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.

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.

I realised this morning what this government’s science and education policy reminds me of.
Back in communist Bulgaria we had a joke. It went like this:
The glorious leader (Todor Zhivkov, if you must know, but I like calling him the glorious leader), the Pope and a bloke on his gap year are on an aeroplane, and the plane gets into trouble. Let’s say it flies through an ash cloud. With the plane about to crash, the three of them find they only have two parachutes between them.
Zhivkov says, “I am the leader of a nation that is on the cutting edge of science and technology. Without my leadership the world will suffer a serious setback in scientific progress. I must have a parachute.” And off he goes.
The Pope turns to the student and says, “I have made my peace with God, my child. He will take care of me. You are young, you have your whole life before you, take the other parachute and save yourself.”
The boy looks at the Pope and says, “Thank you Father, but there’s no need. The guy on the cutting edge of scientific progress couldn’t tell the difference between a parachute and a backpack. So I’ll have to get a new tent, but at least both you and I can save ourselves.”

Remember before the general election, as all the parties were looking for little slogans and soundbites to help you identify them by? If you were playing buzzword bingo, the Lib Dem slogan was a high score: “Change that works for you, building a fairer Britain”. A bit of a mouthful, but it did have both the buzzwords du jour.
Fast forward six months. Nick Clegg has today told us what his definition of a fairer Britain is. There is a lot I object to in his speech: the now familiar deficit narrative, the story about not passing on the debt to the next generation, some of the details on the coalition’s deficit reduction principles. One sentence, however, truly stands out; one sentence sends chills down my spine:

“True fairness is about the distribution of chances, not just about the distribution of cash.”

Clegg’s main argument is around the different definitions of fairness, and he sets out to convince us that his is the right one. It is, he argues, equality of opportunity and not equality of outcome that really matters. Those who make an effort to better themselves should be rewarded, while being shielded from the effects of pure bad luck. To achieve this, the Deputy Prime Minister proposes a £7bn spending plan, to make available pre-primary education to deprived 2-year-olds, as well as the pupil premium and a student premium (the latter not entirely thought through by the sounds of it). By doing this, Mr. Clegg argues, we will level the playing field, giving poor children the same opportunities as rich children, which will allow them to be successful in life if they are willing to work hard.
I don’t know if the Deputy Prime Minister doesn’t realise or is simply wilfully ignoring how dangerous his rhetoric is, how damaging the message. We can see first-hand what the message of equality of opportunity achieves in the United States – one of the most unequal societies in the world. The American dream is a treacherous friend. If only you try hard enough, it says, you can achieve anything. You can be anything you like – a millionaire, or even President. It points us constantly at success stories, both real and fictional, the current occupant of the White House one of them.
But the American dream has a flip side. By starting from the assumption that “all men are created equal”, it is blinkered to the inequalities inherent in society – to class and privilege, to path dependence and deprivation. If only you work hard enough, whispers the American dream, you will overcome all of that, and you will be successful. By extension, though, if you haven’t succeeded, you only have yourself to blame; you must not have tried hard enough, worked hard enough. Those other people from the same background as you succeeded (one in a million though they might be), so if you haven’t, it must be something wrong with you. So you deserve to be poor, you deserve to get no help – you didn’t try hard enough.
In all fairness, Mr. Clegg’s vision isn’t quite as blinkered to the existence of privilege and the topology of the playing field. This is precisely why he wants to invest £7bn in levelling said playing field; he specifically calls out the state’s role in doing exactly that. Yet it takes more than a couple of billion pounds spent on early education to dismantle privilege and create true equality of opportunity. It takes cultural and social change. If we truly wanted to level the playing field, we would close Eton. This move it not about creating equality of opportunity – it is about sustaining privilege while giving those of us born without it just enough scraps from the table of our masters to keep us quiet.
Much more importantly though, we should not underestimate the importance of equality of outcome as a key value and key definition of fairness. I am not saying we should all receive an equal slice of the pie regardless of our efforts; but looking at the gulf that separates rich and poor in Britain, all this talk of fairness based on equality of opportunity pales into insignificance. A country with the third-largest GDP in the EU has the seventh-highest poverty rate. Nearly one in five people in the UK live in poverty. London, one of the world’s wealthiest cities, is also the region of the UK with the highest poverty rate – nearly 30%. Nearly 3 million children live in poverty, costing society as a whole £25 billion annually. (Incidentally, that is more than half of the interest payments on the UK debt that the Deputy PM so objects to.) The majority of those children are not from the Daily Mail poster cases of workless families on benefits. The majority of them have at least one parent in work – working hard – barely able to make ends meet. Nick Clegg’s £7 billion will not rectify any of that – it is not designed to rectify any of that.
So maybe instead of paying lip service to fairness, and leaving the next generation deficit-free in a damaged labour market with chronic structural unemployment, a privatised education system, and a hollowed out, gutted knowledge economy, Nick Clegg could give us something to really aspire to: a truly fair Britain where no one is left behind – not in opportunity and not in outcome.

When all the Mail on Sunday could come up with as a reaction to Ed Miliband’s election as Labour leader was to point out that he was unmarried and his name wasn’t on the birth certificate of his son, I must admit I was mildly amused. After all, in my little left-wing, progressive, socially liberal bubble of the universe, Mr. Miliband’s choices about how to conduct his private life really should have no impact on his job performance as leader of the opposition or even as Prime Minister.
Yet, by Tuesday that nasty persistent whining from the right on the subject still hadn’t gone away. Richard Littlejohn, that paragon of right-wing family values, and Tim Montgomerie have both weighed into the conversation yesterday, trying desperately to sabotage the political debate and keep the already annoying Miliband family soap opera on the front pages while the Labour party conference fades into the background.
And yet, the trick that Messrs Littlejohn and Montgomerie are missing is that the personal is political – something feminists have known for decades. So let’s look at how Mr. Miliband’s family status matters, and what the right’s focus on it really tells us about the kind of society these people envision for us.
Richard Littlejohn finds it ironic that while in “fashionable left-wing circles” marriage between a man and a woman is seen as something reactionary and old-fashioned, civil partnerships for same-sex couples are celebrated. If, he asks, Mr. Miliband and Ms Thornton intend to stay together for the rest of their lives, then why not get married. There is a tangled mess of underlying assumptions behind these comments.
For a start, we don’t know – and frankly shouldn’t care – whether Ed Miliband and Justine Thornton intend to stay together for the rest of their lives. Yes, they have been together for five years, and they have a child together, with a second one on the way. Yet, the rest of someone’s life can be a very long time, and not just because futurologists predict that the first person to live to 1000 years old could be in their fifties today. People change, their goals and outlook on life change, and even the children grow up. A modicum of awarenss of the long term is the minimum I expect from my political leaders, and Mr Miliband for me is showing that by not binding himself in an extremely restrictive legal way to another person.
There is also a certain presumption in all of this commentary that Ed Miliband is the only person in the relationship who has a say over whether they get married, or whose name is on the birth certificate. The right is trying to treat Ms. Thornton here as a “trophy wife” – the same way the press dealt with Sarah Brown (Anyone remember her toes?) and “Sam Cam” whose greatest contribution to anything was to make us feel that her husband was a real man by being visibly pregnant during the election campaign. It is time for commentators like Mr. Littlejohn to realise that women – even politicians’ partners – are human beings, that they have agency and free will of their own.
Finally, Mr. Littlejohn seems to be starting from the assumption that “one size fits all” when it comes to relationships: if you like gay “marriage” then you should like straight marriage; if you have children you should be married. It’s a terribly restrictive view of human relationships, and just because the traditional “one man, one woman, two kids” model may have worked out for him doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone else. Why is it always the right – the proponents of a small state and the worshippers of market-enabled choice – who want to regulate human relationships, who want to deny us the basic rights of choice in the most personal areas of our lives? Is it so difficult to comprehend that context matters; that a person’s experience and outlook on life matters; that two people (and sometimes three, or four – I know it’s a shock!) can have an adult covnersation about how to run their own lives, and make their own decisions, without the state or the Daily Mail having a say in it?
Richard Littlejohn shows grave concern for the kind of role model Ed Miliband, in his new role as leader of the opposition, will be for the country. Here is the kind of role model that he is to me:
He is clearly a man of passion – someone who cares deeply about the biggest social and political problems of our times. And yes, perhaps he prioritised a climate change conference over getting married, or getting his name on a piece of paper – this for me makes him a man who can see the bigger picture. Again, this should be a minimum requirement for our political leaders.
I am making my own assumptions here, but I suspect Ms. Thornton would have had a strong voice when it came to the couple’s decision on how to conduct their relationship. This to me shows that Mr. Miliband is the kind of man who can respect his partner, have a mature and adult conversation about their relationship, and reach an agreement, even if that may not be to his political advantage. In a culture where women are routinely treated as objects, Mr. Miliband is brave to show us a different way.
Of course, Ed Miliband’s success in the leadership election also sends a strong message that “people like him” – people who have children out of wedlock, and whose name isn’t on those children’s birth certificate – can be successful, can be deemed worthy of maybe one day even becoming Prime Minister. That is a very powerful message, as it contradicts the constant pressure for conformity we face from the likes of Mr. Littlejohn.
I do not support the Labour party, but I would like to hear Ed Miliband’s political vision, not see his message drowned out by a media-generated strom in a teacup over issues which stopped being issues back in the 1980s.

The long boredom of the summer recess is over and Parliament is back in session. (Do remind me to tell you about the great idea I had for a new reality TV show to run during the next summer recess.) Anyway, Parliament is back, debating mostly electoral reform of one kind or another: the AV referendum, fixed term Parliaments, etc. So I guess it’s time for me to write about electoral reform again, too.
I believe I’ve made my views on FPTP clear in the past, but for the record, it’s an appalling, undemocratic, unrepresentative voting system. It’s about as unfair as they come, and not to the ever-complaining Tories. Let’s remind ourselves of the number of votes required for some of the parties in the UK to win a seat in Westminster: Lab: 33k, Con: 35k, LibDem: 126k, Greens: 200k.
Another effect of FPTP which doesn’t get talked about very often – but is kind of obvious from the above numbers – is that it severely penalises small parties and strongly encourages large ones. No society, however, can easily be split in just two camps: we are not all simply either Labour or Tory, either Democrat or Republican. I may be economically left-of-centre, and politically liberal; I am also a woman, a bisexual, middle class, an immigrant, childless, working full-time, I believe climate change is the biggest challenge we face, and have many, many other interests and facets to who I am which have a political aspect. The same thing goes for any one of us. However, the party of middle class bisexual immigrant childless women would be quite small – and even smaller if you only took the women who agreed on every single policy issue. The First Past the Post political system would strongly discourage its existence. And so we look to get together with another party whose views we more or less share – they might be the middle class immigrant childless lesbians, they might be the working class bisexual childless women, or even the middle class immigrant men; and then we find another group, and another, to join our ever-expanding political party. You can probably already see how easy it is to form a daisy-chain from you to anyone anywhere else on the political spectrum, even if you’re only taking tiny incremental steps with each new association.
So what we end up with in an FPTP system is a political landscape generally dominated by two parties. Those parties are large and far from homogeneous – they are “broad churches” (yes, that is a technical political science term – remind me to explain about cross-cutting cleavages some day). In fact, it is fair to say that the large parties produced in an FPTP system are coalitions in themselves. You can see plenty of evidence of this in the three main parties in the UK: The LibDems split reasonably neatly into a social wing and the Orange Book wing; Labour have a hard-core left wing trying to cohabit with the Blairites who in turn would actually not be too out of place in the more centrist wing of the Tory party (I may be being charitable here).
Remember back in May all the fear-uncertainty-doubt talk about how coalitions were undemocratic because they made shady deals in smoke-filledfree rooms and were thus not accountable to the public who had voted for the parties involved based on their manifestos and not based on some sort of coalition agreement? So what do you think produces said manifestos other than shady deals and back-room politics, except in a much less transparent, scrutinisable way?
That much about the theory. As a quick postscript, let’s have a look at the damage FPTP is doing to the UK political landscape in practice. So we have the two main parties (the LibDems will forgive me if I treat them separately here) which historically represented different class interests: Labour, economically left of centre, representing the working class (or, well, labour); and the Conservatives, economically right of centre, representing the upper classes (in other words, capital). The LibDems are a freak of nature, a misshapen merger of what was left of the 19th century Liberals and a centre-left off-shoot of Labour. Under Tony Blair, Labour moved to the right, and up along the authoritarian axis for those of you playing along at home on Political Compass. The LibDems’ social wing (which I’d still like to believe makes up the majority of the actual membership) has been submerged by the Orange Bookers who are now solidly forming the leadership of the party. And so the British political landscape is left with a large social-democracy-shaped black hole in it – not so good for those of us who would like someone to represent us in that part of the spectrum.
That’s it for tonight. In the next instalment, by popular request, I’ll be trying to convince myself to campaign for AV.

I have been rewatching the West Wing recently – it is remarkably addictive. Somewhere in between mainlining up to 5 episodes a night, this quote struck me:

“It’s not just about abortion, it’s about the next 20 years. Twenties and thirties it was the role of government, fifties and sixties it was civil rights. The next two decades it’s gonna be privacy. I’m talking about the Internet. I’m talking about cell phones. I’m talking about health records and who’s gay and who’s not. And moreover, in a country born on the will to be free, what could be more fundamental than this?”

Sam Seaborn says this in the first-season episode “The Shortlist”; so if Aaron Sorkin, the creator of the show, understood this back in 1999, why is it that our politicians and leaders continue to be so woefully ill-equipped for the 21st century eleven years later?
It’s important to note that this is hardly an issue that is limited to one side of the green benches. Both the previous government and the current one have plenty of examples to demonstrate that their level of understanding of technology and science is not up to scratch. Both have a record of getting carried away with the opportunities technology provides to the state without asking the right questions about the impact on the individual.
Exhibit one: Medical records
The electronic patient care records system was an initiative of the previous government. Don’t get me wrong, I work in technology, and I can definitely see the potential benefits of medical records stored in a central database, easily accessible to authorised healthcare professionals for use in patient care. However, the way the project was executed betrays a shocking lack of understanding of the technology involved and its social implications at the highest level of government. For instance, while patient consent was ostensibly sought, this was a pro-forma exercise: many households who received letters telling them about the initiative and how to opt out didn’t even realise the importance of them and filed them straight in the recycling.
To this day, the guiding principles and rules for accessing and using the data aren’t particularly well publicised. Who and under what circumstance has access to a patient’s medical records? How is authorisation obtained and does it at any point expire? What rights does the patient have to view their own medical records, and to understand who has accessed them and why? Can data on the database be used for purposes other than treating the individual patient, e.g. for medical studies, and what safeguards are in place to gain patient consent for this and ensure their privacy? Once the data is in the system, who owns and controls it – the patient or the NHS? Under what circumstances can access be obtained to medical records for non-medical uses, e.g. by the police or other institutions of the state? Is the data physically held in this country, or is it transferred to countries with different and potentially weaker data protection laws? Some – though by far not all – of these questions have been addressed by the project. Others remain unanswered.
In addition to the above questions on access rights and data ownership, how is data integrity to be ensured? If the database is to hold the medical records of 60 million individuals, even at an error rate of one per cent that leaves 600,000 individuals with potentially fatal errors in their data. This is before considering malicious attacks on the database, either to obtain or alter records.
Exhibit two: The Digital Economy Act
The Digital Economy Act, particularly the large part of it which deals with online copyright infringement, is an example where the previous government succumbed to lobbying without fully understanding the technical, social and civil liberties implications of the legislation. It essentially hands over copyright policing on the internet to rights holders, at a very significant cost to both internet service providers and end users. If the implementation proposal currently on the table from Ofcom goes through as is, rights holders will have an unprecedented remit to invade individuals’ privacy by scanning their network traffic for copyrighted material. Not only that, but enforcement will be in the hands of rights holders and internet service providers, who will have the power to send end users threatening letters and most likely in the future to disconnect them from the internet, with very little in the way of due process.
While this protects the vested interests of a handful of people and companies, essentially supporting a few monopolies and cartels in the content industry whose business model would be obsolete without such legislation, the wide-ranging implications of the Digital Economy Act remain largely ignored and at best misunderstood by politicians. Handing over policing and enforcement of copyright to non-state actors is a constitutional precedent, and not in a good way. The same goes for allowing private companies to inspect individuals’ internet usage and traffic with – as per the current proposal – hardly any regulation. This doesn’t just change the relationship between the state and the individual, it brings in the private sector into this relationship without any safeguards.
Additionally to all this, the Digital Economy Act is highly likely to damage the real digital economy by, for instance, discouraging the provision of open WiFi access by small businesses such as pubs and coffee shops. Add to that the fact that it’s highly unlikely to achieve its goal to reduce online copyright infringement – the technology to make the Act toothless exists, and this will just be the final push to get users to adopt it – and the picture of our barely-technology-literate political classes is complete.
Exhibit three: The census
One of the early indications that the new coalition government isn’t much better than their predecessors when it comes to understanding the complex interplay between the realm of the technologically possible and the realm of the constitutionally, socially and politically desirable is Francis Maude’s recent announcement that he is looking to scrap the census. A cheaper, more accurate and more real-time way of achieving the same objective, he argues, is to use data already held in various government and private-sector databases to obtain a picture of who is living in the UK.
The first thing this ignores is basic technical feasibility. Reliably correlating each of the data sources the government proposes to use (e.g. NHS records, post office address lists, credit card checking registries, etc.) whilst ensuring data integrity is a nigh-on impossible task. It is also highly likely to leave us with huge gaps in our knowledge, compared to the census as it is conducted today. Especially data on diversity, be that ethnic, religious or sexual orientation, is likely to fall through the cracks.
Next is the issue of consent to use of the data. According to the Data Protection Act, if data is collected on an individual, they need to be informed what the data will be used for. When we give our information to various agencies we consent to it only being used for the stated purpose – not for our data to be later repurposed for a census.
Finally, there is the question of whether the proposed new approach would actually achieve the same results as the census. Don’t get me wrong – there are improvements we can make to the way the census is conducted. The fact that it is done at a household level, completed by the head of the household, means that a number of sensitive categories are misreported. For instance, a religious father may report his atheist child as belonging to a religion; a mother unaware that her child is gay may report them as heterosexual. This, however, is nothing compared to the inaccuracies, inconsistencies and gaps the proposed new method is likely to give us. Thinking about what census data is used for – targeting policy and government spending to those who need it – a data collection method which will leave out the most vulnerable, the minorities, and the underprivileged is hardly fit for purpose.
Exhibit four: Credit tracking agencies and benefit fraud
The latest in the series of “government meets 21st century” stories is of course David Cameron’s announcement last week that he is looking to use private credit reference agencies to crack down on benefit fraud. Handing over policing of an issue to the private sector, allowing private companies to breach individuals’ right to privacy: if you’ve been paying attention this should sound familiar by now. What is even worse is that, unlike the the copyright case where the issue being policed is only of commercial interest, in the case of benefit fraud we are talking about the state creating a financial incentive for private companies to snoop on individuals. Add to that the fact that this measure is exclusively targeted at the poor, and you have suddenly created a two-tier-citizen system, where some of us have a right to privacy while others don’t.
Let’s also not forget data integrity and reliability issues. When I was a student living in halls and needed to be credit-checked to get a mobile phone contract, this was a nearly-impossible task as credit checking happens on an address level. In student accommodation, where people rarely stay for more than nine months, being tarnished by your predecessors’ credit records was unavoidable.
Not only does this latest proposal demonstrate a lack of understanding of technology, it displays a basic ignorance of the constitution, which after all is supposed to establish the boundaries between the state and the individual. Yet again we see the state outsourcing key functions to the private sector, with little regulation, perverse incentives and a remarkable nonchalance about what this means for individuals.
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One thing politicians of all parties should begin to understand is that as Generation Y and their successors reach the voting age, they are a lot more technology-savvy than our current crop of leaders. Issues of privacy, of data use, of the boundary between the state and the individual in a networked world, will not pass this generation by, and sooner or later they will hold their leaders to account. It is vitally important for the political classes to educate themselves about science and technology, to consider more than one viewpoint, regardless of the strength of the lobby groups, and to ensure that they have really asked all the questions before making decisions on these issues.