Puzzles and sports, crosswords to cricket, sudoku to soccer, are all pseudo-problems, artificial obstacles that bear a resemblance to natural problems, the flooded river and the broken car, but have certain properties so different that they should be distinguished and considered separately. For one thing, puzzles and sports are accepted voluntarily, natural problems are avoided if at all possible, though in prosperous times bored individuals invoke natural features, deserts, wild seas, and mountains, as artificial problems, "because they are there". A puzzle or a sport, of course, is undertaken for the pleasure and the delight of the solution, not because the need for the solution is necessarily forced upon you by threatening circumstance.

What further, and more interestingly, distinguishes these pseudo-problems from natural problems is that they are tractable, and they are tractable because they are designed to be solved, which the world's spontaneous difficulties are plainly not. Every aspect of a man-made puzzle invites solution, whereas natural problems are chaotic, a mighty maze indeed, but all without a plan.

Most importantly, puzzles invite solution through a rich structure, which like a novel contains little redundancy; indeed, there is a case for thinking that puzzles stand in relation to the crises of day to day life much as fiction stands to the chronic narrative of our lives. In between these two categories lies detective fiction, combining the most addictive elements of both, and confirming this literary continuum. How odd, therefore, that we know vastly more than we need to about the great fiction writers of the last two centuries, and almost nothing about the great concocters of conundra that, all told, most probably have more readers and have occupied more human time than any other cultural artefact. When next on a train, just look around you.

It is a common theme in primitive, autocractic societies that the essentials supporting life, such as the flooding of the Nile or the growth of the rice crop, are guaranteed by the will or good offices of a monarch, who is often assumed to have divine attributes in view of his or her ability to provide these superhuman services. This arrangement is very convenient for state employees, for not only does the attribution of such powers to the Crown improve revenue for the state, fear of divine and eternal sanctions being so fearful a motivator, but it also implies by analogy that the Crown's servants are better able to provide for the needs of the people than the people themselves, not least because they have powers of vision and divine comprehension as far exceeding those of the citizenry as a god's intelligence towers over that of a mortal.

It seems, therefore, that the current growth of an intrusive and paternalist, maternalist, or nannying in loco parentalist state is not at all progressive, but in certain very important ways is actually a regression to a phase seen repeatedly over human history, namely that of a static hierarchy that funds itself from taxation and claims legitimacy in the administration of the entire economy on the entirely spurious grounds that it has powers over and above those of any natural individual or alliance of individuals within the entire population, or above that achieved by those individuals in spontaneous self-organising economic co-operation.

Indeed, it should be a continual surprise that the broader population surrenders control of their lives to a subset of the people, employees of the crown, which has no plausible claim to superior knowledge of any field other than its own self-interest, a claim that it shares with every man, woman, child and league within that population. To submit willingly to such government is either the result of oppression, which I think is less often true than might be supposed, or, as this unthinkingly respectful reliance on an external and infallible provider would suggest, is superstition, that is to say a judgement based on views that do not for a moment survive exposure to reasoning and the readily available evidence. Errors of this kind are extremely disabling to individuals since they weaken the incentive to self-support, without which no organism can thrive; furthermore, the burdens they place on the overall economy are considerable, entailing much pointless waste, and the combination of these is likely to lead to the decay of wealth and so in more or less short order to societal decay. But, however severe this decline, those in authority will be the last affected, and can persist in asserting their supernal wisdom and the legitimacy of their status to the very end. Indeed, as the general population becomes weakened and debilitated by the impositions of the bureaucracy the latter's claims to superior capability become, for the first time, plausible.

It is not uncommon to hear grumbles about the harmful effect of the electoral cycle on government economic thinking, the which, it is said, is rendered short term and superficial. In part this accounts for the general public’s acquiescence in Mr Cameron’s astonishingly ill-judged Parliament Act, which fixes the term between elections. – The public thought that this would promote long-term thinking, something that is supposed to be in short supply in politics because of temporary tenure, and in the world of business because the pursuit of profit is, irrationally, to be a matter of weeks and months and not years. Indeed, there is a general public prejudice (it is a step too far to call it a consensus since it is rarely expressed until elicited) that governments must provide what private enterprise cannot, a far-sighted plan with consequent preparation, and that if the political cycle does not favour that situation then the cycle must be extended.

There are several confusions here. The first arises from the curious assumption that long term planning is an unmitigated good. On reflection, it is surely obvious that if we plan and prepare for the distant future we inevitably leave ourselves inflexible, and perhaps poorer to no end, if our preparations prove to be mistaken or needless, as they often will. It is by no means foolish to assert that insofar as we should plan and prepare, we should do so only for the short and, in a qualified way, the medium term.

The second confusion is the view that businesses and private individuals think only in what is, as compared to government timescales, the short term. Again, a moment’s reflection shows that the private sector is fully motivated to defend its interests over time insofar as it can. Thus, individuals and companies prepare very carefully for the short term, and even plan and invest (in a qualified way) for the medium term insofar as it can be seen to matter to their interests, which it often does, and moreover they will do so without cramping the potential for responsiveness to emergent situations.

The third muddle is grounded in the perfectly correct observation that the cycles of political government are too short even for medium term economic planning. However, rather than concluding from this that the cycles should be longer, and forced to be longer, it is, I suggest, more sensible to start with the observation that the short political cycle has emerged as the maximum tolerable length of time to be entrusted to human, all too human politicians, if they are not to run mad with power, or entrench themselves to such a depth that they cannot be excavated except by explosive societal change, which is destructive for all and to be avoided. Thus, if the political cycle cannot with safety be any longer, then medium term planning is not the business of government (any more than long-term planning, which is nobody’s business because the necessary foresight is absent).

The solution to the grumbles with which I started, grumbles that betray a justifiable concern that the balance of plans and preparations for the short, medium, and longer term is not optimal, is indeed to examine the role of the state. But rather than extending the period of political tenure, with all the hazards that brings, we should accept that governments are inherently short-term thinkers, and instead we should leave all longer term decisions to the distributed information processing system of the wider population and its economy, where alone can sufficient information be gathered and evaluated for such plans to be wisely made.

In other words, to facilitate longer term thinking in economy and other matters, and only insofar as we need it, government must do less, and the people more, for not only are governments ill-suited to this forward projection on anything other than the smallest scales, but their dreams and fantasies will be forever abruptly (and in my view fortunately) interrupted by the profoundly sensible precaution of the fickle electoral cycle.

There are some exceptions to this general point, that is to say areas where government can and must assist though not undertake thinking and preparation beyond the political timescale, for example in law, in policing, and in defence. This was achieved even in the relatively recent past by allowing the institutions associated with these activities, the armed services, the legal profession, and in a more modest way the police force, a sense of their own individual past, their own history as distinct from that of the state and the rest of society, and so creating in these bodies a degree of personality and autonomy from the political process which ensured that the institutions functioned more as persons or private companies of such persons. The government is a creature of day, but the Crown’s judiciary and the Regiments of Guards serve for the duration. This personalisation of certain functions of the state permitted them to think as if they were individuals and thus in timescales that without risk exceeded the political cycle. It was, in retrospect, a very satisfactory, and a very illuminating solution.

Perhaps we know ourselves, and better know,
That light, elusive, locus which is self
Than any point to which that locus tends,
Expending in a meteor’s tail the health,
From which the personality depends,
That we at length may sow
Patterns on a thankless universe,
Which as blankly and as little understands
The ardent labour of these shaping hands
As those who have a child or write in verse.

Our actions and experiences constitute the mind
With such a tangled, dark, obsessive weaving
In and throughout of threads of cause,
As if we were built self-deceiving,
Skilful in the handling of our oars
But destination-blind;
And, though coxless, passionate for speed
We thrash the water round us into foam;
Yet most single-skullers make it home
To some quiet Ithaca and plant their seed.

Are there such multitudes of fertile bays?
Or does Brahma moderate the sea
That knocks us softly, roughly, into places
We would not know to choose if we were free
And these inviting isles with all their graces
Lay at the joints of infinite ways?
No. Space is wide and cool, landfalls far and few;
What spirit could excuse the harm
And clumsiness of an all-cradling palm?
We see not how we navigate, and yet we do.

This blind, talented, unselfconscious fumbling
Fills the lives of millions, and my own;
It distends the middle ground of common sense
With a pregnancy of meaning proudly shown
To strangers, or boasted of across a fence,
And when born as action’s tumbling,
Becomes just facts, for which time’s surveyors
Black-cap their virtue with a page of ink,
Or which they shudder from and choose to wink
At, lest a harshness silence brilliant players.

For some the virgin-birth-pangs of a day’s quick thought
A year it might be, or a young man’s life, the tender,
And steady growth of a trembling act
Are what the body lives for, the things that render
Unto poets the feelings which a poet’s tact
Alone can pacify and rear as other’s ought.
These unacknowledged Caesars, home from the wars
But bootyless, each have a striking tale to tell
Of how, with Julian modesty, they conquered Hell,
And, true rakes, made all the devils whores.

Or, proud of their defeats, hand pictures round,
“Me in a Posture of Abject Fear and Trembling,
My Humiliation at a Difficult Pass,
How I Lost a Year through Life’s Dissembling,
Tears of Laughter at a Romantic Farce,
What Poets Find Just Underground,
Buried in their Gardens, Wrapped in Sacks,
And this is Me in Ironised Distress
And Me Again in a Different Dress,
Shocked at the Knowledge of All the World Lacks.”

We shift upon our chairs and think of heaven.

A friendly critic starts to expound the rhyme,
“‘Urinary depots’ is terribly witty,
A shower of humour from Joyce’s emerald clime,
But smooth though it is, the politics are gritty,
And politics are undoubtedly the leaven
Of all the Irish work.” “The ludic interplay”,
Another starts, “is surely crucial here, it shows...”

It shows, it shows, it shows…
…that our period’s quintessential poetry grows
In potholes unenlightened by the Humean day.

Theories are formed in the hope that they have explanatory power; and in the short term we properly evaluate them by this rigorous criterion. As they age their comparative explanatory power usually weakens as they are replaced by superior theories, and if we are wise our attention then turns to the evidence that these redundant theories provide of the problems they were designed to tackle, problems that may be present in phenomena or in experience that is hard to observe, but is denoted in the implied or the overall framework and theory, considered as one, that the author presented.

In other words, the residue that theory leaves to history is description.

The combined vote share of the Conservatives and the United Kingdom Independence Party in Clacton was 84%, and in Rochester and Strood some 77%. Construing this as an anti-Labour-Liberal-Democrat-and-Green vote of approximately 80% it is clearly very significant, notwithstanding the many differences between the Tories and UKIP.

In my view the underlying cause for this result will not be discovered by continuing to focus on previous party allegiances, in other words by asking whether the voters are protesting Tories or irritable Labourites. Instead, it is necessary to consider the main correlations between those voting Conservative and those voting UKIP (CUKIP), on the one hand, and on the other those voting Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green (LLG). I have no data for what I am about to suggest, but it is intuitively obvious to me that that CUKIP voters are less likely to be either public sector employees, or to work in or own companies that are in effect public sector clients, amongst which I include industries and professions that are heavily dependent on state regulation for their business, for example lawyers, chartered surveyors, accountants, architects, state-supported charities and NGOs, and employees of National Grid or the various railway companies, amongst many others.

LLG voters, by contrast, are much more likely to be public sector employees or clients, and indeed higher income versions of those people, a fact that explains the now yawning gulf opening up between the Labour party and its original supporting class. As an intellectual, bourgeois, authoritarian statist, Ed Miliband has little time for the rebellious, and to my mind admirable, self-protective recalcitrance of the lower third of the social pyramid, a response which he radiates in person and transmits through his shadow cabinet for all to see. It would be unfair, of course, to blame this entirely on Mr Miliband, for the trend is very long-standing, beginning with the Fabians, though Blairisme, if I may be permitted the French term, is the most recent and important watershed explaining the weakening of the habitual Labour vote in England and Wales. In Scotland, where Labour support is simply evaporating, this is additionally accounted for by the SNP's employment of national socialist arguments to assert an alternative collective interest bringing together the statist middle classes and the working people, a compact not so dissimilar, indeed, from that negotiated by Attlee and Bevin.

From this perspective, Mr Cameron's most significant error, which is probably not his own (even his mistakes are cribbed), was to pursue the collectivist vote, the bulk of which is composed of public sector clients of various kinds. This out-reach policy disaffected a substantial part of the Conservative core, creating an opportunity for UKIP and, still more significantly, gave those abandoned by Labour and the Liberal Democrats no reason to do anything other than sit on their hands.

UKIP's achievement, and it is no small one, has been to transform itself from a Conservative party splinter group to a movement that is in its emotional timbre an individualist party opposed to the interests of the public sector clients that currently dominate British life, which is why UKIP's opponents can correctly say that the party hates modern Britain. However, the criticism has no teeth since resentment of the bourgeois public sector putsch that has gradually materialised since 1945 turns out to be very widespread. This broad appeal has enabled UKIP to pick up voters across the population, including many who have previously supported Labour, and even many of those who have not voted in the last four or five elections (hence their silver-backed age distribution). The downside of this strategy is that they are, as their critics delight to say, a negative party, and while this may be a presentational weakness, a positive program of political action is essentially characteristic of the illiberal, interfering, statist approach against which the remaining non-public sector voters are rising, so UKIP's negativity is unavoidable given the aims of the rebellion.

Whether this movement will be successful is obviously very uncertain. The extended public sector is both entrenched and well-salaried, and perhaps much too numerous to defeat electorally. Moreover, in order to mobilise a coherent political party some degree of collectivist motivation is inevitable, and in UKIP's case the possibility of a slide towards a nationalist group identification, verging on socialism, is real, and signs of this are already evident. In such a case they would become similar to the SNP, though in the very different and less sectarian English context this would not be a winning ticket.

If, on the other hand, UKIP can maintain organisational cohesion while staying true to the individualist drive responsible for its prominence, there is a real chance that the insurrection will manage to put its tribunes into positions of power. Of course, this will only be fundamentally important if those delegates can deliver drastic reductions in public spending and thus produce a reduction in the size of the public sector client vote sufficiently large to transform the character of British democracy. UKIP's prospects therefore hang by the single thread of rhetorical tact, a need that explains both their hazy and occasionally contradictory policy positions, and their otherwise apparently imprudent reliance on the voice of one man.

The state claims to have sole and exclusive possession of the collective interest, and does so quite plausibly since it is funded from expropriations given under the threat of coercive force. That is to say, because the state's income is only provided unwillingly it is invulnerable to donor influence. Indeed, notoriously and even in democracies, taxpayers have little control over the way their taxes are spent and are frequently but powerlessly dissatisfied. By contrast organisations or institutions funded from willing gifts may be accused of self-serving bias in proportion to the satisfaction of their funders.

But the truth is that the state is as much a vehicle of sectarian interest as any more readily identified pressure group. As already noted, taxation must be coerced, otherwise it would go unpaid. This fact implies that the cost of government services exceeds their market value, in other words the price that individuals would willingly pay to achieve the same ends. From this it necessarily appears that the principal beneficiaries of government spending must be the state's employees, considered as a co-operating group, and that the system is optimised in their interest.

It is a common error to suppose that populations become restive when they lack political freedom and that they can be pacified with the offer of extensions to that freedom. However, the proximate cause of dissatisfaction is always economic constriction or coercion, and only distally lack of of political avenues for the expression of political choice.

The Scottish case is an example. The devolution of political power to the Holyrood administration has in no way diminished desire for liberty, and national independence for Scotland will not address it either. The relationship between the European Union and England (nota bene: England, not the United Kingdom) is similar. There is an increasing desire for economic freedom, which manifests itself in part as a wish for political freedom, for restoration of the nation state, but in both these cases, Scotland and England, political freedom is a proxy or at best a preliminary to economic freedom, and it will not in itself satisfy the desire for a life free from constriction on the individual's wish to better his or her condition and that of their family.

Thus, a government faced with a restive population or subsection of that population errs if in attempting to pacify the rebellion it offers an extension of political freedom. This will not only fail to dissipate resentment, but it will actually increase it, since this extension of political freedom, say self-government or a tier of local government, will inevitably only serve to increase the economic coercion that is the primary cause of the initial disaffection. Indeed, the political cadres and bureaucracies that benefit from self-government will usually tend to be illiberal, as we can see from the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP); and in any case, funding an extra tier of government will necessitate the levying of additional taxes.

Given this, a wise central government will respond to separatist movements not with political palliatives, but with deep cuts in taxes and public services at the local level.

This may seem counterintuitive, and many will imagine that while tax cuts would have some appeal, local services should be increased if at all possible, since the offer of 'something for nothing' will surely please the electorate. However, this is mistaken since the central provision of services is constricting in itself, and will lead to public frustration even if those services are provided at no cost to the user. This is a point that is poorly understood even by many on the economically liberal side of the argument.

This is not to deny that political freedom can and does facilitate economic freedom, or that there is some degree of correlation between the two. The point is that political liberty is not the principal and most intensely desired good of the typical individual, an observation that I derive not from what people say, but from what they do. If political freedom were in fact so important, democratic participation would currently be at high not low levels. I conclud that people wish to do and to make, not to vote.

Indeed, we are not that troubled by distant political government. If we were so, there would be a much a powerful emotional loathing of Westminster and the European Union, not the mild contempt and irritation that is everywhere evident, much to the frustration of eurosceptical politicians. But, as anyone who has engaged with local government knows, deeply felt, passionate hatred of state coercion really only emerges when the individual is faced with local councillors or local government officers, and particularly the latter. This leads me to predict that in the event of Scottish independence, which I think more or less probable because of the extremely close referendum result, that country would prove to be more or less ungovernable, and that a return to Westminster control under distressed and distressing circumstances would be the inevitable and ultimate result. This is undesirable, and can be prevented by tax cuts and the abolition of one or more tiers of local government across the United Kingdom as a whole.

In a heavily regulated economy where risk is largely socialised, the ability to judge and evaluate situations atrophies. People just don't know how to make up their minds about goods and services. This simple fact accounts for much of the difference in societal tone between, for example, the US and the UK. It is noticeable even when comparing the United Kingdom and Japan, where I have seen housewives unwrapping supermarket shirts to test the seams almost to destruction before buying or tossing them contemptuously back on the pile. Such a scene is almost unthinkable in Britain, which is marked by passivity in the face of choices, a pacific willingness to accept the assertions of salesmen, waiters and shopkeepers, a lazy incuriosity about the details of an offered good, and a self-pitying resignation when it proves to be disappointing. All these are British traits, though less marked in some parts than others (Essex is a Little Japan, a Little America in some respects).

Teams are obviously collective interests, but they plainly compete, and of course it is this competition that gives interest to the spectacle. No one would pay for tickets to watch two teams walk on to the pitch, shake hands and agree to call it a draw (though this is the normal state of British politics). It would seem then that the attraction of such sports is to be explained not by collectivism in general, but by the special form that presents collective alliances in competition.

However, since we enjoy watching individuals in sporting competitions it seems safe to infer that competition in general is indeed very interesting to us, but then again there is a powerful tendency to represent single combat as a collective activity by regarding the individuals as representatives of larger collective teams, suggesting that we are significantly more interested in team sports than in competitive situtations involving individuals. That is to say, we do not project ourselves into a struggle between individuals by identifying with one of the two individuals, but by supporting a group of which one of the combatants is a member or at least a representative.

Thus, while it is clear that that competition in general is exciting to us, whereas collectivism in general is not, it is equally obvious that the limited form of collective alliances in competition is still more interesting than single combat. The implications for our evolutionary past are plain: inter-individual competition is real, but the interests of individuals frequently clashed through the medium of collective alliances and it is these latter situations that have moulded our psychological preferences.

Furthermore, competitive sports of all kinds seem to become more interesting to individuals in situations where real-world or economic competition is suppressed, by socialism for example or by the wealth preservation strategies of the elites (who castrate and remove the horns of their cattle, all the better to farm them). Unable to strive and better their lot in life, much of their energy is directed into the support of agents who are engaged in less restricted competition for advantage. In this economic environment individuals will enjoy the spectacle of single combat, especially in fictional situations or on film, but, as noted above, the struggle is often rendered collective in that the individual is held to be the representative of a collective interest, often nebulously the "good".

And of course, it is obvious that team sports, perhaps sports in general, are less interesting to individualists, who often enough betray themselves to their work colleagues by failing to take an interest in cup finals and test matches. In the UK enthusiasm for football overall and regardless of the team supported, is an important test of socialisation, and serves as an indicator that you are a placid member of the collective, venting competitive urges through this harmless medium.