Re-launch

Ok. So I've decided I'm going to do this again.

Hello and welcome back for those of you that have missed me in the almost a year I've not posted (where does the time go?). The plan is to try and post a couple of missives a week in order to get me back in front of the computer and writing again. Because I have this terrible habit of thinking I don't have anything important to blog about, I'm not going to limit my writings to things that actually matter. Instead, I plan to just sit down and force myself to write about whatever comes into my head.

This SEO defying approach may well lead to a distinct lack of intrest, but I guess the point is that I should be doing these sorts of things for me. Improve my writing skill, whether it be politics, football, life or any other nonsense. What won't happen on here from now on is any post about video games, as I'll reserve those for Common Ground Games.

Just occurred to me that the last post on here was in reference to the recent AV debacle. Well what a clusterfuck that was. It does seem that if the reformists can't design a coherent plan for themselves, what chance have they got of convincing others? It all got a little bit Judean People's Front for me. Depressing.

Right, that'll do for now. Like I say, hello again, hope you are well. See you all soon.

The ConDem pact

We have a new government. It's not what many people wanted, but the vagaries of First past the post mean that is not irregular. I for one am cautiously optimistic. Yes we effectively have a tory government, and I can't say I trust them as far as I can throw Mount Everest, but that's beside the point. This coalition deal was one of only two realistic options on the table, the progressive 'rainbow alliance' was never an option. I'll explain more on that in a minute, first I'm going to pick out one or two things from the text fleshed out during the 5 days of negotiations. In doing so I hope I can explain my tentative positivity.

Political Reform
It isn't the first item on the list, but for many people that voted Lib Dem this election it is their number one priority. The coalition agreement is generous on Reform, with Fixed term parliaments coming into power immediately (A no-confidence dissolution vote will now require 55% of the house to vote in favour). Also in the mix is a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) system for Parliamentary elections, and a proposal to see a proportionally elected upper house.

Taxation
This was one of the cornerstones of the Lib Dem campaign, and it is surprising how closely the coalition document matches their manifesto. The personal allowance will increase in real terms each year, with an aim to reaching the £10k target by the end of this parliamentary term. This will become the priority tax cut, moving ahead of the inheritance tax cut in the cue. A rise in non-business capital gains tax will help pay for it.

Civil liberties
Based on the Lib Dem freedom pledge in their manifesto a 'great repeal bill' has been touted.  Henry Porter makes the case for this far more eloquently than me. Also of note (though included in the immigration section) is the ending of detention of children for immigration purposes.

Those are my highlights. The full outline is available to view here.

So yes, the government is going to be tory lead. There is also a glaring problem with the deficit that makes spending cuts likely. Unfortunately Cameron's party is likely to do this with more relish, but at least with The Lib Dems looking over their shoulder hopefully thier priorities will more echo my own.

So for my mind this was probably the best result that could have occurred from a really dodgy situation. As a Lib Dem voter I'm aware that the party could be associated with a very unpopular government which could lead to their eventual downfall. So why the acceptance? It's probably best to look at the alternatves.

1) Confidence and supply -
There was the option for the Lib Dems to enter into a confidence and supply agreement with the the Conservatives. I explored this option in a previous post. However in hindsight, this would not have provided a government that lasted very long. Further, though they would have the power to veto elements of Conservative policy, they would have far less chance of getting their own policies enacted. The benefits listed above would have been vanishingly unlikely.

2) Progressive coalition
Well this was the holy grail to many a left-leaning voter, lock out those bastard Tories and get some good done. All wonderful in principle, however the Lib-Dems and Labour together did not hold enough seats to form a majority. That meant that other parties would have needed to jump on board, mainly the Welsh and Scottish Nationalists.
Fair play to them for effort, but the SNP and Plaid Cymru were campaigning on the back of spending increases for their respective countries. This would have been very hard to accept during budgets in which public spending had to be cut. Agreements on budgets were unlikely. Also, when negotiations began between the Lib Dems and Labour, Labour MPs made public their opposition to a coalition. When considering such a slender majority in parliament, any dissent would make the government untenable. For all our hopes and dreams, Labour and the Lib Dems combined just didn't get enough seats.

So there we go, agree? disagree? Let me know below the line.

No Women? Unfair or representative?

So today @hannahnicklin @davecoveny and others have been discussing the lack of female representation during the coalition negotiations. My argument in short was that if the Parties in question had no strong female negotiators, why should there be Women involved?

Let me make something very clear, I am not in anyway suggesting that women cannot be good negotiators or that female negotiators do not exist, I am saying very specifically that there may have been no women suitable for the role in the parties questioned. I am talking about the benefits of a meritocracy versus tokenism here. I firmly believe that in any situation people should be hired/selected/advanced on the basis of their ability alone. That means that Men, Women and so called ethnic minorities (I fucking hate that term by the way*) should all be judged on their talent in a scenario, not just flung in to make up the numbers. It's surely not fair on those people that may have been able to do a better job.
 

If I remember my numbers correctly there are 7 female Lib Dem MPs and 52 female Conservative MPs. The obvious question to ask at this juncture is why the ratios are so low? There are 362 MPs between these two parties but only 16% of women. Is that not unrepresentative given that roughly 50% of the UK population is female?

That all depends. As with the world of work, a better measure of what would be representative surely needs to look at the level of applicants for a role. When the ratio between number of applicants and number of successful applicants across all groups is balanced, then you can call the successful applicants representative. It would be easy to argue that there are talented women that are put off of entering politics for various reasons. For that reason I commend documents like this, which highlight those reasons, and try to help us break down the barriers.

What I don't like to see though is any bias built into a system, that may penalise a man via so called 'positive action' as much as I dislike to see unconscious bias (or even directed bias), rule out talented 'minorities' because they come from the wrong backgrounds. My answer as always in cases like this is that equality of opportunity is vital but selection must be fair. If that were to mean that 90% of MP's were women, I for one wouldn't complain.

*and I apparently am one.

The markets are jittery!

Don't under any circumstances expect this to be coherent or sensible, I just wanted to get something committed to 'paper' about the uncertainty of the markets, whether that be stream of consciousness or not.

I don't remember us electing a bunch of suited everything-phobes to run the country*. Why is it we are being held to ransom by the markets? The thinking behind this seems to be something like:

1. A couple of people think 'ooh-er, not sure I like that government, I might just pull out some of my investment there.'
2. Other people go 'Shit! look at that! some people are pulling out their investment! I might just go and try and make money out of this by taking up short positions against UK holdings'
3. Further people go 'Oh, look at all those short positions in the UK! Market must be about to tank... Should probably reduce my exposure there'
4. UK stock market tanks. 

You may have noticed that most of the work there was done by strategically shaved monkeys reacting to other monkeys going 'Oh shit!' How is that a guide to the formation of a government, and furthermore economic policy?

There is a running school of argument, that we are only in this position due to the level of debt we hold. That makes no sense to me. Even if we followed that argument to its (market driven) conclusion surely the cost of the debt should rise? Why would the state of the government effect the well being of the top private companies in the UK? 3 days after an election?

I could go on, so I will.

Only one trading day has passed between the election and now. Is that really too long to be making a decision? If I was a party leader, I probably would have slept the whole weekend anyway, what with all that campaigning. The impatience bugs me something chronic.

And what is with the news trying to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy? The BBC spent all morning, telling us how the markets were jittery. If I worked in the stock market, that would make ME jittery. Apparently the FTSE opened 100 points up this morning. Then started to descend, apparently in response to all the news stations saying that it should.

Or in short, this shit pisses me off.

*then again the Daily Express quoting Conservatives did get the highest share of the vote.

Hung parliament

So, I've been quiet for a fair old while. I didn't have much time to blog during the election campaign, and with my limited amount of followers I thought it unlikely that I would do much of an influential job here, deciding instead to go and campaign on behalf of my local Lib Dems.

So here we are, the votes are in and we are in hung parliament territory with one of the trending topics on twiiter for the last two days being #dontdoitnick. The don't do it, referring to potential deal with the tories to allow them to govern, either as part of a coalition or as a minority government.

I hold a lot of distaste for the tories, but cannot agree with this approach. Nick Clegg said prior to the election that the party with the most votes and the most seats would have first right to seek to govern if no party got an overall majority. The Conservatives are the party that are in that situation, so surely he should stick to his word.

There is a definitely a case for electoral reform, in fact it is probably the one issue that I deem most important. However, while Lib Dem supporters may consider themselves 'progressives' and therefore closer aligned with Labour than the Conservatives, it would surely been seen as a stitch up, if Clegg brokered any sort of deal that let Gordon Brown remain as prime minister, when only 29% of people voted for his party!

So what would I do? There is one issue of electoral reform on which the Tories and LibDems appear to agree, and that is the need for fixed term parliaments. If a deal could be offered on that basis, with an agreement to abstain from the Queens speech vote, the Conservatives would be forced to run into a 4 year minority government, with the Lib Dems holding the balance of power on a case by case basis.

There would then be a chance for the Lib Dems to put through a private members bill backing a referendum on our voting system. This would clearly be voted down by the conservatives, but if it was voted down by Labour also then it could be held up as proof that they weren't sincere about it's importance. If it was passed by labour then surely it would also have minority party backing, particularly from the Welsh and Scottish nationalists and therefore become law.


I voted Lib Dem, but I am a democrat first. Shouting 'don't do it Nick' because you don't like the Tories, isn't democratic, and if you want them to jump into bed with Labour, well you should remember how illiberal they have been these last 13 years.

Something about Mephedrone

In the run up to the much-anticipated-but-ultimately-not-very-groundbreaking budget we got to witness what may be the last Prime Ministers Questions session before the election. During it I saw a striking illustration of the ignorance and hysteria that plagues our parlimentarians regarding drugs. Labour MP for Ayr, Sandra Osbourne stood up and said the following...

"...will the prime minister give his assurance that when the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs reports on the 29th of March, that he will act immediately to ban such legal highs"

Ms. Osbourne was driven to ask her question after the death of Jordan Kiltie of Ayrshire. However this report by The Press and Journal and this one from the Scotsman website both suggest that the 19 year old 'may have taken a number of substances.' Of course the outrage must continue unabated despite such uncertainty, and while it is almost certain the late Mr Kiltie had consumed mephedrone on the night he died, the toxicology report that would highlight what other substances may have contributed to Mr Kiltie's death is incomplete.

There is an implicit instruction in the question that goes beyond the call to ban the drug that Brown himself went on to call 'evil'. The right honourable member for Ayr is effectively asking for the Prime Minister to take an action regardless on what the ACMD reports! As the sacking of Professor David Nutt* in October last year showed, Parliament tends not to hold balanced scientific advice from it's advisors in high regard. It does make you wonder what the point of going through the charade of making a report actually is.

*By the way there is a great interview with Prof. Nutt in today's Evening Standard. It cheers you to hear someone being sensible

Voting reform 3: Single Transferrable Vote (STV)

Ok so it took a while, but here comes the third and final part of the Hippo voting reform series.


If you missed parts one and two look here for a discussion on FPTP, it's faults and the reason that we should never use the term 'winner' in an election.
Once you are done with that, have a look here for a gander at the rules regarding an AV election, the system that we may get a referendum on as part of the Voting Reform Bill.


Those following the goings-on in parliament will have seen that the Liberal Democrats tried to pass an amendment to the Voting Reform Bill, to get STV included on the referendum form. This motion got voted down, so you may wonder why I'm bothering to mention it at all.


Well in my opinion STV is the best way of selecting representatives for a given constituency, indeed instead of a single 'victorious' representative being chosen, a number of representatives are selected based on the spread of political opinion in that constituency. Of course whether or not this is an improvement on the current state of affairs is a matter of opinion. Before we look into the positives and negatives let's first observe how it works.


In each constituency there will be a greater number of parliamentary seats up for grabs. This will mean that each constituency is larger, so rather than a single election determining the representative of apporximately 70,000 people, an STV election would simutaneously produce four representatives for a ward containing 280,000 members.

The ballot paper for an election in this system will look the same as one in an AV election (see image) where each voter, instead of putting a single 'x' in a single box, expresses their order of preference for the candidates. A '1' will indicate the candidate that the voter most prefers, followed by a '2' for the second most favoured all the way down to the last candidate that the voter can stomach.

So far, so familiar. But of course this time we need to select (for the sake of our argument) four representatives, how to do that with the information gathered from voters?

In the current case where we are selecting four representatives, we look for the four candidates who recieve one vote more than 20%* once we have taken into account all the preferences. That is any candidate who recieves 28001 votes in our 280,000 constituent ward gains a seat in parliament (assuming a 100% turnout in the kind of ward described above).

The first thing that we do is look at the first choice votes cast. If any candidate gets the required number of votes, they are elected. If more than one candidate gets the required number of votes, all of those candidates are elected. As it takes a set number of votes to pass the threshold, second choice votes are transeferred proportionally to other candiates. How this is done is a little hard to explain so please bear with me for the next passage.

Leaving our example for a second, imagine that a candidate that requires 10,000 votes to be elected actually gains 20,000 votes. this means that the candidate has an excess of 10,000 votes (and is good for my on-the-fly arithmetic). Now for each of the 20,000 votes cast the second choice is considered and counted up. Once totalled, half of those votes are then transferred to the respective candidate. We only transfer half the votes, because half of the votes needed to be used to elect the first choice, but we counted all the papers because we need to discover the second choice votes of all voters in question.

When the second choice votes are considered for all of the candidates that have reached the required number of votes** we then check to see if any of the other candidates have now reached that mark. If not, the lowest ranked candidate is eliminated, and their votes are completely redistributed to the next preference candidate on that paper.

If a Candidate qualifies at this point, then any surplus is again redistributed in the way outlined above and the process is repeated until all places are filled. If this was a little hard to follow, check out the STV page on wikipedia which offers a simple scenario involving treats.

Hopefully now with a (sketchy maybe) grasp of how STV works, we can look at the pros and cons of introducing such a system. Writing on the AV post from this series an anonymous poster said.

"Each party can put up as many candidates as they like without fear of splitting the vote. And independents who broadly support a party (and party rebels) can also choose to stand without needing to worry about taking votes away from a more viable candidate and letting a less preferable opponent in."

This is of course true of AV systems, but with only one seat available in the house where is the incentive to field more than one candidate? At the end of the day political parties care only that the candidate from their party gets voted in. Not that the constituents are happy. If they feel that the mood in a constituency is such that their party will get the votes (safe-seats)  there is no need to field other potential representatives if you know there will be someone voting with your whip once the votes are in!

With STV there is an incentive to field at least enough candidates to fill all the available seats. That then gives the voters a choice to vote for a party but to exclude a candidate that they do not approve of. Just think of the chance for labour voters to oust Hazel Blears or Jacqui Smith!

There is another regularly raised issue with STV, is that with larger, multi-represented constsiuencies, there will no longer be an obvious link between MP's and their constituency. While this may be undoubtedly true if taken flat, the information on the ballot papers could be used to assign candidates to constituencies once the election is complete. Alternatively, maybe having more than one representative would be a good thing anyway. If voters had more than one person to field an issue to, they would be more likely to vote again for the one that responded most positively, even if it meant using one of their preferences for a candidate that is not part of the party they would choose for government. The best performing MP's in this system would be returned to sit again, while the weakest would only manage to serve a single term. What we'd end up with is basically market forces aiding in the survival and ousting of MP's!

That's about it. This was quite tough to explain properly, so if you can suggest any clarifications I'd love to hear from you via the box below. Also, if you agree disagree or have anything to add, join in below. I look forward to hearing from you.

*The reason for this choice of number is actually a logical follow on from what constitutes a working majority (ie 50% of votes +1) In a typical (FPTP) election, gaining one more than 50% of the votes guarantees that no other candidate can have more votes. In this case, only 4 candidates can possibly have more than a 20% share of the vote so we use 20% of the votes cast + 1vote. This system for working out how many votes are required to be elected is known as the 'Droop quota'

**Of course if more than one candidate has already been selected, we may need to look at the third choice or lower preference candidate on any paper. In all cases we just look for the highest useable preference.

Voting reform 2: The basics of Alternative Vote (AV)

I argued in my previous post that First Past The Post (FPTP) is a voting system that should be consigned to the electoral dustbin. Should the Electoral reform bill make it past the lords before parliament is dissolved in the next few months, we may get the chance to boot it out. What will take it's place though?

The alternative vote system offers the (near) guarantee that the elected representative for a constituency will have been voted in by a majority of the turnout. On election day, instead of placing one 'x' in the box of your
favoured candidate/party you number the candidates in your order of preference. To illustrate this, Below are two 'example' ballot forms. The first is a traditional FPTP ballot, the second an AV paper.

Voting Reform 1: What's wrong with FPTP?

MP's recently voted to allow a referendum on electoral reform. That is to give us the option to finally send the outdated and unrepresentative First Past The Post (FPTP) to the scrapheap.

The option on the referendum (if it gets through the House of Lords, no mean feat given that parliament will be dissolved within the next 4 months) will be a straight choice between FPTP and AV. For this, the first blog entry in this series we are going to look at why such a change might be considered necessary. In the second I'm going to ignore the curiousness of the timing of this bill and instead try and explain what you will be voting for, or against in the Alternative vote system. In the final installment I'll go over 'what we could have won' (and what we should IMO get behind) Single Transferrable Vote (STV).

props to power

Really quite a short note to highlight some great work that is being done to try and inject some public enthusiasm into politics.

http://power2010.org.uk/home

The aim is very simple, to get people to vote on what sort of reforms they would like to see in the political system. Once this procedure has been completed the aim is to lobby political parties to include those reforms in their manifestos.

There are only 5 days left to vote, so click on the link, read through the options and vote for those you like. It is worth voting, even if your selection is a clear favourite for inclusion, as the greater support exists for a proposal, the more pressure will exist on parties to include it.

A ramble and a soundbite

So, I've kind of neglected this space of mine so far this year, but am determined to not give up. I like writing, but the problem is that I'm not the fastest at constructing my thoughts so need quite a lot of time to provide the sort of post I feel is sufficient.
As a result there may be a few more stream of consciousness posts on here in the near future as I try and train myself to take the time to document some of the things that are going through my mind. I'm sure my two followers have felt really let down by the lack of output!

Anyway there is a thought that has been flashing through my mind of late that I've managed to boil down to a handy phrase.

"Politics is the art of making a country look worse than it is, in order to gain a highly paid job. Or it's the art of making it look better than it is, in order to keep one"

You can quote me on that :)

I really wanted to slam the BNP...

But then I found out that Anton Vowl was doing it so much better than I ever could.
Go and check out The enemies of reason. It's frequently brilliant, and I could currently only hope to emulate