Cross-posting this from the Yes to Fairer Votes North East blog…
I have a confession to make (in case you hadn’t noticed): I’m a huge West Wing geek. One of my favourite moments is when President Bartlet hires Will Bailey at the end of the fourth season. The President says: “There’s a promise that I ask everyone who works here to make: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Do you know why?”
And Will replies, “Because it’s the only thing that ever has.”
The Yes to Fairer Votes campaign office in Newcastle is hardly the White House, but that statement is as valid here as anywhere else.
Sometimes, when you’re really really passionate about something, it’s very easy to feel that you’re the only one in the world who cares, that no-one else feels the same way, and that you’re swimming upriver. When I first got involved with the Yes campaign, I felt that way. I checked for local Facebook groups, I checked all of the affiliated organisations like Take Back Parliament, but somehow the North East seemed terribly under-represented. Since then, though, we have reached out to campaign supporters across the region and we are starting to build a solid network of passionate and committed volunteers across the region.
Every time I speak to a supporter – on the phone, in the office, or at campaign events – I am struck by the passion I encounter for electoral reform. People are tired of MPs who have jobs for life and no incentive to actually represent their constituencies. They are tired of not being able to vote for the party they actually support and having to vote tactically. They are tired of having their votes wasted. And they are jumping at the chance to have a go at changing the world.
I hear a lot of first-hand accounts of how our current electoral system lets people down. My own MP, a former cabinet minister and Labour whip, is in a seat so safe that he won’t even turn up at campaign events if there are other candidates there. Unlike one of the MPs down the road, my one at least holds a surgery – once a month, and in public. Last year, when the government pushed the highly controversial Digital Economy Bill through the wash-up process before the general election, I tried to get in touch with my MP: I wrote three separate letters, and called both his Parliamentary and constituency office twice, to no avail. This is how our democracy lets us down because MPs like mine can get elected with only 42% of the vote – or even less!
But I’m digressing. What I really want to get across is how amazing it is to be able to come together with a group of like-minded individuals and change the world. Every time I have reached out to our volunteer network and asked for help I’ve been overwhelmed by the response: whether it’s been for a street stall in Newcastle, our phone bank, or our campaign launch event on the Millennium Bridge, people have happily given up their time, travelled long distances, battled the snow, and tried something new they’ve never done before (anything from telephone canvassing to giving television interviews!) – all for this campaign.
We come from all walks of life, all ages, all political backgrounds. We are a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens, and we’re changing the world.

Like the rest of the country, I’ve been watching the London student demonstrations over the past month and been absolutely appalled at the behaviour of the police. Unlike the rest of the country, I grew up in a totalitarian state and have always been wary of the police. The Met have not exactly done anything to challenge my prejudice: Charging on horseback into a crowd of children, keeping said children in a confined space in the freezing cold for hours without access to food, water, toilets or medical care, pulling disabled people out of their wheelchairs and beating at least one protester to within an inch of his life – all of these incidents have only served to confirm my prejudice. So it was refreshing to see on Sunday that things can be different.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the Newcastle University Occupation. I’ve not been as involved with it as I would have liked to. I took some food to them, and I tried to get in to talk to them about electoral reform, but by the time I got my act together the university had stopped letting non-students into the building. I retweeted some of their tweets when I saw them, read their blog.
Throughout, I’ve been extremely impressed with the occupation. Their acts of protest have been incredibly imaginative, especially given the scarce resources they had. They were clearly committed to education and learning, putting on an alternative lecture programme when the university decided to move the lectures which were scheduled to take place in the occupied Fine Arts Building, even though both the students taking part in the occupation and the lecturers concerned were quite happy for them to take place there. When they finally suspended the occupation, one of the key reasons was to allow students who needed the Fine Arts Building for their learning to return and complete their degrees. During their action on the Tyne Bridge, the students made sure they only blocked the middle two lanes so as not to cause too much disruption. Leftover food at the end of the occupation was donated to an asylum seeker charity. The students I spoke to were all friendly, passionate and committed, and I was sorry to see the occupation suspended.
I was lucky enough to be in town on Sunday for the students’ post-occupation carnival and march. A crowd of between 50 and 100 people came down Northumberland Street and to Monument, flanked by police. They were dressed up and making noise. Once they got to Monument, the students (and a not-insignificant number of lecturers) lined up and between amusing and imaginative chants (“Cameron has a shiny face, it’s so shiny!”, “Nick Clegg is Tory, he wears a Tory hat, when he sees tuition fees he says ‘I’ll treble that!'”) members of the occupation, lecturers and union representatives addressed the crowd, thanking us for the support given.
By far the most impressive and inspiring moment was when a member of the occupation thanked the police who – by all accounts, including an incident when the occupation called the police in response to the university trying to remove one of their locks – have had a collaborative approach throughout the past month and have ensured the safety of everyone involved. One of the policemen came forward and shook hands with the student.

This shouldn’t be news. This should be how policing works. I am glad this is how it works in Newcastle.
And just because it was so much fun, here are a couple more pictures from the carnival.

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?

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.