrounding Members of Parliament it is interesting that although opinion p= olls where conducted by newspapers and others, the most telling feedback of the = fury of the public was through personal contact from constituents, by e-mails, letters and other direct means, not excluding abuse in the street. As in the case of the Brecon experiment and the pollsters 17% error, many assumptions= are made in the taking of quantitative samples from a heterogeneous population = and serious errors arise. Perhaps, most importantly, the democratic force of samples is fundamentally questionable: would you like decisions for which y= ou pay in taxes to be made by 'samples' in which you were not given an option = to participate?

As importantly, if freed from the fetters of prejudice, habit or indifference, individual self-selected responses are based on the experience of the past as much as on hopes for the future. This is the comm= on experience of interviewers in face-to-face situations. In short, the interviewee, when considering the ‘general good’, senses their ‘circle of influence’, finding and expressing a ‘common sense’ of community. Breaking the, often traditional, sectarian, class and social fetters is key in establishing the undistorted meaning behind interview responses which we know are subject to myriad influences, distractions and tangential excursions.

… oral history is not simply biographical or personal in intent however much it resembles those at the moment of generat= ion.[30]

In this dissertation, the methodologies, whereby the ‘voice of the people’ may be given expression and heard, are crucial. Lummis gives evidence of how statistical data obtained for quantitative analysis may be entirely unreliable if the interviewee has some personal interest in the matter.[31] He cites an example of fishermen asked, in routine surveys, for the location w= here they had made their catch: they would never tell the truth because this wou= ld tell competing trawler skippers were the fish were. He uses this example to demonstrate how an interview conducted some years later established the tru= th (that the truth was never told) leaving the contemporary documents to conta= in falsehoods. This is a cautionary tale about the unreliability of documents = and the danger of assuming that contemporary documentary evidence is safer than retrospective oral evidence. I read this example as demonstrating the unreliability of mass surveying to rigid formulae and the beauty of the individual contribution under discretionary circumstances. Perhaps it is an example of how qualitative sampling may be superior to quantitative sampling but also that the establishment of a ‘true’ history, by any mea= ns, is neither easy nor straightforward. Being ‘in the know’, i.e. aware of the ramifications, values, language and habits of sub-cultures mak= es this process anything but a ‘spectator sport’.

These aspects [of interviewing] are of crucial impor= tance as it is through the culture of political life (or any other milieu) that t= he significance of the document can be properly evaluated. Not only that so ma= ny documents are written in a formalised style and vocabulary which the histor= ian may need decoded by an insider. [32]

If we are to hear the voice of the people, we must obv= iously seek, as by the oral history interview, contributions from those “who never voluntarily participated in formal organisations.”[33] The massive scale of such a concept drives us to a methodology in which data ca= n be aggregated, a procedure which Lummis appears to support:

It is an essential part of the historical discipline= to understand how human activity and consciousness change through time, their social locations and the material reality within which they are formed. This can be done only by moving from the individual accounts to social interpretations. Aggregating data from interviews is one such method.... th= ere is no conflict or question of having to use only one of the alternatives, i= t is purely a matter of whether aggregating the data is a worthwhile activity in itself. I would argue that it is, and that it is going to be an even more informative procedure as the number of interviews available increases. [34]

Some proposals for “direct democracy” would allow people to put forward their own proposals for consideration. No doubt, with enormous input of labour, these myriad proposals could be sifted and classified so as to measure some sort of “consensus”. Such find= ings could be carried forward for formal deliberation in the parliamentary proce= ss. The freedom of expression allowed by such a process could be immensely valu= able in finding feelings and needs hidden in the sub-cultures of society as well= as dealing with the “blockbusting” issues of the day. Such a system would, in my view, be slow, cumbersome and costly. It would also be prone to the very difficulties of selectivity, expression and interpretation regular= ly encountered in the oral history interview. The degree of personal ‘we= ighting’ could distort a voice deemed to come from a whole community.

What is salient to the informant is assumed to have a greater authenticity than responses to the interviewer's questions. Certain= ly one always encourages people to volunteer information but what they say can= not be granted the privilege status: one cannot assume a congruence between the willingness to volunteer information and that information being the most salient aspect of that person's life.... in any case what is most salient t= o the informant for whatever reason is not necessarily the most significant in te= rms of historical (as opposed to biographical) research. [35]

Another system of direct democracy, already practised = in some parts of the world, allows the citizens to push a button on their television sets to agree or disagree with a broadcast proposal. An example = (in Oregon, USA) allows the local taxpayers - who pay for it – to decide when snow sho= uld be cleared. Presumably those who do not agree to a clearance that day it wi= ll still have to pay. This is therefore an example less of democracy – w= hich by our convention respects the minority – than of majority rule. It a= lso strikes me as an example of “passing the buck” because many ski= lls and experience should be professionally input to the decision process by pe= ople who take the responsibility and who are subsequently accountable for the proficiency of their performance. Nonetheless there are structures and conventions known to and sensed by communities which may take the theoretic= al hard edges off such schemes.

Our assessments must be based in socio-structural frameworks which suggest that certain patterns of behaviour are likely to be experienced by particular social and economic groups. This must also be properly historical; people are not only stratified by class or separated by gender, but within those categories are laminated by cohort experience: they leave school, get married, have children and so on at times when the socio-economic structures have a different bearing upon them. [36]

Between the: “You choose what policy you like= 221; and: “Do you like this one, yes or no?” as in the previous two examples, the 'preferendum' constrains the choice so that approvals can be aggregated but the decision is left with the proposer who has also defined = the issue and is accountable for its interpretation. This, in effect, codes the results so that the system can be applied on a large scale.

The process of analysis through coding is most valua= ble where the interviews have been guided by a schedule which has ensured that everyone was asked for the same range of information.[37]

The objective is to hear the voice of the people; that= is, of a whole community. Aggregations of countless individual contributions mu= st nonetheless reflect the local and individual 'character'. Other than in ghe= ttos it is unlikely that all neighbours will think the same on a whole raft of issues – but in that instance, would not the voice be louder anyway? I would argue that a system of voluntary approval on a range of issues would reflect “circles of influence” which would pick out the like-mi= nded across a wide geographical area. This, surely, is the nature of society:

There is a dialectical relationship with individuals forming society and society forming individuals, and alternative approaches= to historical and social knowledge from interviews are validly based on the perception of people as creators and bearers of economic and social relationships. … Each individual oral history, therefore, is an exemp= lar and reveals the history of the period through the relationships of the individual with others, lived within the constraints of the economic and social.

…=

The individu= al is not the founder of the social, but rather its sophisticated product. Paradoxically, the true elementary unit of the social is, in our opinion, t= he primary group: an apparent complex system which constitutes, in reality, the most simple object under sociological observation.

…

… there are difficulties in establishing how o= ne might define what constitutes the biography of a group, but certainly it is= a perspective which maintains a materialistic emphasis on economic and social forces as the focus of social analysis and historical change rather than the individual.[38]

(refer= ring to Franco Ferrarotti's “On the Autonomy of the Biographical Method”= ; in Daniel Betrtaux (ed.), 1981 and ‘L’approche biographique, Cahiers Internationaux du sociologie, Vol LXIX, 1980)

Lummis is “convinced of the value of positivist methodology… while rejecting positivistic philosophical assumptions a= bout individualism and society.” He states:

The need for large statistical analysis is unnecessa= ry because the pattern of life and the correlation between areas of experience= are part of lived experience visible in the trajectory and activities of people= 's lives. [39]

My conclusion to this part of my review of references = is that a credible voice of the community cannot be produced by a positivist statistical analysis but that a methodology should be employed which aggreg= ates a large number of individual volunteered “interviews” by which groups of social and economic interests may clearly be identified. As Lummis point out, life history is more than biographical, it is societal and that leads us straight into speaking politically.

Interpreting Qu= alitative Data (David Silverman)

And

A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Qualitative Research (David Silverman)

Silverman, who clearly prefers observational data to interview data, tends to scorn the post-modern or “poetic” view= of data and the related methodology which he regards as sloppy:

.... I want to consider how bullshit suffuses popular culture and politics. Here ‘bullshit’ denotes a world in which ascetics reduces to celebrity and lifestyle. A world in which supposedly st= ill serious newspapers are dominated by lifestyle columns telling us how to live our lives and in which politicians must have an attractive “personal narrative”. So the Oxford-educated Tony Blair uses glottal stops to betray himself as an “ordinary bloke” and football fan; the pre= ppy George W Bush sets up an image as a Texan son of the soil and David Cameron= the wealthy, Eton-educated, new leader of the British Conservative Party, has photos taken of him doing the washing up in his kitchen so that we may see = him as an “ordinary family man”.

In a politics of bullshit, ‘facts’ are j= ust boring and/or irrelevant. Instead, policy is made on the basis of focus gro= ups and perceptions. As Tony Blair said in 2006, policy-making on law and order= “is not about statistics, it is about how people feel... the fear of crime is as important in some respects as crime itself” (quoted in the Economist, 24th June, 2006). [40]

The voice of the people as expressed in the media is a= n integral part of this dissertation and my treatment of this subject follows in more detail. Silverman puts this in post-modern context but he urges the case for qualitative analyses to be run to tight methodologies while taking the broad view.

Whatever data collection method we use, we need to b= e less precious about the sanctity of our ‘own’ data. Indeed, secondary data analysis is a very important, if usually unacknowledged, method in qualitative research.... ‘pure’ research is undoubtedly importa= nt but it should not blind us to the need to think through what contribution o= ur research might make to ‘society’ and, indeed, what we mean by 'society'. [41]

As with Lummis, Silverman delineates some of the characteristics of what interviewees may tell us.

... we can treat what people say as an account which= positions itself in a particular context (e.g., as somebody responding to an interviewer's question and/or as a person claiming a particular identity, f= or instance as a “ family member”, “ employee”, “ manager” etc). Here the researcher is viewing what people say as an activity awaiting analysis and not as a picture awaiting a commentary. [42]

Although these relationships and positions are importa= nt and relevant in the structure of society, this natural characteristic introduces our by now familiar difficulty with the interpretation of meanings which, collectively, must add discordance in an attempt to express a communal voic= e. Hence the advantage of removing the personal interviewing interfaces from t= he data gathering process in accordance with my hypothesis that the aggregatio= n of self-selected, i.e. voluntary, contributions needs a degree of formalisatio= n.

... the issue... is whether the research environment= was procedurally consequential, i.e. whether how the data was gathered influenc= ed its reliability. It demands that researchers attend to and demonstrate that they have thought through the extent to which their findings may simply be = an artefact of their chosen method.... my own research experience... teaches me that, all things being equal, it is usually a good ploy... to begin a resea= rch project by looking at naturally occurring data.... (working with) naturally occurring data... opens up a wide variety of novel issues that are outside = the prior expectations embedded in, say, interview questions. [43]

I have to be aware that in setting out what may appear= to some a revolutionary new methodology to record and hear the voice of the people, I am skirting round and touching a number of different disciplines.= Was it not for the grounding in experimentation and an advanced level of what amounts to comprehensive field work I would be concerned that the ‘preferendum’ was but an ‘artefact’ to fit a proces= s to an idea. As it is, the feedback was considered, overwhelmingly supportive (= with but a handful of returns carrying rude remarks), and provided accurate data= not otherwise available. I do not regard it as a disadvantage that political parties did not seize on the idea: that merely confirms Professor FinerR= 17;s assessment of the self-appointed role of these minority bodies. There has t= o be the suspicion that they really do want to impose dogma-based policies and t= hat, to them, a popular democracy is rather frightening.

... organisations may resist ethnographic findings w= hich appear to threaten vested interests. We also know that organisational leade= rs can ignore research on their companies or, as happened in my research on the personnel function of a public sector organisation, use the research as a legitimating device to support policies previously decided. [44]

Nonetheless, there have to be sociological and histori= cal aspects as well as life history, philosophy, politics and, perhaps psycholo= gy rolled into such a radical thesis. The one aspect which I do try to stay cl= ear of in my thesis is ‘statistics’. Although results may be shown = in percentages for relative comparison, it is the informed response to discret= e initiatives that is provided by such an integrated system.

.. are there types of quantification which can actua= lly aid ethnography and conversation analysis?... My positive answer … is … that quantification can sometimes help us sort fact from fancy and, thereby, improve the validity of qualitative research.. There are two broad ways in which simple counting techniques are affected:

As an initial means of obtaining a sense of the vari= ance in the data

At a later stage, after having identified some pheno= menon, checking its prevalence. [45]

A political voice has to be a human voice and there is= no such person as an ‘average’ human being. Although it is most effective if expressed clearly, cohesively and in unison, the collective vo= ice should carry the inflections and tones that emphasise its expression. Silve= rman addresses this issue:

Part of the problem [an inability to assess the impo= rtant topic of how institutions are routinely enacted] arises from two dangerous orthodoxies that lie behind the thinking of many social scientists and poli= cy makers who commission social research. The first orthodoxy is that people a= re puppets of social structures. According to this model, what people do is defined by ‘society’. In practice, this reduces to the level of explaining people's behaviour as certain ‘face-sheet’ variables (like social class, gender or ethnicity). Let me call this the explanatory orthodoxy. According t= o it social scientists do research to provide explanations of given problems, e.= g., why do individuals engage in unsafe sex? Inevitably, such research will find explanations based on one or more ‘face-sheet’ variables.

This second orthodoxy is that people are ‘dope= s’. Interview respondents' knowledge is assumed to be imperfect, indeed they may even lie to us. In the same way, practitioners (like doctors or counsellors) are assumed always to depart from normative standards of good practice. Thi= s is the divine orthodoxy. It makes a social scientist and philosopher king (or queen) who can always see through people's claims and know better than they do. [46]

The nature of the ‘preferendum’ is that it treats everybody equally and anonymously: the ‘puppet’ followin= g of the party line is accommodated. Voluntary participation is akin to participation in the electoral vote itself. If voting for a candidate, or a tranche of candidates by proportional representation, is made compulsory (a= s is mooted by at least one school of electoral reformers) then a ‘policy vote’ might become the only form of free expression left to us: to sh= ow we are not ‘dopes’. That said, the preferendum procedure is intended to pick up minority interest and will almost invariably do so. The existence of a “democratic majority” for any one issue is considered unlikely – it would have to be a majority of those asked – and even then,= the system provides that the policy must subsequently go forward for interpretation and debate in Parliament where its meaning, relevance and effect can be taken i= nto account by deliberative process. The point is that those who propose the policies, the election candidates, are themselves participating in the proc= ess so the flow of information is mutual. This takes place constituency by constituency picking up social, cultural, class, ethnic and religious bias. Results inform the interviewers (the candidates) of the support or otherwise for their proposals (and for those of their opponents). The interviewees (t= he voters), whether they become a resp= ondent or not, may be informed of the intentions of someone seeking their vote= . In this sense, the numbers matter.

Simple counting techniques, theoretically derived and ideally based on participants’ own categories, can offer a means to s= urvey the whole corpus of data ordinarily lost in intensive, qualitative research. Instead of taking the researcher's word for it, the reader has a chance to = gain a sense of the flavour of the data as a whole. In turn, researchers are abl= e to test and to revise their generalisations, removing nagging doubts about the accuracy their impressions about the data.

This shows that well-grounded, simple tabulations can improve the quality of qualitative research and speak to practitioners who = are used to seeing research expressed numerically. [47]

Given the format of what is now termed a preferendum - although there are other decision procedures using this name – and it= s potential for wide scale application, together with the aggregation and quantificatio= n of “preferences”, the question arises as to whether it should be regarded as quantitative or qualitative. Silverman reports on scholarly def= initions of “common research styles” in qualitative research:

Capturing the individuals point of view.

Qualitative investigators think they can get closer to the actor's perspective through detailed interviewing and observation. They argue that quantitative researchers are seldom able to capture their subjects’ perspectives. =

Acceptance of post-modern sensibilities.

Alternative methods... including emotionality, personal responsibility, and ethnic caring, politic= al praxis, multivoiced texts, and dialogues with subjects.

... I also agree with the argument, voiced elsewhere= in their writings that research does not exist in a vacuum but is intimately t= ied to the workings of modern society. [48]

Whilst Silverman agrees with these definitions, he has reservations about post-modernism and the degree to which its freedoms can = be pushed (see also his earlier reference to Tony Blair et al). He quotes Alain Sokal and Jean Bricmont's definition of postmodernism as:

An intellect= ual current characterised by the more-or-less explicit rejection of the rationa= list tradition of the Enlightenment, by theoretical discourses disconnected from= any empirical test (and) a cognitive and cultural relativism that regards scien= ce as nothing more than a ‘narration’, a ‘myth’ or a social construction among many others.[49]

So standard ideas about how we reason are being reth= ought and replaced by something that its proponents call “radical thought&#= 8221;. In an era of what Benson and Stangroom call “epistemic relativismR= 21;:

The underlyi= ng idea in the rethinking process is that radical thought can go anywhere and tackle anything: that the rethinking is inherently and necessarily political, not factual or technical; that it is a matter of morals, of value, of justice, rather than one of statistics; of ought rather than is. This implies both t= hat anyone and everyone is qualified to engage in it, and that no one is qualif= ied to gainsay its insights on the basis of expertise or technical knowledge. (2006: 45) [50]

<= /o:p>

It will be noted that by applying numerous tests and s= treams of accountability, counterchecks and cross-checking, combined with processe= s of deliberation, the policy vote or ‘preferendum’ stays well clear= of lax qualities while undoubtedly exploiting ‘radical thought’. However, in a specific consideration of the qualitative vs. quantitative approach Silverman gives a comparative table.

Tab= le 2.2[51]        &= nbsp;              Claimed fe= atures

= of qualitative and quantitative methods

Qualitative&nbs= p;            &= nbsp;           &nbs= p;    Quantitative

Soft        &= nbsp;           &nbs= p;            &= nbsp;        Hard

Flexible        &= nbsp;           &nbs= p;            &= nbsp; Fixed

Subjective        &= nbsp;           &nbs= p;         Objective

Political        &= nbsp;           &nbs= p;            &= nbsp; Value-free

Case study      &n= bsp;            = ;          Survey<= /o:p>

Speculative        &= nbsp;           &nbs= p;       Hypothesis testing

Grounded    &nbs= p;            &= nbsp;           &nbs= p; Abstract

Source: Halfpenny, P (1979) “The analysis of qualitative data”,

Sociological Revi= ew, 27 (4): 799 -825<= o:p>

Table 2.2 shows how imprecise, evaluative considerat= ions come into play when researchers describe qualitative and quantitative metho= ds. Depending on your point of view, Table 2.2 might suggest that quantitative research was superior because, for example, it is value-free. The implicati= on here is that quantitative research simply objectively reports reality, wher= eas qualitative research is influenced by the researcher's political values. Conversely other people might argue that such value freedom in social scien= ce is either undesirable or impossible.

The same sort of argument can arise about ‘fle= xibility’. For some people such flexibility encourages qualitative researchers to be innovative. For others, flexibility might be criticised as meaning lack of structure. Conversely, being ‘fixed’ gives such a structure to research but without flexibility. [52]

There is= no doubt that this apparently academic dichotomy is crucial for the credibility and acceptability of research work.

Outside the social science community, there is little doubt that quantitative data rule the roost. Governments favour quantitative research because it mimics the research of its own agencies... They want qu= ick answers based on “reliable” variables. Similarly, many research funding agencies call qualitative researchers “journalists or soft scientists” whose work is “termed unscientific, or only exploratory, or entirely personal and full of bias” [53]

Although Silverman does comment that:

… it is arguable that number-crunching researc= hers have fared little better. As Roger Hadley (1987: 100) has pointed out, R= 20;not being heard” is the common experience of Anglo-American social researchers who attempt to influence public policy.... academic researchers= who produce unpalatable conclusions can be written off as “unrealistic= 221; (1987: 102). [54]

And:

The idea that social research might influence public policy provides an inspiration for many young social scientists. In most English-speaking countries, the sad truth is that things have never worked = in this way.

Qualitative research has rarely had much appeal to c= ivil servants and administrators geared to focus on numbers and the “bottom line”. [55]

... [there is] a “legitimation crisis” w= hich makes problematic the traditional criteria for evaluating and interpreting qualitative research” (2000: 17 Denzin and Lincoln)... the postmodern turn in which ethnograp= hies are read as “tales from the field” which unthinkingly construct= the “other”.[56]

The foregoing detailed review of analytical criteria embraces many authoritative sources and is intended to show the systemic grounding of a policy voting system based on the thesis as set out in this dissertation and encompassing some of the hypothetical stages taken into consideration in the whole concept. In pa= rticular, I argue that the preferendum is ‘political’ rather than ‘value-free’ and therefore combines the best of qualitative with that of quantitative research in a simple methodology which can employ posi= tivist aggregation to give credible results based on the criteria set by the princ= ipal participants themselves.

AN INTEGRATED REVIEW OF REFERENCES

Part 3: life history research: term essay assignments

Elements of my argument are backgrounded in the life h= istory research essays preceding this dissertation. The relevant detail is indicat= ed below each of the following summaries.

Life History and the Reliability of Narrative (January, 2008)

This essay explores the propensity for storytelling in= the recollection of memory. It considers how the written record cannot be ̶= 0;argued with” (inaccuracies, errors, and deficiencies are therefore perpetuat= ed) whereas oral evidence can be revisited and compared with contemporary recor= ds and witnesses so long as the interviewee is alive and articulate. I consider the role of the “unreliable narrator” and the processes and dynamics of interpretation and transcription. The build up of vast amounts = of information in this communications age produces an “onion skin” layering of stories in which the more durable and more memorable or, in post-modernist terms, the most poetic, may overlay those of more passing interest whether or not they are more relevant or meaningful.

The relevance to this dissertation is this essay’= ;s consideration of the degree of influence exerted by an interviewer over the narrative and= how this modifies the “voice” of the interviewee in what has become= a joint production. If, therefore, we are to hear the voice of an entire community, politically, even if it is represented by a small number of individuals, the interviewing interface has, in some way, to be modified or even eliminated. Nonetheless it is inevitable that some interpretation takes place in the listening process and the method has to be devised which harmonises the voice of the people in a cohesive expression with the minimu= m of ‘noise’.

Oral Narrative and the Art of Fiction (April, 2008)

In this essay I consider the essential egocentricity of personal narrative which embodies a derived knowledge of the world as seen = by the narrator. In presenting their life stories within their own streams of consciousness a degree of compression, abbreviation and identification with= the familiar will tend to produce a novel format - if for no other reason than securing the interested attention of an audience. “The interviewer and analyst must confront in this record issues of unreliability, rhetoric and fiction.” in particular, I looked at the intonation of voice and considered how much information in terms of emphasis and periodicity is los= t in the transcription to plain text. I submitted examples of how some of this information might be restored by the use of graphical presentation.

The relevance to this dissertation of this essay is it= s consideration of how the voice produces meaning beyond the words as seen in a simple transcript. The quality of a voice is an essential element in its power whe= ther that is the power to convince, to hold the mind of the listener or simply to gain a hearing. This is not a “level playing field” and there is much disparity between individuals in the various aspects of their vocal po= wer. Democracy is hardly about serving the will of the loudest voices and yet th= ere has to be a measure of their potential contribution to the welfare of socie= ty whilst ensuring equitability and protection of the disadvantaged. The tende= ncy for the individual narrative to follow streams of consciousness and the familiar milestones and clichés of experience and expression would l= ead to considerable eclecticism across a population indicating the need for some sort of inclusion of positivist methodology if we are to hear an intelligib= le voice.

The Mass Observation Archive: Creative Fiction? (January, 2009)

The relative merits of quantitative and qualitative su= rveys are considered with the conclusion that the “self selected” sma= ll sample may not only provide enhanced information “outside the boxR= 21; of the positivist survey but can give more pertinent information while avoi= ding virtually all of the limitations of more formal methods. I concluded that &= #8220;the writings in the Mass Observation archive are, in essence and in the main, creative fiction. Set against this I suggest that that the conclusions of structural surveys are constructive fiction.”

The methods used to analyse data are not only crucial = to the compilation of useful information from that data but the methodology used m= ay itself influence the final report and hence the “voice” that is heard. The previous references have indicated that there are no absolutes f= or the processing of data and neither one system nor another may necessarily be correct or transposable to a new application from a previously successful o= ne. It is therefore advantageous to consider how positivist and post-modern app= roaches might appropriately be blended.

Life Writing and the Art of Characterisation (April, 2009)
&n= bsp;

This essay considers the possibility that in reconstru= cting a life in literary form an element of characterisation may be introduced. T= his characterisation may not only lead to improved readability and deeper understanding but also to the presentation of an individual life in a more recognisable accuracy based on common perceptions. I introduced dog Bron= son as an exemplar and the creative writing element in this essay, and as an illustration that “voice” takes many forms of expression.

Individuality is an essential human characteristic: we= are all different. In listening to the voice therefore it is important to allow= for differences in interpretation of meaning as well as the relationship they h= ave with life experiences which may be beyond the comprehension of the listener. The character that may be conveyed by the voice, whether audible or metaphorical, will invariably widen the spectrum of interpretation unless t= he response is in some way produced in a controlled format. In short, the natu= re of the question asked should be not only consistent but subject to a review process which allows for partiality, prejudice, ignorance, or expertise.

AN INTEGRATED REVIEW OF REFERENCES

Part 4: The ‘media’: television, radio, newspapers, journals, the Internet and specialist papers, street art, letters, intervie= ws and conversations

My thesis is that an entire population or any community group within a defined geographical area, or, presumably, with special arrangements, ethnic, religious or within any subculture or division of soc= iety may be given a voice through a procedure now known as a “preferendum&= #8221;. Clearly, there has to be a political will and there are other conditions and circumstances that have to be taken into account. However, in general terms, the preferendum is only suitable for voicing the will of the people on relatively long term issues or on broad political philosophies. This is bec= ause the issues have to be presented by an identified individual (candidate) who= is making the proposal because he or she wishes to see it implemented. This de= gree of accountability is only feasibly obtained at the time of election although that does not have to be a general election: the tests have been conducted = at both general and by-elections. It follows that this “voice” can only be heard infrequently and is specifically linked to a system of govern= ance whereby decisions affecting the community as a whole may be informed at a popular level. The ‘media’ are particularly active on political issues at the time of election: minds are concentrated on the issues, the individuals concerned are accessible and, of course, there will be some topicality to the proposals being submitted by the candidates.

The voice of the people is, however expressed other th= an at time of election and often with considerable effect. This section of my dissertation considers these “ad hoc” contributions which influ= ence many day-to-day aspects of our lives. With the possible exception of street art, graffiti, the expression of these voices is generally through the media which provide the instant topicality which makes them relevant. Even if a q= uiet word is whispered confidentially into a politician's ear, it is very likely that it will appear in print somewhere, sooner or later. I have therefore t= aken a number of references from reported current affairs. The references derived from the media and other sources peripheral to this dissertation are identi= fied and attributed at each instance of use. The broadcast media are a rich sour= ce of the spoken voice, the ‘heard’ voice and, in their reports, of the metaphorical voice of individuals, groups and organisations, and of political entities. References are selected so as to illustrate voice power, scope (influence over other lives), and political relevance with the manner= of how and why it is heard.

The reference to testimonials earlier in my background review has illustrated how the individual voice - in democratic terms insignificant - has enormous power to convince others. In public life there= are similar instances where clearly minority views prevail in the political are= na. I have also referred to the distinction between “majority rule”= and “democracy”. Whether or not these ‘personal’ uttera= nces are beneficial to society as a whole is subject to a very complex structure= of appointment and accountability ramifying our Establishments. I can make no judgment on these aspects but simply set out examples covering what I see a= s a range of different circumstances, motivations, and instances which have the= ir own characteristic and are part of the mix and synthesis of the “hear= d” voice of the people.

The quality of the voice, voic= es and voice

The voice itself

The spoken or sung human voice carries more than words conveying information. Its tone, manner and inflexions can inspire or terri= fy; oratory can whip us into frenzy or cast us into despair. It can lie yet convince or tell the truth and sow doubts. It can attract to seduction or r= epel to disgust. Professor Howard:
It is an extraordinary instrument, the human voice. = Within a second of our starting to speak we reveal our background, gender, age, le= vel of education, emotional state and our relationship to the person we are speaking to. … personality too … can play a remarkable part in changing the voice. In fact we often give things away about ourselves as so= on as we open our mouth. [57]

= ;

The BBC programme “The Voice” illustrated = how there is “accommodation” and “convergence” as the v= oice is adjusted automatically to both context and audience. The words uttered a= re the same but the intonation is different, the tempo is different to fit in = with other people – to adjust social distance. Most importantly, the voice= can be trained to carry authority as for leadership, or conviction as for selli= ng. Actors will adjust their voices to match the character they are playing. As Professor Howard says, “The voice can be used as a weapon of mass persuasion” and the word ‘weapon’ is the key: in the mout= h of those who wish to manipulate us, spread rumour or use it for their own prof= it, the voice is dangerous because ‘meaning’ can be detached from t= he words by the manner of their expression. In the face-to-face interview we l= ike to see the eyes but there is always a process of interpretation. The politi= cal voice has always got to be a problematic: leaders seek to appeal to all so = they must say very little that sounds like a lot.

The spoken voice is thus, in political terms, a fickle instrument. Unless it is recorded, it is gone on the instant and we are thr= own back on our recollections and the reliability of our memory.

Oral communication is different in kind from written sources: it is richer in communicative power, containing as it does, inflections, hesitations, expressions and nuances not reproducible in writt= en form. … Even a simple word like ‘yes’ can be stated insta= ntly and decisively in response to a query or in a hesitant tone, as if to signi= fy that it is only marginally more accurate than a ‘no’.[58]

For clarity of meaning it is therefore conventional to transcribe the words into a durable printed form. This process will not eliminate ambiguities and misunderstandings from the interpretation of text= but at least it stays around for long enough to debate the issue and to seek clarification. Life history interviews are almost invariably recorded and t= his is essential because the transcript will lose a vast amount of the meaning accompanying the words spoken.

The voice print

I became aware from my first life history interview of= a fellow student, of the enormous loss of information that took place by the process of transcription. Although I have subsequently discovered that other workers have been pursuing this same objective for a long time, I set about devising a graphical presentation which would restore some of this loss. I = was privileged to be asked to present my ideas at the 2009 Oral History Society annual conference at Strathclyde and discovered that the shortcoming of the transcript into text was of widespread concern. As an example of what I cal= l a “voice print” I have transcribed an interview presented by Anne Karpf in the final plenary session of the OHS conference in which she pointed out the inadequacy of the formal transcript. An enlarged copy of this voice print f= ronts this dissertation. The recorded voice of the interviewee, Mercedes Rojas, c= an be heard on the Museum of London website. I could not claim that the “voice print” is of great practical va= lue at the present “state-of-the-art”. In fact it may be more appropri= ate to think of this as an art form than as a scientific presentation. Nonethel= ess the history of technology tells us that one day a man is walking in front o= f a horseless carriage with the red flag and a few generations later this vehic= ular transportation is, more or less, available to all of us and at speeds beyond the comprehension of the innovators.

Transcript of Mercedes Rojas interview (see footnote).

It= 217;s been hard, hard issue because at the back of my mind I cannot believe that human being could go through this process of making somebody vanish from the surf= ace of the earth. Because it’s like denying somebody’s existence. That a person who was living, working, studying, suddenly become nobody. Nobody, except a piece of paper saying yes this person was b= orn one day, but we don’t know when he died, if he died, where it is, if he’s still somewhere.

It= 217;s, I think, the worst torture probably. I mean I don’t want to take the meaning of the word torture as such, but I personally feel that it is anoth= er way of infringing pain to human being. You are left in limbo. You don’t know whether you are married, you are widow…

I don= ’t think we will rest from searching for the truth and justice. I think itR= 17;s a right that every human being has, to know what happened and to bring just= ice to what had happened.[59]

Coding systems for annotating interview= s are to be found in life history research, psychoanalysis and other text books. = “Tying down” the human voice in print has probably been of concern for a very long time. I illustrate an example of Ernest Robson's method for 'prosodynic cue-scoring system' of 1969[60] as evidence that this is not a new problem nor is mine a new approach to solving it.

The Mercedes Rojas interview conveys with enormous str= ength and power the heartfelt feelings of a victim of a repressive political regi= me. There must have been many similar voices raised at the time of the abductio= ns and while it seems they may have fallen on deaf ears then, there can be lit= tle doubt of the historical significance of an interview with somebody who lived through such terrible times. In that sense, therefore, her voice may have s= ome political effect, remotely, diluted, but undoubtedly persistent.

A voice which is comparable with that of Rojas's but w= hich was heard instantly all over the world is from an interview by Charles Whee= ler of a Kurdish refugee met quite by chance on a single mountain road into Iraq f= rom Iran. The misery in her voice was immediately apparent and her accusation t= hat President George Bush ignored the plight of six million Kurds but had gone = to war to defend one million Kuwaitis and left Saddam Hussein unscathed, was so potent that the subsequent provision of a Kurdish safe haven is attributed = to that interview. The element of chance which allowed this voice to come thro= ugh was more than just that of a competent journalist encountering an English speaking mother in a human sea of people coming out as he was making his way into Iraq, but there were also political difficulties in broadcasting the interview. T= he BBC has a reputation for strict impartiality and it was felt that this Whee= ler interview gave too one-sided a view of the turbulent situation in the Middle East. It was reprimanded by the Director Gen= eral for not being impartial. Tim Gardam, then editor of BBC's “Newsnight&= #8221;, interviewed in 2005, said:

“I think the most influential piece with which= I was associated on “Newsnight” was that done by Charles Wheeler at t= he end of the first Gulf war.... but it was Wheeler's report that, we understo= od later, had made a significant impact in government, especially with Linda Chalker, Minister of Overseas Development.” [61]

The report was filed, unedited, on News= night on three consecutive nights. [62] This example demonstrates the power of the media to amplify even the ‘ordinary’ voice and how, if that voice strikes a common chord,= it may be propagated virtually without limit.

Public voices<= /o:p>

&n= bsp;

There is a class of public voice which can instantly b= e effective and affect a lot of lives. We are all familiar with Hans Andersen's fairy t= ale about the “Emperor's New Clothes” and how an innocent in the cr= owd pricked the puff of the proud and greedy by proclaiming in a loud voice what was obvious to the ingenuous. An equally dramatic but far more serious voic= e is that of falsely raising the cry= of “fire!” in a crowded theatre.[63] This latter is so dangerous that legislation making such an utterance a criminal offence marks a boundary of the freedom of speech. These voices ar= e, therefore, political and, by definition they are heard. The political sensitivity of an emperor to his wardrobe may be of passing concern to ordi= nary folk but people are killed in a stampede to exit from a burning building. O= ne way or another, these ephemeral voices are life changing and with historical impact.

The characteristic of these voices are that they are u= ttered by “ordinary people” and are instigated by the circumstances of= a particular event. They are heard. There are, however, voices that command attention by virtue of the status of the speaker.

The celebrity voice=

For five years there had been a campaign running to al= low Gurkha soldiers, recruited in the Himalayas, to reside in Britain= when they retired from service. Then, enter Joanna Lumley: a mature, attractive = and articulate actress with considerable popular following. Her voice not only carries impact but it commands attention from the media. With family milita= ry connections with the Nepalese Gurkhas, she came to spearhead the campaign.[64] Even so, a critical and fickle public is not known to support fey or eccent= ric ideas expressed by notable personalities. Ms. Lumley gave a knowledgeable v= oice to a commonsense notion of fair play and elementary reason with which we ca= n readily identify. Soldiers who most ably place their lives on the line in our servi= ce deserve special consideration.

And so the issue was resolved. Gurkha soldiers will no= w be treated the same as other British Commonwealth soldiers and will, after four years of service be able to apply for residency in Britain. This commonsense correction of an obvious injustice is described as a political ‘U-turn’ because the government’s original proposals were then thrown out by a Parliament rendered nervous for its Members’ sea= ts by the clamour of Ms Lumley’s protest in the streets outside.[65]

The political reality is that the government, strapped= for cash (the more so since the 2008-9 ‘credit crunch’), had calcul= ated that the provision of social services and infrastructure for new Gurkha residents would cost the general taxpayer millions. This might be an exaggeration but the government was also simultaneously besieged by the same electorate on the political need to restrict ‘immigration’. The government was ‘in a corner’ but clearly caved in to a popular voice uttered loudly and we have no way of knowing whether or not this reflected a majority view or just seemed a good and fair idea at the time. = It is, after all, easier to protest than to run a country.

A celebrity voice that is heard, yet which may express minority views with considerable force is that of Prince Charles, the Princ= e of Wales. He has recently torpedoed the architectural plans for the developmen= t of the Chelsea Barracks site. This prominent site, between the Thames and the King’s Road, was sold by the Ministry of Defence to a business owned = by the Qatari prime minister via a Guernsey company for £959 million. Plans had been submitted for a £3bn housing development designed by famous British architect Lord Rogers. The Prince contacted the Qatari Royal Family and the planning application was pulled.

Professional architects are outraged by the PrinceR= 17;s ‘interference’ in a process that had already taken two-and-a-ha= lf years of consultation with local authorities and residents. A range of ‘stakeholders’ and the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment are being consulted in the search for a new design.[66]

The Prince’s voice cannot be described as democr= atic yet, as with the voices of the former hereditary peers in the House of Lord= s, there can be no doubt of a tied and committed relationship with this countr= y. As with the Lords, a benign patronage, often with keen insight, may give an advising or cautioning voice to real concerns that otherwise slip through t= he political net. Doubtless many ordinary people will agree with the Prince on this issue, and professionals are known to make mistakes.[67] It is difficult to see how a voice of the people might be heard on such esoter= ic issues but this example points the need for a transparent, accountable and competent public administration that can be trusted to make decisions on our behalf and to sift the protests among the many factors of decision.

The celebrity voice is, in the end, problematic and the instances of it having effective power may well be an indication that there= is, or has been a failure elsewhere in the complex ordering of human society.

The authorial voice= : the voice from the printed word

&n= bsp;

&n= bsp;

Many writing styles are unique to the writer whose voi= ce may be distinguished within the first few lines. Take, for example, Alan Bennet= t: …

‘Has there been any other mental illness in yo= ur family?’ Mr Parr’s pen hovers over the Yes/No box on the form and my father, who is letting= me answer the questions, looks down at his trilby and says nothing.

‘No,’ I say confidently, and Dad turns t= he trilby in his hands.

‘Anyway,’ says Mr Parr kindly but with w= hat the three of us know is more tact than truth, ‘depression isn’t really mental illness. I see it all the time.’ [68]

The discerning listener who has heard Alan Bennett spe= ak will hear his voice in this opening passage even though he is ostensibly fe= aturing Mr. Parr. The qualities of the voice are seen with the hesitation in reply = augmented by the detail of the trilby. The mood is set, the period, the tension and t= he familiar scene are fed into our mind. The trilby is echoed in the pause following his monosyllabic reply and casts a shadow of doubt as does the unreliable ‘confidently’ and the shift from ‘father’= ; to ‘Dad’. Bennett delightfully bends the writers’ ‘rul= e’ (to show not tell) by then telling us what this has already told us, that t= he three already know the truth. The ‘Anyway’ softly holds the continuity and we are pulled into the scene by Bennett’s warmly famil= iar and conspiratorial voice. These features are among the many that give unique identification to this author’s voice in the same way we assemble the recognition of someone’s face by their features. The power of communication is interwoven with intimacy and understanding which gives a d= epth beyond the meaning of the words spoken, and hold the attention of the reade= r.

Many fictional authors do have the power to communicate widely and relay accurate observations of social issues – as Dickens = with A Christmas Carol – which prompt effective political action and which may genuinely give voice to pop= ular concerns.<= /p>
=

The professional and the official voice

The example I have taken here is not only particularly= well documented but, because it was widely broadcast but was not heard, devastat= ing consequences ensued which have affected all our lives and history. Hans Bli= x, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was called out of retirement and retained by the United Nations to investigate Iraq’s possession of we= apons of mass destruction (WMD).

There can be no doubts concerning the qualifications a= nd ability of Hans Blix nor is his manner of calm presentation anything other = than to inspire confidence: he weighs his words and his voice carries authority.= On 7th March, 2003 he presented the twelfth quarterly report of the UN Monitor= ing, Verification and Inspection Commission to the Security Council. Bearing in = mind that it is very difficult to “prove a negative”, Mr Blix came as close as a wise and diplomatic public servant could to saying that there we= re no WMD in Iraq. Those of us who listened to the broadcast of his report could not fail to be appalled by the turn taken by subsequent events as the USA and UK= declared war on Iraq= “because they had WMD”. A year later Mr Blix was to declare the belief, as a lawyer and diplomat and “no pacifist”, that it was= the responsibility of the Security Council to uphold its own resolutions regard= ing Iraq, not the responsibility of one or two Council members acting alone:
Had Iraq resisted further inspections, or had they turned up evidence of another nuc= lear weapons programme... Security Council members Russia and China would most likely have voted for military action, giving it international legitimacy.

Blix went on to accuse the <= st1:country-region w:st=3D"on">US President George W Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair = of:

…acting not in bad faith, but with a severe la= ck of 'critical thinking'. The United States and Britain failed to examine the sources of their primary intelligence... [69]

It seems almost certain that there must have been other ‘reasons’ that the two allies took it upon themselves to enter = into the Iraq= war. Whatever the speculation, the consideration for this dissertation is: = “Where was the voice of the people?” There is also the serious question as to whether our elected leaders are up to the job of serving our democratic = 216;general good’ because they failed to employ ‘critical thinking’. = The Americans, reeling from the devastating ‘9/11’ attack on the Tw= in Towers in New York wanted to lash out in a violent response, as is undoubte= dly in their character and history, and (wrongly) saw Iraq as part of an Al Qae= da terrorist movement. In Britain the mood may have been different. The following story gives a personal view= .

=

The v= oice of protest

Thee weeks before Hans Blix reported to= the Security Council of the United Nations in New York, it took me six hours to shuffle from Gower Street to the lower end of Shaftesbury Avenue, not quite reaching Piccadilly Circus. I never met up with my son Gareth who had gone = to Hyde Park and was immured in the crowds there. I, w= ith the dense throng around me and stretching far beyond the range of the eye to see, was not going to make it to the peace rally. I reckoned the point had = been made so I turned off down = Rupert Street and with liberated feet, strode to Charing Cross and the train home. It was the 15th February, 2003 and a million people were attempting to give voice to their objection to entering a war with Iraq. In the pleasantries exc= hanged while intimately jostling with my neighbours I met many who had never engag= ed in public protest before. “Not in my name” said it on the placa= rds.

Now in 2008, few can deny the people were right and the politicians, still at large and prospering, were culpably wrong. No weapons= of mass destruction, six years on, have been uncovered: the suggestion that Iraq co= uld hit us within 40 minutes has proved at least groundless and possibly deliberate= ly misleading. Those purporting to represent us and our democratic best intere= sts only noted and barely commented upon the nation-wide clearly heard voice. With d= eaf ears they disregarded the voice of the people and went ahead with the war on dubious intelligence and undeclared agenda, paying the price of many lives, incurring enormous draining and continuing cost, committing the expenditure= of vast material resources, dividing cultures and impairing public, national a= nd world security.

The voice of the people was not heard, whether in supp= ort or in opposition: the political class ruled their peoples imperiously. It is n= ot just with the benefit of hindsight: we know the evidence at the time was extremely tenuous. Alternatives were available: the Blix recommendation, al= so ignored, to continue monitoring Iraq would, if accepted, have taken the pressure off the timing of decisions and allowed other peaceful options. Many life histories of ordinary people were= set on a new path from these events.

I had attended another compelling mass gathering in London some years= earlier on 6^th September, 1997 which had a notably different outcome. The funeral of Princess Diana produced a solemn and powerful outpouring of grie= f, coupled with open criticism of the Queen’s initial reticence to be associated with the event – as with not flying the flag on Buckingham Palace at half mast. A sullen fury= against the royal family suffused the crowds standing deep in the litter of the tabloids along the Mall and around the Victoria monument. The irony was lost to the masses whose insatiable appetite for pi= ctures of a beautiful princess in those same tabloids had led to the death they we= re now mourning. As it happened, this popular mood galvanised the royal family= and the palace circles to leap from the 19th into the latter part of the 20th century and to identify more closely with the people. The flag was lowered = to half mast.

Why should such sensitivity to popular “voice= 221; be seen in the “royals” on a matter of sentiment? How is it tha= t an unelected and largely unaccountable establishment body should so respond, h= owever tardily and reluctantly, to the will of the people? In contrast, how is it that on a tr= uly political issue, the life-and-death issue of Iraq, the public outcry is di= sregarded by those who hold periodic office at the specific behest of the people? It = must be acknowledged that the royal response to the popular voice was catalysed = by the elected political establishment fearing for the destabilisation of their own comfort zones. The life history of the royal family changed from that d= ay.

These examples of spontaneous and vocal collective voi= ce demonstrate different outcomes from similar mass expression in which a domi= nant characteristic was that they “came from the heart”. That is, the voices were not “expert” but were emotional. The change that ha= ppened changed the lives of others, the royals: the change that failed affected the lives of the vocal, the people as a whole.

The voice of passio= n and the protest song

The sung word can be more potent than the spoken word. Historically, protest songs have had considerable power although predominan= tly among special interest groups as Johnny Cash with San Quentin, Joan Baez with We Shall Overcome. Anti-war protest has hardly been more graphically expre= ssed than by Pete Seeger's Where Have Al= l the Flowers Gone?

&n= bsp;

On Ju= ly 26, 1956, the House of Representatives voted 373 to 9 to cite Pete Seeger and s= even others (including playwright Arthur Miller) for contempt, as they failed to cooperate with House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in their attem= pts to investigate alleged subversives and communists. Pete Seeger testified be= fore the HUAC in 1955.
In one of Pete's darkest moments, when his personal freedom, his career, and his safety were in jeopardy, a flash of inspiration ignited this song. The = song was stirred by a passage from Mikhail Sholokhov's novel “And Quie[t] Flows the Don”. Around the world the song traveled and in 1962 at a UNICEF concert in Ge= rmany, Marlene Dietrich, Academy Award-nominated German-born American actress, fir= st performed the song in French, as “Qui peut dire ou vont les fleurs?&#= 8221; Shortly after she sang it in German. The song's impact in Germany just after WWII was shattering. It's universal message, “let there be peace in the world&= #8221; did not get lost in its translation. To the contrary, the combination of the language, the setting, and the great lyrics has had a profound effect on pe= ople all around the world.[70]

&n= bsp;

It is a sad reflection that notwithstanding its popular support and is wildfire spread across the planet from the early 1960s, it d= oes not seem to have deterred our political leaders from entering into bellicose adventures.

A remarkable example which has recently proved that th= is kind of protest can be remarkably effective has been provided by Dave Carro= ll, a country and western singer from Halifax, Canada with his band; Sons of Maxwell. His guitar was broken by United Airlines baggage handlers at Chica= go O’Hare but United staff showed indifference to his complaint. Eventua= lly, having intimated this would be his course of action, he wrote a ballad United Breaks Guitars and posted a= video on the Internet. Within ten days the site had received three-and-a-half mil= lion hits and United share price had tumbled 10%, wiping $180 million off its va= lue. United then asked to use the video for their staff training, offering compensation and reparation of his Taylor guitar. Dave refused the cash payment but asked it be given to charity.[71]

United Airlines obviously realised that= they had liabilities in the matter but it was only when the voice was loud enough that they were prepared to acknowledge this. The reference to “staff training” suggests an unhealthy remoteness between the company's ethos and its employees and, perhaps, the indication of a tendency to “pass= the buck”. Similar characteristics can be detected in the political arena: the remoteness from the electorate and the tendency to apologise and set up= an inquiry or to blame department personnel when things go wrong.

&n= bsp;

&n= bsp;

re-arguing the evidence (1^st October, 2009, post submission)

My evidence has been selected and presented in conside= rable detail, hence the extended word-count, in building the foundation for my argument. Overarching this dissertation is the fundamental truth that we sp= eak from our life history: The child is father of the man.[72] Our opinions are formed from our past as are our hopes for the future: on t= hese we speak politically out of our life history. This is a dynamic sprung from= life history research and if the individual voice is to be aggregated into a politically speaking communal voice, the interview methodology has to be designed to eliminate the spread of interpretations that arise in conventio= nal face-to-face interviews. The individual life history may contribute to our knowledge of the past: as Silverman makes clear, it has neither the positiv= ist credibility nor the relevance to shape a politically acceptable communal voice. The oth= er side of any appropriate methodology to give political voice has to facilita= te the hearing of it by procedures which are both acceptable and workable with= in the political community.

That there is a problematic with the interface between governed and governing has been demonstrated both by respected political authorities and by independent considered opinions with survey evidence: Bl= ake, Finer, Craig and the Hansard Society. My own field exercises confirmed a dysfunctional democracy on the political issues. In answer, I have detailed= a methodology whereby the individual opinion may be expressed without coercio= n or ‘leading’, and aggregated into a well-tried voting and party political system. The respondent’s personal opinion is sought for proposals submitted by accountable and identified proponents and, being wit= hout obligation to reply, must comply not only to the life experience (and any prejudices born of that experience) of the respondent but to his or her strength of feeling on the issue.

A particular strength of such self-selected contributi= ons is seen in the Mass Observation Archive. We see how the motivation to contribu= te engenders an intimacy which embraces a personal if not an absolute ‘truth’: as expounded in my January 2009 assignment essay. Furt= hermore, as Lummis points out, people are the bearers of economic and social relationships, and laminated by cohort experience. In short, being at the centre of our own ‘circle of influence’ our individually voiced opinion is given enormous value. Of collective value, that is, once interview flexibil= ity and ‘postmodern’ softness have been eliminated (Silverman).

The preferendum methodology is designed to express an aggregated communal voice pitched within established procedures at the time= of democratic election. This is argued to moderate dogma, win acceptability and set guides for future development. However, a work on political voice has to consider the quality of the voice itself. Effective voices are raised outsi= de electoral constraints and I have considered examples of voices both audible= and metaphorical which are ‘heard’ in varying degrees, under differ= ent circumstances, with political effect. Here, the quality of the voice is cru= cial not only in its utterance but, most particularly in its being heard. Its audible variability makes for extraordinary difficulties in its interpretat= ion. The whole structure of sound generation by the human vocal chords presents a serious problematic in respect of meaning which pervades the face-to-face interview. I have illustrated graphical recovery of some of the lost meanin= g in transcripts which may carry some political force through the page.

Conclusion

I have argued that the voiced opinion stems from the l= ife history of the speaker. Our individual, freely expressed viewpoint cannot be otherwise. Joanna Lumley’s voice was undoubtedly more powerful becaus= e of that part of her life history that gave her personal experience of the Ghur= kha people. The Prince of Wales’s life history as “a royal” w= ith his overview of society, together with his history of voiced views on architecture, gives weight to his voice. It was Dave Carroll’s and Pe= te Seeger’s personal life histories that led to their powerful musical v= oices. Our everyday life experience of right and wrong leads us to express our vie= ws as in protest against war. The life histories behind myriad individual voices produces a clamour which, to be heard distinctly, requires the coordination= of an emotional event as with the state funeral of a beautiful young princess.= Nonetheless, we need a methodology whereby the motivated individual voice can be aggrega= ted on issues of personal concern. I submit that the preferendum is such a methodology. The evidence I have submitted shows clearly that the democratic voice is presently modulated and hugely distorted by the party political manifesto system. Here, I submit, is the root cause of the political deafne= ss to the people’s voice when they are politically speaking.

In approaching this vast and vital subject I have work= ed from the "grass roots" embracing ‘Utube’ and the ‘net: the broadest base of observation and interview data. I have set aside many individual interviews on discovering that, while they embody interesting personal data, they cannot be extrapolated even to a localised democratic scale. I have turned to references which confirm that circles of influence pervade society which are sensitive to economic and social forces around them and with a balancing effect on views expressed yet flowing from= different life histories. These overlapping circles require aggregation in common ter= ms, yet on a vast array of subjects, to yield an intelligible while multi-faceted communal voice.

We have to conclude that presently it is a matter of c= hance that the political voices of ordinary people will be heard. A somewhat small cha= nce: as of meeting Charles Wheeler on the teeming road out of Iraq. M= ore than that, the hearing, outside the highly constrained and traditional political processes of the cognoscenti is, to say the least, arbitrary. The public vo= ice, the voice of common sense, is heard clearly enough when the situation is blatantly absurd: compare the MPs expenses scandal with the emperor's new clothes. Meanwhile, we must sit back and pay for partisan governance based = on spurious ‘mandates’ claimed by the party that ‘owns’ Parliam= ent. The parties operate the system; all they need is to hear the voices flowing from the life histories of their electorates. Via the preferendum, candidat= es can become the virtual interviewers of every one of their constituents whose voluntary responses can be given ‘ballot-box’ quality. The hope then is that the ethos of public accountable transparency will infiltrate e= very arm of government.

People have shown themselves to be remarkably wise at elections but the decline in participation in political processes is harmful because it allows the loudest voices to prevail. Hearing our voices across party, ethnic, gender, sectarian, ability, age and occupational lines when = we are speaking politically out of our own life histories will produce social = harmony through visible acceptability. I submit that the preferendum will do much t= o elucidate the relation between the individual and society, the local and the national with self representation [and] with the potential for advocacy and empowerment.

* * * * *
BIBLIOGR= APHY

Abrams, Mark. Social Surveys and Social Action: Developments in Britain since 1939. (1951) extract pp104 – 113 (class handout)

Bennett, Alan. Untold Stories, Faber and Faber, = London, 2005.

Craig, F.W.S. (Ed). British General Election Manifestos 1900-1974. Macmillan, London, 1975 (1^st Pubn: Political Reference Publications, Chichester, 1970)

Finer, Professor S.E. The Changing British Party System, 1945 – 1979. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, DC, 1980

Goodley, Dan; Lawthom, Rebecca; Clough, Peter; Moor= e, Michele Researching Life Stories: M= ethod, theory and analyses in a biographical age. RoutledgeFalmer, London, 2006 (2004= )

Hansard Society Commission on Electoral Reform June= 1976, The Report of the. Chairman Lord Blake, Provost of Queen’s College, <= st1:place w:st=3D"on">Oxford

Jenkins (1), Keith. Re-thinking History. Routledge, London= , 2003 (1^st Pubn. 1991).

Jenkins (2), Keith. (Ed.) The Postmodern History Reader. Routledge, London, 1997.

Jenkins (3), Keith. Why History?Ethics and postmodernity. Routledge, London, 1999.

Jenkins (4), Keith and Munslow, Alun (Eds.) The Nature of History Reader. Routledge, London, 2004.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Penguin Books, 1972 (1^st pubn. 1957)

Lummis, Trevor. Listening to History. The authenticity of oral evidence. Hu= tchinson, London,= 1987

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Tr: Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi). Manchester University Press, 1= 989 (Edn: 1984).

Merrill III, Samuel & Grofman, Bernard. A Unified Theory of Voting. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Oral History Reader, The. Eds: Robert Perks, Alistair Thomson. Routledge, London, 2007

Plummer, Ken. Documents of Life. Unwin Hyman, Lond= on, 1990 (1983 Edn.)

Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Routledge, London, 1969 (1^st Pubn. 1958= )

Quotationary. Ed: Leonard Roy Frank. Random House Websters, London, 2001.

Silverman(1), David Interpreting Qualitative Data, Third Edition: Methods for Analysing Talk, Text and Interaction. Sage, London<= /st1:City>, 2006 (1^st Pubn: 1993).

Silverman(2), David A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Qualitative Research. Sage, London, 2007.

Thompson, Paul. The Voice of the Past. Third Edn. OUP, 1988

Turco, Lewis. The Book of Literary Terms. University Press of New England, London, 1999

Yow, Valerie Raleigh. Recording Oral History. Altamira, Wa= lton Creek, CA, 2005= .

Titles by the author of this dissertation

How to Fire= the Taxman: the vital links between energy and the environment, civilisation and economics. Hydatum, Ross-on-Wye, London and Monmouth, 1987. =

Manifesto of Manifestos, 1974 & 1979, 1983, 1987, 1997, 2001. Hydatum, Ross-on-W= ye, London and Tunbrid= ge Wells.

The Brecon = Mandate: Portrait of an Electorate. Hydatum, Ross-on-Wye, 1986

“The Dynamic Economy: the case for a new econ= omic order based on dynamics and related to the value of energy” in The International Journal of Environme= ntal Studies. 1980, Vol. 15, pp287 – 292.

“Democratic accountability and the vot= es for nuclear energy” in Science and Public Policy, October 1980

APPENDIX

Rt. Hon. Geoff Hoon, = MP        &= nbsp;           &nbs= p;                  &= nbsp;           &nbs= p;            &= nbsp; 13^th May, 2005

Leader of the House of Commons

Westminster

London, SW1A 0AA

Dear Sir

As a publisher, I fee= l it incumbent upon me to draw to your attention an element of exaggeration in a statement of yours broadcast on 11^th May. You declared, in effec= t, that the Labour government now had the authority to proceed to implement its manifesto undertakings and should get on with the job. I, upon evidence, be= g to disagree, and to suggest that it is the duty of the House of Commons possib= ly to frustrate and certainly to question this declared intention.<= /span>

You may care to give = me (and others) a definition of the word “democracy”. Let me suggest th= at in our British representative parliamentary democracy the purpose, legitima= cy and existence of the House of Commons is to serve the “general good&#= 8221; and of the government, insofar as it is expedient, to serve the “will= of the people”. This last should lay the stress on “the peopleR= 21; and not allow that to be subsumed by “the Labour Party” –= or any other party of government.

If we let pass the inescapable fact that the Labour government has been elected by only 22% of= the electorate (because we must acknowledge that “democracy” is not quite the same as “majority rule”) we are left with the mind-blowing assumption (for those who think outwith the complacent accepta= nce of historical precedent) that mandates are granted by each single vote for every line of the Labour manifesto. A package comprising, shall we estimate= , at least 150 distinct policy proposals? It is not rocket science to suggest th= at the “democratic” support for any policy has to fall well short = of “mandate” value. (Let us further overlook the government’s implied monstrous assumption that all the policies in all the other manifestos have been rejected.) You may cling to theories of “plurality” but, if you= do, you probably think that all is well with our democracy, that the population= is ignorant and the young merely apathetic. I submit that the plurality argume= nt is but the security blanket of a failing system where, firstly, the elector= ate is far too smart and secondly politics too diverse for plurality (while sti= ll well suited to the appointment of representatives) to determine the will of= the people on the issues. It follows that any government seeking to press legis= lation through the House of Commons claiming these spurious mandates should be giv= en a hard time by those purporting to represent the general good of the people a= s a whole.

I refer now to the re= sults of the “preferendum” run in a number of constituencies during the = May 5^th election. I take the example of “ID cards.” The Labour government proposed, in the manifesto you say it intends to implemen= t, to introduce them. This proposal won the approval of 29% – more, you = will note, than the government itself. However, three parties (in the Cardiff preferendu= ms) proposed in their manifestos “no ID cards”: LibDems, Plaid Cymru and UKIP, and won approvals of, respectively, 36%, 38%, and 36% of the s= ame voters. Given that LibDem gained Cardiff Central and that the votes the= re for these three parties amounted to over 80% compared with the Labour vote,= it seems clear that, to put it modestly, not all Labour manifesto policies are favoured by that electorate. Of course, government may, because we have no check on it if it “owns” the House of Commons, decide to rule on this “lesser of evils basis” vote and to ignore the clear will = of the people. I would hope, however, that any true parliamentarian would seek= to test any government attempting to push this, or any other policy, through t= he House, just “because it was in the manifesto.”

The circles of influence radiating around us all are sensitive to moods and issues which may be “below the radar” of top-down generalists seeking to solve problems by passing endless laws and regulations which subvert the skilled, incommode the honest and are ignored= by the dishonest.

HEARING VOICES, POLITICALLY SPEAKING

Finding the voice<= span style=3D'mso-tab-count:1'> &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; 5

The voice of Lord Blake: = &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; = 11

The Report of the Hansard Society Commission on Electoral Reform 13

The Changing British Party System, 1945 – 1979 (S.E. Finer) &= nbsp; 14

Man= ifesto of Manifestos, 1974 -2001 = &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; = 17

Scien= ce and Public Policy, October 1980 = ; &n= bsp; = ; 21

The B= recon Mandate = &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; 26

The Horne Experiment &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; = 2= 9

http://www.hydatum.com/page26.html (Manifesto of Manifestos) &= nbsp; 30

A U= nified Theory of Voting (Merrill) = ; &n= bsp; = ; &n= bsp; = ; 34

Lis= tening to History (Lummis) = &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; = <= /span>35

Int= erpreting Qualitative Data (David Silverman) &nb= sp; = = 43

A V= ery Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Qualitative Resea= rch (David Silverman)

Life = History and the Reliability of Narrative (January, 2008) &= nbsp; 51

The M= ass Observation Archive: Creative Fiction? (January, 2009) &nbs= p; 53

Life = Writing and the Art of Characterisation (April, 2009) &= nbsp; &nbs= p; 54

The quality of the voice, voices and voice = &nb= sp; = 57=

The voice itself = ; &n= bsp; = ; &n= bsp; = ; &n= bsp; = ; 57

The voice print &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; 58

Public voices &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; 61=

The celebrity voic= e &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; 62

The authorial voic= e: the voice from the printed word = &nb= sp; = 65

The professional a= nd the official voice &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; 66

The voice of prote= st &= nbsp; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; 67

The voice of passi= on and the protest song &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; = 70

<= /span>

RE-arguing the evidence = &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; = &nb= sp; 72

Conclusion &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; &= nbsp; &nbs= p; = 74

=

HEARING VOICES, POLITICALLY SPEAKING<= /u>

Finding the voice

The voice of Lord B= lake:

The Report of the Hansard Society Commission on Electoral Reform

The Changing British Party System, 1945 – 1979 (S.E. Finer)

British General Election Manifestos 1900-1974 (F.W.S. Craig)

Manifesto of Man= ifestos, 1974 -2001

=

Science and Public Policy, October 1980 =

The Brecon Mandate

The Horne Experiment

http://www.hydatum.com/page26.html (Manifesto of Manifestos)

A Unified Theory= of Voting (Merrill)

Listening to His= tory (Lummis)

Interpreting Qu= alitative Data (David Silverman)

A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Qualitative Research (David Silverman)

Life History and the Reliability of Narrative (January, 2008)

Oral Narrative and the Art of Fiction (April, 2008)

The Mass Observation Archive: Creative Fiction? (January, 2009)

The quality of the voice, voic= es and voice

The voice itself

The voice print

Public voices<= /o:p>

The celebrity voice=

The authorial voice= : the voice from the printed word

=

The professional and the official voice

=

The v= oice of protest

The voice of passio= n and the protest song

re-arguing the evidence (1st October, 2009, post submission)

Conclusion

Titles by the author of this dissertation

re-arguing the evidence (1^st October, 2009, post submission)