Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘I need to be able to stand up in the House of Commons and show how this lobbying is outweighed by a deluge of support, and I know I can count on you to deliver that deluge of support, just as you know you can count on me. Thank you.’

Applause. Crow acknowledged it with a smile and a wave, and stepped back. Deirdre said a few closing words. Music, this time recorded, started thumping out. The speakers chatted to each other and began to leave the platform.

Hope made her way to the side of the stage to intercept Jack Crow as he came off the steps.

‘Uh, Brother Crow? Could I have a word?’

Crow stopped and moved aside, out of the way of others stepping down, and gave her a friendly but wary smile.

‘Yes?’

‘Interesting speech,’ she said. ‘Inspiring.’

‘Thanks.’ He still looked slightly puzzled. Hope imagined that she must cut a strange figure. She’d meant to ask Crow why he hadn’t replied to her letter, but when it came to it, she hesitated. She wasn’t sure how quickly MPs were expected to answer letters, and as she was hoping to get some help from him, she was wary of starting off on the wrong foot. Instead she found herself saying the first thing that came into her head – something that had genuinely puzzled her for weeks.

‘I’ve only recently joined the Party,’ she said, ‘and I’m not too clear on everything, how the ideas fit together, you know?’

Crow laughed. ‘Me neither!’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it. The Party’s, you know, a broad church, as the cliché goes. What do you want to know?’

He had his head cocked to one side, beard clasped between thumb and forefinger, elbow clutched in the other hand. A slight frown, barely more than a crinkle around the eyes, made him look like a teacher waiting to hear a question from a precocious child.

‘I was just wondering,’ Hope said, ‘how the Safe Work for Women campaign sort of fits into the “free and social market” you talked about?’

‘Ah!’ Crow’s expression cleared, and brightened. ‘That’s pretty straightforward. Glad you asked. The free and social market is one of our most successful and useful ideas, one I think the Government has got right. The economics are quite technical, there’s stacks of literature debating it – you know what academic economists are like, and if you don’t, ha-ha, count yourself lucky – but the basic idea is very simple, really. The neoclassical… uh, the standard model of a truly free market assumes that everyone in the market has perfect information. They must know what choices they’re making, otherwise it isn’t a free and rational choice, right?’ He raised a didactic finger, half-smiling in acknowledgement that he was about to forestall a sensible but predictable objection. ‘Now obviously ,’ he went on, ‘this doesn’t actually obtain in the real world. Nobody really has perfect information. In fact, even if we make it a bit more realistic, they don’t have all or even most of the relevant information. So for the market to be really free, it has to work as if everyone involved had perfect information, or at least as if they had all the relevant information. This is where the social side comes from – the state, of course along with civil society, the unions and campaigns and so on, steps in to allow people to make the choices they would have made if they’d had that information. Because these are the really free choices.’

‘Not the ones they actually chose, then?’

‘Exactly!’ said Crow. ‘Because they’re not the choices they would have made if they’d known all the facts, which would have been the rational choices, so society helps them to make those choices. And that’s your free and social market, right?’

‘But it doesn’t feel very free,’ Hope said, ‘having other people make your choices for you.’

‘It feels a lot freer than making the wrong choices,’ said Crow. He pinched his lower lip for a moment, thinking. ‘Suppose you were a mother, right?’

‘Well, I am actually,’ said Hope.

‘Oh! Great!’ He gave her an up-and-down look, and met her eyes again with a wry glance. ‘And… if you don’t mind me saying… with another one on the way, yeah?’

‘That’s right,’ said Hope.

‘Congratulations!’ Crow beamed. ‘Perfect examples, then. When you buy a toy for your little…’

‘Boy,’ said Hope.

‘… you wouldn’t feel you’d made a very free choice if it turned out to be painted with lead paint that could be chewed off, or its head, say, was stuck on with a sharp spike that could injure the child if he pulled it off. Which they do, don’t they? Pull the heads off. Mine always did. Or if you were buying milk powder for the baby and it turned out to be contaminated with poison. These things did happen, and not so long ago. Tragic stories. The reason they don’t happen any more – well, hardly at all, because something will always slip through – is because the state – here, in China, and so on – makes regulations and employs inspectors to enforce them, and locks up and fines and even expropriates people who break them. Now, you wouldn’t feel very free if you had to do all that checking yourself, would you? Or if you couldn’t do that because it wasn’t practical, and just had to trust to luck, and you could never be sure, you’d always have a nagging doubt, and the effort of putting that doubt out of your mind. Whereas now, you can buy toys and milk and clothes and so on for the kids and feel free from all that worry. Not to mention free from the regret over making the wrong choice.’

Hope felt baffled. ‘But lead paint on toys and contamination in food is… something like fraud, isn’t it? It seems a long way from that to saying that everything needs to be controlled that way. And a long way from saying the government has to make choices for women about where they work.’

‘It’s the same principle,’ said Crow. By now he was beginning to look a little impatient. ‘The government isn’t making choices for anyone. Like I said, it’s enabling people to make the choices they would make for themselves if they knew all the consequences of those choices.’

‘But…’

‘I mean, would you want pregnant women to have the “choice”’ – he waggle-fingered the quotes – ‘to work down coal mines?’

‘Well, no,’ Hope conceded. ‘But working in offices where people once smoked thirty years ago doesn’t seem quite so risky.’

‘Oh, it isn’t,’ said Crow. ‘But it’s still risky. That foul stuff leaks out of the walls and floors for decades .’

‘Only in tiny amounts,’ said Hope.

‘Yes!’ said Crow. ‘That means it’s actually riskier than smoking itself, because the amounts are so tiny. I mean, we’re talking about femtograms per cubic metre. You know how small that is? It’s smaller than a subatomic particle! When you had actual smoke particles in the air, you could at least cough, you had some natural protection – not enough, of course, but some – whereas these nano- and femto-particles can slip right between the molecules and into your lungs and bloodstream. Not to mention your foetus’s lungs and bloodstream.’

‘Yes, well I do understand that,’ said Hope. ‘But what I don’t get is, this just excludes women from more workplaces.’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Crow. ‘The law will mandate that employers of women between the ages of blah-blah, et cetera, will have to strip out or cover with sheet diamond any surfaces that—’

‘But I work from home,’ said Hope. ‘Our house is over a hundred years old, and I’m pretty sure somebody must have once smoked in it. Does that mean we’re going to have to—’