Author: anomalyuk

Fixed Term Parliament

All through the election campaign I told myself, and my loyal readers, that it was just a game – that, out of habit, I would follow it closely, but in the spirit of a major sporting event rather than something that was actually important.

In the face of the new Conservative-LibDem government, however, I am struggling to maintain my cynicism. This government really might make a difference to the real world.

Abolishing ID cards is good. Abolishing ContactPoint is great. But abolishing Parliamentary Sovereignty – that is genius. And done with such subtlety, as a rider on fixed-term parliaments. “Oh, and by the way, Parliament will no longer be able to get rid of the government by majority vote”. Talk about balls.

Of course, the newly created system does not make sense. We could end up with a government that can’t be sacked, can’t resign, and can’t govern. What then? Then they will make it up as they go along – and probably at least some of the inconsistency will be resolved by further limiting the powers of parliament.

At the Blogger Bash, I asked the panellist how bad things would have to get before they would give up on democracy. Perry de Havilland (I think) stood up for democracy, saying that it was important that the government could be thrown out. But that is not the same thing as having the voters choose MPs and MPs choose government. You could have the Prime Minister appointed for life, and ministers too, and merely have them recallable by a popular supermajority, and that would still meet the criteria.

Most people think that the government should, in principle, be controlled by the people, but in specific cases most intelligent people come to the conclusion that reducing democratic control actually produces better outcomes. If the new contradiction between the government and the commons majority resolves itself in favour of the government (as I suspect it will), then it should be possible to demonstrate the improvements brought about by reducing democracy.

This would not have been possible even thirty years ago. What has made it possible to casually take away what were always seen as vital fundamental democratic principles is that recent democratic governments have been so bad that nobody cares any more. When I casually mention to strangers that my preferred political outcome is a military coup installing an absolute monarchy, the most common response is “well, it couldn’t be any worse.” They probably aren’t serious, and don’t realise that I am, but the reaction is almost automatic – what is the point of defending the democratic system that gave us Gordon Brown? If we do escape democracy, it may not be through violent revolution, or Mencius’ “True election”, but simply through the influence of voters being chipped away to a chorus of apathy. The electorate will, reasonably in my view, just not care.

Alternative Vote

It’s beginning to look quite likely that we could end up with the Alternative Vote (AV) system. Aficionados of electoral reform will tell you that it’s not a proportional system, which is quite true. The results it produces will be quite different from those produced by multi-member STV or d’Hont. That doesn’t mean, however, that it would not be a significant change.

Unlike the multi-member systems, AV will continue to give small parties no seats. What AV does, however, is allow much more effective signalling by voters. It is very plausible that it could help small parties, over time, become big parties.

The point of AV is that it saves the voter from having to do tactical-voting calculations. Currently, anyone who votes UKIP, or Green, or SSP, or BNP is sacrificing their (tiny) influence on the result of the election in favour of making a public statement. With AV, you can do both – vote SSP ,Labour as 1 & 2, and there is less chance that your SSP vote will let in the Lib Dems. (Not no chance – there are still circumstances in which it might turn out that you would have got a different result by voting Labour, SSP, but they’re complex and not very predictable)

2.5 million people voted UKIP last year. Only 900,000 did last week, so quite possibly the other 1.6 million didn’t vote UKIP because of the wasted vote issue. If in the next general election, the constituencies which went 8% or 9% UKIP became 25% or 30%, they probably still wouldn’t get any seats, but they’d get a lot more publicity, and they wouldn’t be far short of getting MPs.

The same logic applies to high-profile candidates who defect from their parties to stand as independents. It becomes a straight popularity contest between them and the “official” candidate, since any supporter of the party can vote rebel-1 official-2.

AV might benefit the BNP most of all, since they have most to gain by giving voters a chance to anonymously show support for them. Today, nobody knows, do the BNP get only 2% because nearly everyone hates them, or because they’re a small party and it’s a wasted vote, or because most people think nearly everyone hates them, since they only get 2%? In the last case, it would only take a few election cycles for them to look less like outcasts to those who are secretly disposed to vote for them, but put off by the opprobrium.

At the end of the day, though, a politician will still win. I’m not paying all this attention because I think it’s important, it’s just more entertaining than the Premier League. But if you do care about who wins, then while multi-member STV is still the first choice, you probably shouldn’t turn your nose up at AV.

The Election

Some disconnected thoughts:

Politics as Entertainment – election night was the most entertaining media event of the year. Possibly the most entertaining event ever for me – I sat up until 1am on Monday to watch the end of the snooker, but I was glad when Robertson won the last few frames to get it over with. I didn’t go to bed on Thursday. The only bad bits were actually listening to politicians.

Poisoned Chalice – for both major parties, there must surely be a temptation to put the other lot in to bat. Whoever forms the government will have to take over a very difficult situation, and as soon as they hit serious trouble, the government is likely to fall and they will have to fight an election on a record of chaos and failure. The opposition can make a show of being humble and helpful, and then attempt to knock the whole thing over at a time of their own choosing.

Cleggmania – Either Clegg made a big impression in the debates on people who couldn’t actually be bothered to vote, or voters were in “X-Factor” mode when answering pollsters, which is different from voter mode in the polling booths

Technical Difficulties – With 40000 polling stations, some few are bound to be affected by incompetence or unforeseen circumstances. This will no doubt be used to argue for hi-tech voting systems, which will solve the problem by making such failures so frequent they cease to be newsworthy

Lib Dems – The Lib Dems told me to vote for them because only they could stop Gordon Brown. They can now stop Gordon Brown, so what do they tell people if they don’t do it? But no doubt they told many others that only they could stop Cameron.

Esther Rantzen – was always an irrelevance, and lost her deposit. Was no more worthy of media coverage than the Monster Raving Loony William Hill party

Predictions – the results were in line with a lot of polls, if not the ones from the last couple of weeks. I don’t remember anyone addressing the possibility though of the Conservatives not having a majority, but Labour and Lib Dems together not having one either. It seems to be hitting everyone as a new idea.

Voting Systems – radicals of all types hoping for proportional representation can forget it. If anything, we would get AV+, which would help the Lib Dems but nobody else. The BNP might get a seat in the North-West, and UKIP might get one in the South-West, but Marxists, Greens, Libertarians, etc. would get nothing.

Two-horse race

3 new leaflets this morning – one from the Labour candidate, one card from Nick Clegg, and one letter from Nick Clegg. All three carry pictures of two running horses. The Lib Dems say only they can beat Labour, but Labour say only they can beat the Conservatives. That’s the main point of all the material.

The Lib Dems seem more convincing – for one thing, unlike Labour, their illustration demonstrates that they understand that horse races involve jockeys. But of course, the authorities on horse races are still considering the Lib Dems outsiders, though at 11/2 they’ve nosed ahead of Esther Rantzen.

Only one of the three documents (the postcard from the Lib Dems) has any mention of policy, and one of the four bullet points there is “action to get our economy moving again”, which doesn’t quite qualify as a policy for me.

Anyone out there who thinks that democracy is a good thing – how can it be right that the vast bulk of the material given to me by candidates is concentrated on the question of who is more likely to win? OK, PR would change that somewhat, but really, what is the explanation?

Previous posts: Letters from Gordon, Dave and Nick, The Liberal Democrats – an apology,

The Cancer of Bureaucracy

I just got round to reading Bruce Charlton’s short piece The Cancer of Bureaucracy (h/t Isegoria)

It feels exaggerated and overstated. But I’d be a lot more confident in dismissing it if I could find one thing in it that was actually wrong.

I suppose there is one thing which the article misses, which is the private sector. In my experience, in private-sector organisations, while the bureaucracy Charlton describes does exist, it is subservient to an individual decision-maker. As such, it sometimes shrinks instead of growing, and the bureaucratic process is carried on in the shadow of “what Tom thinks” – where Tom is the person whose opinion matters, either because he is in charge, or his judgment is trusted by the person who is in charge.

But really, how important is the private sector in the direction that our society is taking today? While in raw numbers it’s still a bare majority of activity, so much of it is now under the indirect control of public-sector bureaucracy, that private decision-making is restricted to a much smaller, and diminishing, sphere.

Recall petitions

Voting systems used to fascinate me. I miss caring about which PR system was fairer more than I miss believing that the government worked for me.

That’s pretty much gone, now, but I just had a thought about the Conservatives’ plans for introducing recall of MPs.

I was wondering whether they had taken into account the small number of people necessary to elect an MP. Luton South is a 4-way contest, so 30-35% of the vote may well win it. If turnout is around 40%, then the winning total may be no more than 12% of the electorate. So finding any way of demonstrating that even a newly-elected MP has the confidence of his constituents won’t be easy.

It turns out that the Tory plan is that a petition of 10% of the electorate forces a by-election. I think I can safely predict that there won’t be a single MP in the house that 10% of the electorate wouldn’t want to get rid of, so the only obstacle to getting a by-election anywhere in the country is being organised enough to collect the signatures.

Any existing research on how easy it is to get signatures is probably worthless, because existing petitions are a complete waste of everybody’s time. This is the sort of thing where people are getting very much more efficient.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the recall plan led to every week being a by-election week. Should be a laugh.

The Liberal Democrats – an apology

Earlier in the week, I wrote of the Liberal Democrats’ election literature, that it says “that ‘in many areas’ only the Lib Dems can beat Labour. It tries to give the impression that I am in one of those areas, without being so dishonest as to actually say so.”

Possibly they were stung by my remarks into stepping up their dishonesty, because I got a leaflet yesterday claiming outright “It’s a two horse race here – the Conservatives can’t win in Luton South.”

If I wanted to know about horse races, I would, as the Labour and Conservative parties did, look at what the bookmakers were saying, and they do indeed have the “can’t win” Conservatives as odds-on favourites, and the Liberal Democrats as fourth-place outsiders, behind even Esther Rantzen.

I wouldn’t criticise the LDs for claiming they have a chance when impartial observers say they don’t, but when they claim that the odds-on favourites can’t win – why should any intelligent observer believe a word they say about anyone else?

There is a slight moral conundrum. Tactical voting, like other coordination games, can exhibit self-fulfilling prophesies. If the Lib Dems can lie well enough that they are bound to beat the Conservatives, it would become true, as tactical anti-Labour voters who believed them would vote for them. So if they do come third or fourth, will their offence be that they lied, or that they didn’t lie enough?

Home Education registration dropped

When I wrote my earlier post, the top reason in my mind why a Tory government would be slightly less unpleasant to me than a Labour one was that the Conservatives had promised to repeal the requirement in the new Education Act for home educators to be registered.

As I went through the “filling-in-the-links” stage of the post, I discovered that that clause had been knocked out by the Lords, and the bill had gone through without it.

I felt rather silly for having missed that. However, on checking I could not find one mainstream national news organisation had reported the change. Google News shows 19 stories on the subject, all of them either from specialists or not actually mentioning the home education part. It was also picked up by some local papers such as The St Albans and Harpenden Review

There is a conspiracy of silence on all sides about home education in the UK. Home educators prefer to keep a low profile, because of the risk of the government getting interested and putting in its big boot, particularly since Badman. The education establishment is equally quiet, because they don’t want to draw attention to the number of parents who value state education not merely at less than it costs the taxpayer to provide, but as so completely worthless that it is preferable to do the job themselves.

Letters from Gordon, Dave and Nick

The other interesting element of the election is the literature I’m being sent. The letter from Gordon Brown is about the sort of policies he would introduce if he were ever to become Prime Minister. It barely mentions the Labour party, and makes no suggestion that this Brown person has ever had power of any kind in the past.

The one from Cameron is about civil liberties – ID cards, ContactPoint, and so on. I’m suspicious enough to think that I am on some Conservative database as being concerned about those things, and my neigbours are getting letters from Cameron about clamping down on immigration or spending more on hospitals, depending on what the database says about them. (Actually, rising immigration is one existing phenomenon that this Gordon Brown chap claims in his letter to be opposed to).

The letter from Clegg is the most interesting. It has nothing to say about policy, but says only that “in many areas” only the Lib Dems can beat Labour. It tries to give the impression that I am in one of those areas, without being so dishonest as to actually say so. (Update: they have since rectified that)

Attempts to guide tactical voters are not restricted to party leaders though. The local Labour leaflet devotes one side to claiming that the Lib Dems can’t win in Luton South, and that therefore only Labour can keep the Tories out, and the local Conservative leaflet agrees fully. They are not identical, though – Labour cite William Hill as an authority, but the Conservatives go with Ladbrokes. (if the leaflets are correct that 14/1 is available against the Lib Dems, I think it’s probably worth a flutter).

Meanwhile local LD blogger Andy Strange is keen to claim that they’re really in with a chance, because Nick Clegg has visited twice…

I’m a bit confused about the Lib Dems claiming on one hand that Labour and Conservative are so alike as to be one “Labservative” party, and on the other that I should not vote Conservative because only the Lib Dems can get Gordon Brown out. If I want the Conservatives, and the Dems’ first claim is correct, then I should prefer Labour, who are like the Conservatives, to the Lib Dems who are claiming to be different.

OK, I’m not really confused. I am perfectly aware that the Lib Dems will say anything at all that they think might get them votes. Not that the others have more moral scruples, but they have slightly more actual history to tie down voters’ idea of what they stand for, and can’t therefore claim as wide a range of different positions simultaneously as the LDs