At my work, we’re currently looking into adopting a project management / development methodology called Scrum.

Scrum, which involves breaking work into two-week segments called “sprints”, is an example of what are known as “agile” methodologies for software development. As the name suggests, agile methodologies are designed to be quick and responsive to customer and product needs.

Scrum all seems very good… except for the name.

Because if you were doing a word-association test with me, you could give me the word “scrum” a thousand times and not once would I come up with “agile”. It would be like deciding to name an agile methodology after an animal, but having worked through and rejected Cheetah, Greyhound and Gazelle, settling instead on Hippopotamus.

I was so confused by the name in fact, that I got on the net to try and find out why the hell its authors had given it such an inappropriate moniker. And I think I’ve figured out why.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the development (and naming) of Scrum:

In 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka described a new holistic approach that would increase speed and flexibility in commercial new product development.[2] They compared this new holistic approach, in which the phases strongly overlap and the whole process is performed by one cross-functional team across the different phases, to rugby, where the whole team “tries to go to the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth”. The case studies came from the automotive, photo machine, computer, and printer industries.

They invented it, but they didn’t give it a name. And I think that anyone who’s ever watched a game of rugby will know that when they used rugby as a metaphor of an quick, darting, sprinting, responsive, adapting, and agile method of software development, it was something like this they had in mind:

Then the story continues:

In 1991, DeGrace and Stahl, in “Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions”,[3] referred to this approach as Scrum, a rugby term mentioned in the article by Takeuchi and Nonaka. In the early 1990s, Ken Schwaber used an approach that led to Scrum at his company, Advanced Development Methods. At the same time, Jeff Sutherland, John Scumniotales, and Jeff McKenna developed a similar approach at Easel Corporation and were the first to call it Scrum.

Do you get the feeling that none of those people have ever seen a game of rugby? Because this is a scrum:

A huge amount of effort to produce about six inches of forward movement… and then it collapses.

And yes, I do know that within the methodology, the “scrum” is a daily morning meeting you have, but couldn’t they just called that a huddle or something? And the methodology itself, something, anything other than “scrum”?

After all, even hippos can manage to move more than a foot without collapsing, which is more than you can say for most scrums.

…he might have been able to think of a dish a little more imaginative than fish on bread.

Last Saturday I downloaded, for the very reasonable sum of £1.79, a new app for my iPhone: Vegan Recipe Finder by VegWeb.com. (I found it by accident, by clicking on the “New Apps” page in the AppStore while upgrading my existing apps). Their website already has 13,000+ user submitted vegan recipes; the app – which has literally just come out – simply exposes them in a very usable form.

As it happens, I was able to try it out the very next day, when my wife decided to do a spot of cooking for a picnic we were planning later that afternoon:

Jules: Can you look up on the Internet to see if you can find any choc chip muffins?

Me: [Holding up my iPhone and grinning in a way that was quite possibly both smug and idiotic] I don’t need to go on to the Internet love, I’ve got a new app!

I fired up the app, went into “Search”, tapped “Chocolate chip muffins” in… and was rewarded with 8 different recipes. (And that was just based on the recipe title. I later clicked on “Entire Recipe” and it came up with dozens).

The first couple of recipes we browsed through weren’t right for us, because they needed ingredients we didn’t have. But then we found one where we appeared to have what seemed like all the critical ingredients. It was perhaps a bit of a risk because it was the one with the least views and no ratings. But we needn’t have worried because it turned out great.

As an aside, that’s one of the things that I think is great about this app; you have so much choice that you can find a recipe that you can cook with the ingredients you currently have to hand, rather than having to head off out to the shops.

We selected a recipe by “CrumbledCookie”.

The recipes are laid out in a nice simple way; ingredients above and instructions below.

One issue for those of us in the UK is that the recipes are American and thus use cups (a system where ingredients such as flour are measured by volume rather than weight) and Fahrenheit. But as it happens, we’d already made sure to buy a measuring jug that had cups marked on it, and converting from Fahrenheit to centigrade (or gas mark) isn’t too hard. (And as @luciddestiny remarked when I mentioned the latter issue to him, “There’s an app for that”).

We didn’t have all the ingredients. We had no idea what turbinado sugar was, so we just used regular sugar. We didn’t have almond milk, so we used regular soya milk. And we didn’t have vanilla extract, so we just left that out.

But the results were still awesome. The muffins rose up wonderfully, and had a lovely, moist, creamy gooey consistency (plus a really nice flavour) that everyone (vegans and non-vegans alike) loved. We think maybe it was the bananas that provided the extra special texture.

Anyhow, here they are. (To right).

If you’re a vegan, I’d strongly recommend this app. The recipes look really good, it’s well-written (you can save your favourite recipes, email a recipe to someone, or send a link to a recipe to Facebook or Twitter), and it’s going to be very handy for those occasions where we’re in the supermarket, thinking on what we should buy and what we should cook.

And I can’t wait to try the vegan french toast recipe I found.

My Monday night group have just started playing Spirit of the Century, a free-wheeling pulp role-playing game based on the Fate system. We’re managing to take our time on character creation (three sessions and counting so far), but as we’re really enjoying it, the system’s looking good, and I’m really chuffed about the characters we’re coming up with, I thought I’d do a write up of where we are now, covering both the characters and what I’ve thus far learned of the system.

First off, the basics. It’s a pulp game set in 1925. You create your character in a series of five phases, which collectively cover the period of your life from your birth (for setting related reasons, all SotC characters were born on 1st January 1901) up to the start of play.

This is what I came up with for the first phase of “Lord Edward Silver”:

PHASE ONE (BACKGROUND)

Events: Lord Edward grew up the privileged second son of the Duke of Buckinghamshire. After his elder brother was killed in the Great War he became the heir, to his father’s obvious disappointment.

First Aspect: Old Money

Second Aspect: Old School Tie

So he’s an English aristocrat, who from his childhood has acquired the aspects Old Money and Old School Tie (i.e. his family are wealthy, with that wealth being established at least several generations ago, and he went to a prestigious and exclusive school which grants him membership of a mutually beneficial social network).

I should perhaps explain how aspects work, as they’re pretty much at the heart of the Fate system. Aspects can be almost anything: a person you know, a thing you have, a background you’ve come from, something you are, something you do. Although the rulebook does suggest aspects, there is no set list. You simply make them up.

Now I’ve come across these sorts of “make up your own skills/attributes/whatevers” systems before but have always been distrustful of them. It all seemed too woolly. After all, what’s to stop someone coming up with an attribute called “Brilliant At Everything”?

But Fate does it differently, because in a stroke of sheer genius, aspects are intimately bound up with what in other games would be called hero points (but are here called fate points).

It’s probably best explained with an example. Firstly, imagine I’m playing a generic game in a system that has hero points, where spending a hero point allows you to either roll again or add +2 to a roll you’ve just made:

GM: Okay, the customs agent doesn’t appear to be buying your explanation that your 200 packets of cigarettes are for personal use.

Me: I’ll try and strike up a rapport with him.

GM: Okay, roll against your Rapport skill.

Me: [Rolls] Three?

GM: He’s still not buying it.

Me: I’ll spend a hero point to push it to five. Enough?

GM: Yeah. He smiles, shrugs and then waves you on.

Now let’s look at how it might play out in Fate, where you can also spend a fate point to allow you to either roll again or add +2 to a roll you’ve just made – but only if you can justify it using one of your aspects:

GM: Okay, the customs agent doesn’t appear to be buying your explanation that your 200 packets of cigarettes are for personal use.

Me: I’ll try and strike up a rapport with him.

GM: Okay, roll against your Rapport skill.

Me: [Rolls] Three?

GM: He’s still not buying it.

Me: [pushing a fate point token across the table] He wouldn’t by any chance have gone to the same school as me, would he? You know, Old School Tie and all that?

GM: Well as it happens, he is looking at you with narrowed eyes. “Weren’t you in Rochester house, a couple of forms above me?” he asks.

Me: I’ll make a bit of small-talk with him and push the roll to five. Enough?

GM: Yeah. He smiles, shrugs and then waves you on.

So far from aspects being something which makes the game woolly, they instead take something woolly (hero points) and give them substance and add some roleplaying to them.

Another key part of aspects is that as well as using them to spend fate points, they’re the way in which you gain/regain fate points. The best aspects offer both advantages and disadvantages, because when they work against you, you get fate points back. Take cowardice for example:

• If you need to get away from something, you could use cowardice to spend a fate point and grant you +2 or a reroll.
• But if there’s something you need and want to do which requires bravery, the GM might point out that your aspect compels you to run away. In this case you can either spend a fate point to avoid the compel (i.e. have your character overcome his cowardice) or instead accept the compel (and run away) and then get a fate point as a reward.

I then moved onto the next phase, which covers your early adulthood, in particular that Great War (WWI) and the period after it, and your introduction into an organisation called the Century Club, which is a key part of the setting.

PHASE TWO (THE GREAT WAR AND ENTRY INTO THE CLUB)

Your Patron In The Century Club: Sir Humphrey Peterford (Great-great-great-uncle – mother’s, father’s, father’s, uncle)

Lord Edward became a dashing pilot and motor racer, achieving fame through a series of epic flights and races and even more epic society gatherings, until he pushed his luck too far and was dashed to Earth by an unearthly storm. Finding him lying dying in a remote hospital, his mad scientist great-great-great-uncle knew that only the full body transplant he’d been spending the last fifty years developing could save his young protege.

No donor body was available, but there was a local zoo. That night, a male silverback gorilla was stolen. Lord Edward lived, but he was no longer the same Lord Edward. Where once had strode a suave, charming, debonair human being, there now shuffled a suave, charming, debonair… gorilla.

Sir Humphrey introduced him to the Century Club. They needed him, but he perhaps needed them more. After all, it was now the only club he could get into if he fancied a fine cigar, a single malt, and some intelligent conversation.

First Aspect: Bright Young Thing

Second Aspect: Body of a Gorilla

Yes. I’m now a gorilla. Who loves to party.

Bright Young Thing can be a good thing: I’m fun, entertaining and charming at parties and other high-class social occasions. And it can be a bad thing: I’m very easily distracted from what I should be doing if I find out there’s a party going on.

And Gorilla’s probably self-explanatory. It will get in the way with pretty much any interaction I might make with human society; but you could activate it for things like hitting people, intimidating people, breaking things, using your feet to do things, and just plain damn avoiding notice because people “never suspect it was the gorilla”. (We’ve even worked out that in many cases, if I simply stand motionless up against a wall, people will just assume that I’m a stuffed animal, some hunter has put there as a trophy).

Edward can talk by the way. It’s just that people often aren’t prepared to listen to a gorilla, no matter how cultured his accent.

I then moved onto the third phase, which is where you imagine a novel that your pulp character has already been the star of:

PHASE THREE (YOUR NOVEL)

Title of your Novel: Edward Silverback and the Black Baron of the Skies

Guest stars in your Novel: TBD and TDB

Events: Edward gatecrashes a New Year’s Eve fancy-dress party held on board Californian billionaire Roger Henderson’s dirigible (posing as someone wearing an awfully good gorilla costume). Among the guests are the British Ambassador to the United States, and the ambassador’s beautiful daughter, Georgina.

Just before midnight, as Edward is busily engaged charming Georgina, the dirigible is captured by a black-painted Zeppelin commanded by Lothar Von Richtofen (the Red Baron’s younger brother) who faked his own death in 1922, and now roams the skies seeking revenge for Germany’s WWI defeat.

The Baron’s stormtroopers capture all the guests save Edward and Georgina who get away. Helped by Georgina, Edward gradually captures the stormtroopers one by one and then rescues the guests. The Black Baron gets away in a biplane his Zeppelin carries, but turns back aiming to shoot down both airships (and thus eliminate all witnesses). Edward jumps into a second biplane, launches, and engages the Black Baron in combat. Edward’s plane is damaged, but he forces the Black Baron to flee.

First Aspect: Sworn Enemy of the Black Baron

Second Aspect: Georgina

The Black Baron was always going to get away. Having him as an aspect gives General Tangent (the GM) a good hook for future stories, and of course if he takes that hook (which he’s already planning on doing), I’ll be rewarded with fate points. We were brainstorming ideas last night and we were thinking that the Black Baron could have recruited a load of disaffected airship builders and designers (Germany was banned from building Zeppelins in the period immediately after WWI) and established a secret base in the mountains of Greenland, from where he can threaten both the United States and Western Europe.

A lot of planes used to crash around then. Maybe they weren’t all crashes…

Having Georgina as an aspect gives me a friend and ally who can help me negotiate a human-centric world. She can explain my presence by posing as my “owner”, with me as her “pet”. And of course, she is also someone who the GM can use as a hook, by putting her in danger.

WHAT’S LEFT TO DO?

Well firstly the guys need to write their “first novels”. So far they’ve come up with: a Chinese monk travelling the world looking for pieces of a powerful and cursed asteroid that fell to Earth hundreds of years ago (John); and a private detective who not only sees dead people but is frequently employed by them (TAFKAC).

Having done that, we move onto phases four and five, which is to take the “novels” of two other players (in our case, as there’s only three of us, we’ll all appear in all the novels) and write yourself into them as a guest star.

For my novel, we’re thinking that John’s Chinese monk, on the trail of a chess set constructed from a piece of the asteroid, could have got himself onto Roger Henderson’s dirigible by getting a job in the kitchen. Of course, he’ll then help me defeat the Black Baron’s stormtroopers.

I think doing the “novels” in this way is a really cool idea. (You don’t have to do them in as much detail as I’ve done by the way – they can just be one-liners). It gives the characters loads of background, gives the GM lots of hooks to work with, and makes sure that the characters start play being already friends and allies.

And then the final touch will be to give our characters skills. Not surprisingly, I’m going to have Pilot as my top skill and Drive as my second. That’s pretty well going to be my niche within the party, which could be interesting if we ever get stopped by the police who ask the two humans why they have a gorilla driving their car. (It might be a gorilla with the finest leather driving gloves, a nifty set of goggles, and a hand-made Saville Row suit, but I doubt that will cut much ice with Plod).

I can’t wait.

EDIT: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Forgot to say that the genius idea of me going to a fancy-dress party disguised as a gorilla came from John, and it was TAFKAC who said I should do something with dirigibles.

Also, I think the inspiration for the talking Gorilla itself came from Tony Lee’s comic The Gloom.

I’ve just started reading Frankie Boyle’s autobiography My Shit Life So Far.

Wow.

This is a list of all the people / things he’s managed to insult in just the *introduction*:

Everyone who’s bought the book
Ian Wright
Tina Turner
Michael Jackson
Fidel Castro
Paul McCartney
England football team
Michael Jackson (again)
The British people
Michael Jackson’s father
The Daily Mail
Creationists
The Israeli Army
Religious people
Israel
The Palestians
God
Prince Harry
Princess Diana
The Royal Family
Prince William
Prince Philip
Chris Moyles
The Teletubbies
Paul Gascoigne
Jordan
Kerry Katona
Nadya Suleman (the Octomom)
Scotland
Susan Boyle
West Lothian
Everyone who’s bought the book (again)

It’s also very, very funny.

Okay, I do at this point need to declare an interest. I’m an Apple fanboy. Not only have I got an iPad, an iPhone, a MacBook, and a MacBook Air, I have also in the past owned an iBook, a first-generation iMac, and even [drumroll please] a Newton.

(Buying a Mustang or a Mondeo, say, doesn’t make you a Ford fan. Having bought an Edsel – that makes you a Ford fan. And having been one of the “handful” of people who bought a Newton is a bit like that.)

But this article is not about the iPad, at least not directly. I love my iPad, but this article is not about the ways in which people will use iPads, but the ways in which they will use tablet computers in general.

The iPad has been a huge success; and that success will create an entire new market, which appears likely to be filled by similar generic tablet/pad/slate devices powered by Google’s Android OS. Several are either here or on the way.

Now there are many reasons why for most people and most tasks, a simple tablet is better than a more complex computer. But this morning I read something that made me think of a particular area of improvement. (This is probably obvious, because it’s something I myself already knew, but have only just perhaps joined the dots together; so apologies in advance for writing a post in which I’ll now proceed to state the obvious).

The article revealed that the proportion of iPad users who are female is starting to rise as it moves beyond the initial “early adoption” phase, and that it’s starting to become a strong platform for online shopping. But that wasn’t what caught my eye. It was this:

Usage of Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Shopping and Yahoo Travel rose by 28%, 25% and 22%, respectively, compared with Yahoo’s first batch of numbers. This could be related to the gender shift, as well, but it’s a good sign for commerce on the iPad — a key application that many big retailers are embracing with a giant bear hug. Banana Republic (GPS), for example, went whole-hog with an intricate and richly designed iPad application that takes users into a seemingly 3-D virtual store.

Full dailyfinance.com article…

It’s all about the apps.

In the eighties and into the nineties, our computing was all about applications. You bought applications for your PC (or Mac), installed them, and used them. Buying them was a slow offline process; installing them frequently a nightmare.

Then came the web revolution. For several years we really just used our browsers as, well browsers, to surf the web. But as the technology matured (Java/Javascript/Flash/Ajax etc), companies started to distribute what were essentially “applications”, but implemented as rich and dynamic websites. I’m not just talking about the obvious apps here, like Google docs. If you think about it, Hotmail (perhaps the first of these types of “application” sites), Facebook and Twitter aren’t websites as we would have understood the term in the mid-nineteen nineties; they’re “applications” offering a rich set of functionality, but implemented via the medium of a website.

Why?

Well not because the application is simply better that way. It isn’t. These “application” type websites weren’t quite as good as an actual executable website would have been – a proper email program like Thunderbird or Outlook is almost always a bit nicer to use than a webmail site like Hotmail or GMail, for example. But that wasn’t the point.

The key thing is that distributing your application as a website gets rid of both of the preliminary steps I described above; you don’t have to go out and buy the app, and you don’t then have to install it. And when Facebook et al want to change or improve their “application” they just roll it out by redoing the website.

(I should point out that there’s also an additional advantage: that you can use the “application” of many different computers).

Where am I going with this? Well one of the things that people say about the iPad is that it’s a wonderful device for surfing the web. And it is. But I think this is in some ways an example of transitional technology; where new technology is initially used as a better way of doing things the old way.

Because I think as times goes on, and we all get tablet computers, we’ll end up using the web a lot less. When we want to get the latest news from our favourite news site, or go shopping at our favourite store, it won’t be the web we turn to. It will be the custom app for our favourite news site, and the custom app for our favourite store, with those apps offering a far richer, more responsive experience than a mere website ever could.

Apps can be purchased, downloaded, and installed easily and quickly with just a few clicks. At a stroke, many (not all) of the reasons that caused the turn of the century shift away from applications to “website applications” are gone. (Although the web will still be there as a handy backup for when you’re somewhere else, much as many of us access our email via dedicated email programs like Outlook when at home, and via web when away).

People now joke that “there’s probably an app for that”.

But whatever it is you want to do, there probably is. The web’s never going to go away. But I can see it being used a lot less. If I had an online shop, I think I’d want to start getting an app developed, pronto.

I was on my way home last night, on the final stages of my walk from the station to our house, when I heard music. It was a folky tune, a woman’s voice floating above a simple acoustic guitar. There was something about the quality of the sound that immediately made me think: “That’s not a recording. That’s live.”

Of course, I immediately scolded myself for having had such a stupid thought. I was on a quiet residential street. The truth would obviously be more prosaic: an open window on a warm summer evening and a good quality stereo cranked up to high.

I started looking around for an open window, and then I saw the music’s source: up above me, on a roof-top terrace, was a group of people who included in their midst a man with a guitar and a woman singing. And the thing is…

They were good. Really good.

And then it hit me. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen. Not in real life, not in lives not lived in beer commercials selling a bullshit lifestyle that doesn’t exist and never did. But there they were.

I like living in Brighton.

I’m currently closing in on the completion of the first draft of what will hopefully become my second published novel. Word count at the moment is 90,000+ words, every single one of them written on a train.

Writing on the train has been my standard modus operandi for some years now. But just recently, while sorting through my old emails, I found one I sent to various friends that identifies exactly when it started:

Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 09:14:14 +0000

From: [me]

Subject: Project “Write On The Tube” Status Report

The project began today, with the taking of the Linux powered mobile writing unit (known hereafter as “the laptop”) on the home-to-work tube journey.

Project initiation was initially delayed by technical issues, but when I got into work I had another look at the laptop, and this time was able to figure out how to turn it on. A second attempt at project initiation will therefore be made during the second “work opportunity window” this evening, on the work-to-home tube journey.

That first laptop was a cheap, reconditioned model I’d gotten from Maplins, and it was very much an experiment. At the time, I had no idea whether or not I’d be able to write on a busy, noisy, bouncing tube train. As someone who’s always written on a word processor, all my writing had thus been done at home. I was doing a monthly column for Mongoose, and was finding that the writing of each column was dragging over a whole weekend. And yet, I spent an hour and a half each weekday on a train, with nothing to do save read or think.

Writing on the train might have been the solution, or it might have been a complete failure. I might have found it impossible to concentrate, to be creative, in what isn’t an obviously creative environment. There was only one way to find out, which was to try it, but given the high chance of failure I was keen to keep my initial costs down. Which was why I went to Maplins.

And having tried it, it worked. It turned out that I could write on a tube, much better in fact that I ever did at home. Freed of the distractions offered by books, TV and the Internet, I had nothing else to do save write. It isn’t other people who distract me from writing, it’s myself. I don’t need peace, quiet or solitude – I just need to have nothing better to do.

I guess that makes me lucky.

I followed up that Linux laptop with a G3 iBook (Mac). That eventually suffered a catastrophic failure somewhere in the graphics circuitry, following which I bought an Intel iBook. That’s still with me, but it stays at home now, because my writing tool of choice is my MacBook Air, which was my Christmas present to myself a couple of Christmases ago.

And in answer to the question you might have been asking since the second paragraph of that email, yes, I did feel a right twat sitting on a train with my new laptop unable to figure out how to turn it on. (I seem to recall that the problem was that at home, it had sat in a docking station, and the docking station had an on/off switch — but without the station, I needed to find a second, more hidden switch, and that took a bit of finding).

Labour party supporters (not necessarily the Labour party itself) are currently slamming away at the Lib Dems for talking to the Tories about some sort of coalition, totally ignoring the fact that it wasn’t the Lib Dems who took this decision, but the British people themselves when a hell of a lot more of them voted for the Tories than voted for Labour, creating a situation where a Tory-LD coalition would have a healthy majority but a Labour-LD one would fall short.

But what’s really pissing me off is the hypocrisy they’re displaying. Here’s a look at the front page of the apparently unofficial @UKLabourParty twitter feed (the official one is @UKLabour – I’d be very interested to know who’s behind the supposedly unofficial one):

I’m currently seeing a lot of retweets of their various “We need another x people to retweet if you want Proportional Representation” going around.

So exactly how long has the Labour Party believed in proportional representation? Well their 1997 manifesto did say the following:

We are committed to a referendum on the voting system for the House of Commons. An independent commission on voting systems will be appointed early to recommend a proportional alternative to the first-past-the-post system.

Full Manifesto

And they did do the first part of that. They created an independent commission under Roy Jenkins that produced a report. You can read the full report here. The crucial bit is contained in the first two recommendations:

1. The Commission’s central recommendation is that the best alternative for Britain to the existing First Past The Post system is a two-vote mixed system which can be described as either limited AMS or AV Top-up. The majority of MPs (80 to 85%) would continue to be elected on an individual constituency basis, with the remainder elected on a corrective Top-up basis which would significantly reduce the disproportionality and the geographical divisiveness which are inherent in FPTP.

2. Within this mixed system the constituency members should be elected by the Alternative Vote. On its own AV would be unacceptable because of the danger that in anything like present circumstances it might increase rather than reduce disproportionality and might do so in a way which is unfair to the Conservative party. With the corrective mechanism in operation, however, its advantages of increasing voter choice and of ensuring that in practice all constituency members (as opposed to little more that half in recent elections) have majority support in their own constituencies become persuasive. Lord Alexander would, however, prefer to retain FPTP for constituency elections for the reasons outlined in the attached note.

Of course, having spent a load of tax payers money finding out what they should do, they then binned it. Hey, FPTP was winning them obscene majorities on a minority of the vote! Excluding factors such as fairness, decency, democracy, keeping their word, and the long-term good of the country, what possible reasons would they have for moving to a proportional system?

Then we arrive in 2010. Labour are now making a big fuss about the fact that their 2010 manifesto contained a commitment to electoral reform. It did, saying the following:

At the heart of our agenda for a new politics are commitments to a referendum early in the next parliament on whether to move to the Alternative Vote system for elections to the House of Commons;

Full Manifesto Section

It should be noted that Alternative Vote is not a proportional system. You might have noticed a line in the section I quoted from the Jenkins report:

On its own AV would be unacceptable because of the danger that in anything like present circumstances it might increase rather than reduce disproportionality and might do so in a way which is unfair to the Conservative party.

Basically, it’s not PR. It can actually make it more likely that a party could achieve a majority with only a third of the first-choice votes; its only, minor, saving grace is that at least it would mean people no longer had to vote tactically. There’s a very good article on the BBC News website that allows you to see the effects of various types of voting system. From that, you can see:

In the 2005 election, FPTP gave the Labour Party 355 seats (54.6%) on  35.3% of the vote.

If those elections had been held under AV, they’d have got 366 seats (56.3%).

You can read a bit more about Labour’s retreat away from PR, here, but it’s clear that they have not been in favour of it in any meaningful way.

So when did the Labour Party and Gordon Brown become converted to the cause of proportional representation? Sometime last Friday morning, far as I can tell.

And if they think they can get voting reform past a sceptical British public in a referendum while displaying such a huge degree of opportunism and hypocrisy, I suspect they might find themselves mistaken. And remember this: if we lost such a referendum we’d have lost all chance of PR for a generation.

Let’s talk about a small, remote, poor, and undeveloped country called Oxfordia that recently held an election. Oxfordia has a simple “first-past-the-post” election system; the country is divided into two halves, each of which returns a member of parliament. The results of the election were as follows:

East Oxfordia

Labourious Party: 21,938 votes (42.5%)

The Liberally Democrats: 17,357 (33.6%)

Conversative Party: 9,727 (18.8%)

West Oxfordia

Conversative Party: 23,906 (42.3%)

The Liberally Democrats: 23,730 (42.0%)

Labourious Party: 5,999 (10.6%)

So following the election, Oxfordia has two members in its parliament, one from the Conversative Party and one from the Labourious Party. Now of course, this is pretty unfair, given the numbers of votes cast:

The Liberally Democrats: 41,087 (40.0%)

Conversative Party: 33,633 (32.7%)

Labourious Party: 27,937 (27.2%)

Still, at the end of the day, that’s just a small, far away country with a corrupt electoral system. At least we don’t have to worry about anything like that happening here.

For more information, click to read about East Oxfordia and West Oxfordia.

Some of you might be wondering just how it’s possible for the Liberal Democrats to increase their share of the vote, albeit by only 1% or so, but to then have lost several seats. The point you have to bear in mind is that because of the way they get squeezed, bashed and generally thrown about by our rickety old first-past-the-post system, there isn’t actually a huge correlation between how many votes the Liberal Democrats get, and how many seats they end up with.

To illustrate this, I’ve knocked up a graph showing the percentage share of the vote they received and the percentage share of the seats that got them, for every election from 1970 through to 2005. Look at when they got their best increase, in 1997, when they advanced from 20 seats in 1992 to 46.

That was their reward for losing 1% on their share of the vote.

Given that, why would you expect them gaining 1% in their vote share to give them a good night?