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Disappointing but significant

About 2.5% of voters believed strongly enough that the UK should be independent that they voted UKIP. (I don’t have final figures yet).

That’s disappointing — I had hoped for something like twice that — but it’s still significant. Look at the seats that the Conservatives could have won with UKIP’s votes:

From Labour:

Battersea
Crawley
Dartford
Gillingham
Harlow
High Peak
Hove
Medway
Portsmouth North
Sittingbourne & Sheppey
Staffordshire Moorlands
Stourbridge
Stroud
Thanet South
Warwick & Leamington
Watford

From the Liberal Democrats:

Carshalton & Wallington
Eastleigh
Hereford
Romsey
Solihull
Somerton & Frome
Taunton
Torbay
Westmorland & Lonsdale

That wouldn’t have changed the overall outcome, but it would have left Tony Blair with a very slim majority, and the Liberal Democrats with practically no gains since 2001. These votes are there for the taking: when are the Conservatives (or Labour) going to pick them up?

Update: Harlow gets added to the list. A pro-independence Conservative party could probably have cut Labour’s majority to 34.

Security through Partisanship

The Talk Politics blog criticises Lib Dem John Hemming’s attempt to bring greater control (at the last moment) to postal votes.

It doesn’t take a political genius to work out the consequences of allowing political parties to scrutinise applications for postal votes. Within a given district or ward, political parties are well aware of the likely levels of support both for themselves and for their opponents and equally that, if denied a postal vote, a proportion of those applicants will ultimately not vote at all. Far from scrutinising applications in the interests of preventing fraud, which is of course in the public interest, its inevitable that political parties will use the scrutiny process in their own interests by seeking, wherever possible, to depress the turnout in areas where they know their opponents are strong. It’s a system that’s intrinsically open to abuse and, frankly, crying out to be ‘worked’ for every political advantage it could possibly yield which mean, inevitably, that that is exactly what will happen.

How does he think parties will be able to depress turnout? The only way would be by pointing out that some postal vote applications are invalid – either the applicant is not entitled to vote, or the application has not been made by the ostensible applicant. In either of these cases identifying the problem would be a good thing.

This is an instance of the general fallacy of the undesirability of “partisanship” or “adversarialism”. If something should be found out, the best person to find it out is the person with an interest in it being found. A neutral party is needed to decide whether the accusation is justified, but the neutral or disinterested cannot be trusted to make proper
investigation.

The strength of our voting system is not that it is in the hands of the disinterested, but that it is visible to every interested party, who can verify that they are being treated fairly. The problem with postal voting is not that there are fewer “official” checks, but that it takes the whole process out of public view, where interested parties can no longer exert oversight. Whatever his
motives or faults, Hemming is right to attempt to repair that.

Related:
Voting Fraud

Postal Voting

I’m well used to spin and deceit from politicians, and I tolerate it.
When I read in 2002 that “Saddam Hussein could be months away from developing a nuclear bomb if he can find a source of weapons-grade material, according to Western intelligence estimates.” I knew an attempt was being made to mislead me. This is normal.

Some misleading statements are lies which are difficult to prove wrong. Some (like the above) are true, but give a false impression. (The trick there is, as I wrote at the time, that just about anyone could produce a nuclear bomb in a few months if given the weapons-grade material). Some are things that could be true in rare and unlikely circumstances.

But how can anyone say “Overall, the postal voting system is no more prone to fraud than other electoral systems.” That is a simple claim of fact that is obviously and provably wrong. I consider it far more a disqualification for office than any of the usual “Blair lied” episodes.

Make my vote count

Just seen make my vote count, a campaign for PR, via the General Election blog

I was about to sign myself up to its petition, but I saw a (random) quote at the top of the page referring admiringly to the Jenkins Report.

The Jenkins Report was the stitch-up that came up with the absurd “AV Plus” voting system, one carefully tailored to change a two-party system into a three-party system while minimising the danger of allowing voters real choice. (This is the system that is used for the London Assembly).

That puts supporters of democracy in the age-old bind: support a measure (AV+), which, while an improvement on the status quo, falls short of what is needed, or persist with the indefensible in the hope that it improves the chances that the “right” answer will become available.

In most cases, a step in the right direction makes further steps easier (see this paper by Eugene Volokh). On this basis, I support incremental tax cuts, deregulation, “civil libertarian” freedoms, even if they fall far short of what I would like to see. But in this case there seems to me a danger that the adoption of AV+ would mark “end of debate” of our voting system. The chief enemy in the struggle is boredom: most people are not interested. To go through a campaign, a referendum, and a major electoral change, and then tell the bored masses “actually, this still isn’t what we want, now let’s change it again to STV”, is to invite scorn and stubbornness.

I think I will probably have to support MMVC anyway. If it gets any momentum it will bore people whether it succeeds or fails, so it might as well succeed. There’s still the chance of getting a better system than AV+ into the debate, and most importantly, I don’t see any other realistic strategy for getting to STV.

What then?

Tim Bray at ongoing writes that

[The Chinese are] walking away from those “cheap labour” manufacturing jobs that have served as one of the main economic drivers of the last couple of decades. At the end of the day, cheap labour doesn’t stay cheap. And while there are probably some more “cheap labour” places for businesses to move—India, Africa—the consequences for China have to be profound. And I can see the day coming, maybe not in my lifetime but not that much further out, when the whole notion of moving businesses around the world so you can pay people less has become, finally, self-defeating. What happens then?

Of course, the first thing that happens then is that we celebrate the end of global poverty of the kind that exists today. It would be a shame to let that go by without marking the achievement.

The way I always look at this question is to compare Japan and Indonesia. Two chains of islands in the Far East. Indonesia is more than double the population of Japan and much larger. Japan is a high-wage economy, the second largest in the world. Indonesia is a low-wage economy, visible to us as an exporter of textiles and cheap manufactured goods.

What would happen to Western economies if Indonesia were to sink beneath the waves tonight? What if Japan were to do the same?

The first would be a blow; the second a catastrophe. Japan is more valuable to us than Indonesia. If Indonesia (and China, and India, and Africa) were to become like Japan, we would be richer.

To descend to the “micro” scale, the competition for cheap labour (as a whole) comes from more-productive expensive labour in more capital-intensive industry. Goods currently produced in labour-intensive ways will be produced in capital-intensive ways with less, but costlier, labour. Workers currently producing low-value goods will be producing more value.

Cheap-labour manufacturing has a “sweet spot” of goods that are easy enough to make that you don’t need highly skilled labour, but difficult enough that you can’t do it with virtually no labour. This is a moving target: I have heard (anecdotally) that socks are not made in places like Thailand and Indonesia; they are made in the developed world because the process is so automated that unskilled labour isn’t needed. As cheap labour becomes less cheap, the sweet spot will disappear.

The purpose of Schools

“David Copperfield” (a policeman) explains the purpose of Schools in our society.

Womens' Work

I’ve been reading the Equal Opportunities Commission’s report on young people entering jobs.

One finding highlighted in the press release:

67% of women, didn’t know when they chose their career, about the often lower pay for work mostly done by women and of these two thirds of young women said they would have considered a wider range of career options had they known.

In the general spirit of making up “just so stories”, without evidence, to explain why men and women might behave differently (not being an academic, I can participate in this diverting pastime), I have a new one:

Children are generally presented with a mass of propaganda to the effect that making money is nasty, and nice people aren’t concerned about such things. (I still wince at the memory of Roger Hargreaves’ “Roundy and Squarey”). My prejudice leads me to suspect that girls might be slightly more susceptible to this rubbish than boys, and that therefore boys would be more keen to identify and head for well-paid occupations than girls.

Just a thought. It would be interesting if the EOC, or whoever, were to ask a question along these lines in their next survey. My prejudices are all very well, but data would be preferable.

For the record, while I see no need to aim for exact equality of numbers of men and women in every occupation, and am suspicious of quangos like the EOC, they are clearly looking at a real problem. I am sitting here in a room with twenty-six other software developers, twenty-five of which are male, and we’re struggling to fill open positions…

(comments disabled on this post as having “Work” in the title seems to particularly attract spam)

What tops weekly bills?

According to page 14 of today’s Metro, transport tops weekly bills, with £60
spent per week on average.

That’s odd. If average income is £570, then on average we spend about £200 per week on government. That’s as much as on Transport, Recreation, Food and Housing put together. Since I suspect the ONS figures quoted actually include the VAT and other taxes on what we buy, the extent to which taxation dominates our household budgets is even more dramatic.

Tax tops weekly bills.

Voting Fraud

The Register reports a survey of attitudes to voting fraud.

The good news: a majority express concern about voting by SMS or email. It’s actually worrying that only 66% would be concerned about email-voting, but at least it’s a clear majority.

The bad news: “nearly 60%” believe that identity cards would be a solution for electoral fraud.

Now, it is possible for me to vote fraudulently by turning up at polling station and claiming to be someone else. But for that one fraudulent vote, I’m taking the risk of being noticed by someone who recognises me, or by someone who would recognise the person I’m claiming to be, or that the person I’m claiming to be has already voted, or that the person will try to vote later, which I might get away with, but which would at least raise suspicion. If I’m an eligible voter myself, I would be well advised to make my legitimate vote in a different polling station, which would entail some travelling. That’s a lot of work and risk for one crooked vote. I’m sure it happens, but not on any scale.

In the traditional UK system, every single step of the process is open to the public and visible, except for the voter marking the paper.

That’s actually really surprising. I can watch in my local polling stations as voters ask for ballot papers, are given them, hide in a booth to mark them, come out and put them in a box. I can watch the box all day. I can see the box carried to the counting room, and stand on the balcony as counters take the papers out of the boxes and sort them into piles. I don’t have to trust anyone else to oversee the process, it’s all there for me (or any other voter or candidate) to check.

The manual system is vulnerable to small human errors and small opportunistic fraud. It is totally immune to large systematic fraud, because that is bound to attract attention. In Bruce Schneier’s terminology, the system is resilient, despite being imperfect. The security protecting postal or electronic voting, conversely, is brittle: when it breaks, it breaks badly.

It's 13:15

GMT. For about the tenth year, I am leaving my clocks well alone this weekend. There are defensible arguments for doing regular activities a bit earlier in summer, but changing the clocks twice a year just isn’t a sensible way of doing it. From an information systems point of view, it’s just bad data modelling. It would be much easier if we could assume that every day has 24 hours (give or take a second), that every day has a 1:30 am (and no day has two), and that clocks will run by themselves.

Most timetables get revised regularly anyway — train timetables, for example, usually change around the time of the clock shifts. Both at school and at one past job, we had summer timetables and winter timetables without causing any problems.

I don’t know what the average number of clocks per person is these days, but I don’t think it’s unusual to have one in every room, plus watches, cars, microwave ovens etc. etc. BST probably costs about 30-60 minutes of leisure time per person per year. Add about one programmer-day per medium sized business unit per year dealing with errors thrown up by the time shift. Add the cost of all the human errors introduced twice every year. Add the costs of those that need their timetables to stay regular, and therefore have to adjust them to compensate. (I wouldn’t like to be running an airline at this time of year). Compare to the benefits for people who would otherwise have to change their schedules to take advantage of the early mornings, but this way don’t.

If I were to pluck a figure out of the air, I’d say this insanity costs the country about a billion pounds a year. It’s going to get worse, not better. I don’t know how many people routinely have to know the time in more than one timezone, but it makes that much more difficult. Even if we bully the whole world to do the shift at the same date, half the world is still doing it the other way.

My refusal to change my clocks is a token resistance. What’s most frustrating is that most people agree it’s silly to do this, but nobody cares much. I try to keep the issue visible, to remind people what they’re losing.

All of the arguments in defense of the nonsense assume that people are totally incapable of noticing or adapting to the change of the seasons without the government tricking them into it. I have a higher opinion of my countrymen than that.

Update: via Stumbling and Mumbling, a study estimating the effect of clock changes on the equities market. I’m not really sure what to make of that — the author’s explanations are in terms of subjective effects on traders rather than effects on the actual companies being traded, so I wouldn’t count the devaluation detected as a “loss” per se. The author also mentions in passing increased accident rates following clock changes, which I hadn’t taken into consideration.

Speaking of subjective effects, I think that my habit of adjusting my timetable rather than my clocks helps me to adjust as regards sleep and so on. There’s no logical reason for that, but who knows what effect our belief as to what time it is affects our minds?

Also cited, an earlier item from Village Hampden. I’d meant to refer to that, but I couldn’t find it today. I see BST more as a symbol of government’s inflated self-importance than its tyranny — after all, legally everyone could do as I do and leave their clocks alone. It is worthwhile to demonstrate that the state doesn’t control the stars and the planets…

Update 2: Via the Risks Digest (in full, the Association for Computing Machinery Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems), Barclays’ cash machine network brought down for a day by the time change. Every spring and autumn brings similar news stories.