Monthly Archives: November 2010

Next time, engage brain before getting Marie Antoinette to run the country

What a jolly-good so-called recession we’re having, according to Lord Young. Interest rates are down so we’re paying less on our mortgages, and losing 300,000 jobs in the public sector is well within the margin of error. We’ve never had it so good! While we’re at it, why not let them eat cake?
Lord Young has now retracted and apologised for his comments, with what possibly counts as the understatement of the year – “inaccurate and insensitive”. What remains, though, is the dawning sense of realisation that the UK electorate appears to have got Marie Antoinette and her chums to run the country, during what is already a very difficult time for those below the 90th income percentile. (And remember, earning about 50k puts you that 90th percentile!)
One has to wonder whether a cabinet of millionaires – some self-made like Lord Young, others living off trust funds while telling us no one should get something for nothing like George Osborne – is in the best position to steer the country through the tough economic choices we’re facing and act in “the national interest” – if such a thing exists in the first place. Lord Young’s pronouncement is only the latest in a series of examples of members of this government being hopelessly out of touch with reality.
So maybe next time we’ll think twice before hiring Marie Antoinette to run the country. In the meantime, where’s that cake?

Maybe we should look more closely at the other half of That Bill

Earlier this week, the Labour party tried to use an arcane Parliamentary procedure to hold up the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. To you and me, that’s the AV referendum bill, and both the government and sections of the media the media tried to convince us that Labour’s only motivation was to try and scupper or delay the referendum. Lord Falconer, who tabled the motion to delay the bill, claims that his and his party’s concern is mainly around the second part of the bill – the one that deals with reducing the number of MPs in the House of Commons and equalising the size of constituencies. Regardless of their true motivation, I do think Labour have a point in challenging the second part of the bill.
In my own head, I have affectionately come to call the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill the “AV and Gerrymandering Bill”. I find supporters of the coalition government get very upset by the allegation of gerrymandering, and strictly speaking the proposed redrawing of constituency boundaries isn’t likely to particularly benefit one party. Having said that, it is likely to have at least as fundamental an impact on our political system and landscape as changing the voting system to AV, and while the general public is being given a referendum on one of these issues, the government appears to be going out of its way to stop us from having a say on the other half of the bill. To quote from Labour List,

The way the change is being rushed through, though, is of more concern. It states that:
“a Boundary Commission may not cause a public inquiry to be held for the purposes of a report under this Act.”
Contrast this with s.6 of the 1986 Representation of the People Act, which the Bill intends to repeal, which gives 100 electors the power to force the Boundary Commission to exercise an inherent discretion to hold a public inquiry.

Sure, cutting the number of MPs in the House by 50 out of a current 650 doesn’t seem like a big deal – there’ll be fewer of them to fudge their expenses, the cynics might say. The proposed make-up of the constituencies, however, is another matter. For those of you not in the habit of reading Parliamentary bills (It’s fun – your should try it!), what’s proposed is the following:

  • Retain two exception constituencies which will continue to have natural borders, determined by history and geography (Orkney & Shetland, and the Outer Hebrides – none of the other island constituencies get to retain their integrity);
  • divide the population of the rest of the UK by 598 (the number of remaining constituencies) and call the number you get U (U is currently around 75,000);
  • then draw the constituency boundaries in such a way that no constituency (except the aforementioned two) has a population of less than 95% of U or greater than 105% of U;
  • whilst trying to keep Wales, Scotland, England and Northern Ireland separate, i.e. have no constituency straddling the borders.

In practice, what this means is that you start in one corner of the UK and draw a line when you reach 75,000 people; then you move on to the next bit and draw another line at the next 75,000; and you repeat this another 596 times. I reckon about 10 constituencies in, you will have lost any meaningful historical and geographic boundaries you and I might be familiar with from past elections. Not only that, but at the next election, you get to do it all again. You get a sudden influx of people into Bradford? You might as well start over with a blank piece of paper.
One of the negative effects of this approach will be on smaller parties, as LDV pointed out back in August. Most smaller parties tend to establish strongholds in particular constituencies, and this is a process which takes years if not decades. By moving to rigid constituency sizes and flexible and unnatural constituency boundaries, this tactic becomes futile.
Here’s the thing that really gets me though. Proponents of First Past the Post have two arguments why FPTP is a good voting system. The first is that it produces decisive election results and clear majority governments (and we’ve seen how well that’s going recently). The second is the constituency link: the fact that one MP represents a particular geographic area and set of voters, that they can be expected to address local constituency issues as well as attend to national matters in Parliament. This is one of the big arguments for moving to AV rather than a proportional system, as AV retains that constituency link. And yet, those same proponents of FPTP and the constituency link (no other party is as attached to FPTP as the Tories) are proposing to change the way we set constituency boundaries to something that will, for all intents and purposes, break the constituency link. No MP (other than possibly those representing Orkney & Shetland and the Outer Hebrides) will have an incentive to truly build a link with their constituency and properly represent their constituents if they know that in 5 years’ time the constituency they’ll be standing in will be profoundly different.
So next time someone extols the virtues of FPTP and the constituency link at you, or tries to get you to vote against AV in May, do ask them what they think of the second part of That Bill. It should make for interesting conversation. In the meantime, if you want to try your hand at gerrymandering, here’s a fun online game. It’s a bit US-centric but it gets the point across.

Please take your gender bias out of your science

A meme has been going around a couple of the social networks I’m on. I picked it up on LiveJournal, but I’m told it’s also been making the rounds on Facebook. It’s called “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” and is allegedly a test used in diagnosing Asperger’s syndrome. According to the website introduction, it first appeared in Simon Baron-Cohen’s book “The Essential Difference” in 2003. In a nutshell, the test asks you to look at a picture of someone’s eyes and determine their emotional state – you get four words to pick from.
Before you read on, go and do the test. It shouldn’t take you more than 15 minutes, and you might even spot what I’m about to write about. Before I write on, it’s probably a good idea to point out that I haven’t read Simon Baron-Cohen’s book and thus have no idea whether the online test is a faithful reproduction of the one in the book, or just an imitation. So I am writing purely about the online test.
The thing that struck me about the test was the shocking gender bias it displayed. Yes, half the pictures were of men’s eyes, and the other half of women’s, but that’s about as far as balanced coverage goes. The age range of male models used was much greater. We saw young eyes, but we also saw pictures where the wrinkles and eyebrows were threatening to eat the eyes. Heck, men were event allowed *gasp* to have asymmetric eyes! Compare and contrast to the range of images we got for women’s eyes: not a single wrinkle to be seen in 18 images. Without exception, all of the women had their eyebrows plucked into perfectly attractive shapes – no stray hair to be seen. The vast majority were made up to accentuate the eyes and look attractive. There were maybe one or two photos of women without make-up.
Now think about the moods and emotions that the male and female eyes expressed. Did you notice that men were despondent, decisive, insisting, while women got to be fantasising, playful, and flirtatious? Not only were the types of emotions strongly gendered, but women were even limited in the number of emotions they could display. Every single man had an emotion of his own (19 in total, counting the introductory example); yet two women each had to be fantasising, preoccupied and interested, as apparently the creator of the test could not imagine 18 different emotions for women to display.
Now, as I said, I don’t know if this specific version of the test is the one which appears in Simon Baron-Cohen’s book. But if it is, I would be very worried. The underpinning theory of that book, you see, is that there are significant gender differences in how we think, with women more likely to empathise and men more likely to systemise. Baron-Cohen even labels his different ways of thinking the “male brain” and the “female brain”. I would be seriously concerned indeed if it turned out that someone was making such generalisations who did not have sufficient imagination to come up with 18 different emotions which women can exhibit.
I would appreciate it if someone could set me straight and tell me that the test in the book is more representative of real women, but just in case it isn’t, I would like to reassure both my readers and Mr. Baron-Cohen that women can be angry too.

AV is a scam… and I’ll ruin a good pair of shoes campaigning FOR it

Today in 6 months, you will be asked to put a cross in a box. Depending on where you live, you may have more than one cross and more than one box to put it in, and there’s a big kerfuffle about that, but that aside, I am hoping that it will be the last cross you ever have to put in a box in a national context. I am hoping that next time, you’ll have numbers to put in your boxes.
Now, I have gone on the record a couple of times declaring that AV is a scam. And so last time I left off promising to explain why I had decided to campaign for AV.
I’m not going to take you on a tour of the Yes campaign arguments, good though they are. You can look them up for yourself. I’m not even going to stay on message as far the Yes campaign is concerned – these are my personal reasons and I speak only for myself.
So let’s talk first about why AV is a scam. The first time I said this was when Gordon Brown first brought it up in the run-up to the general election, in an attempt to pander to the Lib Dems. If you know anything about the Lib Dems you will know that they would like to move to a proportional voting system, which would reflect the percentage of votes gained by a party in the percentage of seats they receive in Parliament. For a party which needs about 126,000 votes for every seat it gains in Parliament, while its main rivals need somewhere in the range of 30-35,000, this is completely understandable. But looking beyond individual party interests, it seems obvious to me from looking at those numbers that the current voting system (First Past the Post, or FPTP) simply is not fair and not democratic. It disenfranchises the vast majority of the population, as only about a third of the votes cast actually make a difference to the election outcome. The rest of us – well, we might as well stay at home.
Having established that FPTP is unfair and that we would quite like a proportional system, the first thing to note about AV is that it is not proportional. If anyone tells you it is, they’re either misguided or outright lying. The AV system retains the single-member constituency. This means that only one party can represent a constituency, which in turn means that the result is not proportional to the number of votes cast for each party either in that constituency or in the country as a whole. (Whether single-member constituencies are a good thing is a question for another day.) So when Gordon Brown put AV on the table as his electoral reform of choice back in April, of course it was a scam.
For me, the biggest risk around adopting AV in May – and this is something I’m still genuinely concerned about – is that it will be used as an excuse to block further reform. We will be hearing the words “We’ve only just had a change, let it bed in” for the next 50 years.
Equally, however, AV is what is now on the table, and in this world, in this life, you play the hand you’re dealt. So I’m choosing to hope. The AV campaign will certainly get people talking and thinking about change and electoral reform. And hopefully if AV is implemented, it will demonstrate that change is possible and can be positive. Hopefully it will make people consider further changes in a positive light.
Beyond meta arguments on change, though, I do believe AV has one or two merits in its own right. Firstly, it eliminates the need for tactical voting. No more leaflets through your door using dodgy numbers and doctored charts to tell you how Labour can’t win here. No more grudgingly putting your cross in one box but really wishing the other guys stood a snowball’s chance in hell around here. No more trying to second-guess your fellow voters so you can vote with them rather than waste your vote. AV lets you rank candidates according to preference. So if you really like the Greens, you can say so. And if you don’t happen to live in Brighton & Hove, well then your vote still isn’t wasted, because you can say who you like second-best, and third-best and all the way down to the BNP. Being able to vote for the people you actually want to vote for, without wasting your vote, is worth a lot in my book.
The second benefit of AV is that we will actually be able to get some data on the results a truly proportional system would produce. Currently even the best numbers we have are estimates. If you just look at how people voted in the last election, it isn’t particularly representative as so many people would have voted tactically, rather than for their first preference. However, if people are allowed to rank candidates in order of preference we will get a much better picture of what kind of Parliament a truly proportional system would return. That way, when the PR referendum comes around, at least we won’t have all the scaremongering about letting the extremists in.
Those are my two reasons why I intend to ruin a good pair of shoes in the next six months. The Yes campaign has many more, and you may have some of your own. If you do, go and sign up. And if you’re not convinced yet, then talk to people about it. Ultimately, a healthy debate on the issue will only help all of us make up our minds.
And so tomorrow, I will be hosting the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign launch in Newcastle. It’ll probably rain, and we’ll probably get overrun by the people trying to shut down the Vodafone store just up the road. Hopefully, though, we’ll also get to talk to a lot of people, raise awareness, sign up lots of volunteers for the campaign, and change some minds. I’m looking forward to it.