It’s not news that Fianna Fáil suffered a disaster of epic proportions. But I thought it might be nice to knock up a graph showing just how badly a catastrophe had befallen them. (It’s not a terribly good graph. I’m not sure lines are the best way to go here, and it would be nice if the X axis was proportionally spaced. But I think it does the job.)

Here it is:

(Click on the graph to show it full size).

A few things you should note.

1) Ireland has a pretty proportional STV electoral system. To win more than 50% of the seats in such a system is a very, very impressive feat. Fianna Fáil did it several times.

2) Although Ireland had two major parties, it wasn’t a two-party system in the popular sense of that phrase. If you define the winner of an election as the party that gains either the most seats or the most votes, Fianna Fáil won every single election between 1932 and 2007, on both of those counts. For Fianna Fáil, “defeat” was when they were still in first place, but with a number of seats less than the total of those parties in second and third places, thus enabling a viable coalition to be formed that didn’t involve them.

3) Fianna Fáil was so dominant that it not only managed to form the government for 61 out of 79 years, for most of those years it did so as a single-party government, not needing to form a coalition to achieve power until 1989. (Again, not an easy feat under PR).

4) Between 1932 and 2007, the lowest share of first preference vote it ever got was 39.1% in 1992.  In the same period, the highest vote ever achieved by the second party Fine Gael was 39.2%, in 1981 and 1982. (e.g. Fianna Fáil’s worst ever post 1932 vote was only a fraction lower than Fine Gaels’ best ever vote). And even in the “landslide” of 2011, Fine Gael only got a vote share of 36.1%.

And then in 2011 Fianna Fáil lost. Hugely. Epically. And it’s a defeat made more marked by just how dominant they previously were.

This wasn’t a two-party system. It was more akin to places/times like Northern Ireland through most of the twentieth century, where the Official Ulster Unionist party always won, or apartheid South Africa, where the Nationalist Party always won.

Why?

Well perhaps one thing Fianna Fáil had in common with those parties was that it wasn’t based on ideology and didn’t sit on the left-right scale. It was instead based on identity, a particular sort of patriotism, and a general populist appeal, thus enabling it to be all things to all men, and allowing it to be broadly centre-right in policy and yet still achieve widespread support among working people. In that, it was perhaps similar to the Gaullists in France and the Peronistas in Argentina.

And then of course, there was the appeal of power itself. I read somewhere that Fianna Fáil was almost like a career and life enabling alternative to university; those who hadn’t had the benefit of an education could still “better themselves” by joining Fianna Fáil and making their way up its ranks. Loyalty was achieved not through altruistic joint-purpose but though collaborative shared-achievement.

(A bit like joining the Masons or the Rotary Club, except those latter two don’t stand in elections).

But for that to work you have to keep winning. I think we can probably say that the alternative university is now closed. One look at the graph makes it clear. Whatever Fianna Fáil was, it ain’t that now.

This makes me sad. I love STV. It has a purity and elegance against which MMP looks kludgy and contrived. I should at this point pause to point out to UK and US readers that contrary to what many people in those countries seem to think, there is no such system as “proportional representation”. Instead, there are many possible electoral systems, each of which can be judged against various factors, such as:

Proportionality: The extent to which a party getting a certain percentage of the vote will get a similar percentage of seats in the resulting parliament. The First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system used in the UK and the US fares particularly badly here. In the 1983 UK general election, Labour got 209 seats (33%) on 28% of the vote, while the SDP/Liberal alliance got a measly 23 seats (4%) despite achieving an only slightly smaller 25% of the vote. In February 1974, the Liberals got a pretty impressive (for a third party) 19% of the vote, but got only 14 seats (2%) in return. And in 1951, Labour scored 48.8% of the vote to the Conservatives’ 48.0%, but the conservatives got 51% of the seats – an overall majority.

Geographical Link: The extent to which individual members of parliament represent specific geographical areas, and thus the extent to which communities are specifically represented in parliament. FPTP is very strong here, as you have a large number of small constituencies, each represented by a single member.

Member-Voter Link: The extent to which voters can select the specific members that represent them. (As opposed to parties effectively selecting who will get elected). FPTP is pretty middling here. Where there is a tight contest, then yes, the voters get to choose who will represent them. But in the 80% of seats that are “safe”, the winner is almost inevitably the candidate chosen by the leading party, so it’s the party selection contest that effectively determines who will be the MP. (The USA kludges around this by opening up the party selection process to voters, which gives power to voters, but at the cost of depriving parties of the right to decide which candidates they wish to offer up for election). This aspect also includes the ability for independent candidates to both stand and get elected.

Effectiveness of Legislature: The extent to which the system delivers a functional legislature. It’s often suggested that it’s beneficial for a system to require parties to get at least a meaningful level of support before they start winning seats. If you assume that decisive, stable government is a good thing (and that’s a big if), then FPTP scores quite highly here, as you tend to end up with a small number of large parties (as opposed to a squabbling plethora of small, single-issue parties). Many proportional systems kludge this requirement by requiring parties to get over an arbitrary share of the vote. Get 5.01% of the votes in Germany for example, and you’ll get 31 MPs. Get 4.99% and you’ll get nothing.

As a comparison, let’s look at the “pure” proportional representation system used in Israel, which is probably the polar opposite of FPTP. The entire nation is one single constituency, with each party submitting a list of candidates, ranked in an order chosen by the party itself. Voters can choose between parties only. If a party gets X% of the vote, then the first X% of candidates on their list are elected. If there are 200 MPs in the legislature and a party gets 0.6% of the vote then they get 1 MP. If you’re not particularly keen on a party which is likely to get it’s first 5 candidates elected, but you love the bloke they’ve got at number 8, then tough. There’s no way whatsoever for you to vote for him.

I hate that system. I’d rather have FPTP. I want to vote for people, not lists.

Which is where we come to STV, the system I’ve loved ever since I found out about it in the 1980s. STV uses large, multi-member constituencies (in Ireland they have between three and five members) where voters are presented with a list of names not parties, and then rank those names in order of preference (until they have no further preference). Parties are free to suggest an order in which they would like people to vote for their candidates, but people are free to ignore this.

Imagine you lived in a hypothetical UK four-member constituency, in which the candidates were:

Dev Alahan (Conservative)
Peter Barlow (Labour)
Janice Battersby (Independent)
Hilda Ogden (Lib Dem)
David Platt (Labour)
Graham Proctor (Labour)
Dierdre Rashid (Green)
John Stape (Conservative)
Rita Sullivan (Lib Dem)
Kirk Sutherland (Conservative)
Sean Tully (BNP)
Kevin Webster (Independent)

You might have noticed that the parties aren’t putting up the maximum four candidates that you might expect. There is a reason, and we’ll get to it.

Now the Labour party, say, might ask you to vote for their candidates in the following order:

1. David Platt (Labour)
2. Peter Barlow (Labour)
3. Graham Proctor (Labour)

But what if you’re broadly a Labour supporter, but you think David Platt’s a complete wanker? And what if you also have some sympathy for the Greens, and think that Kevin Webster, the independent, is a good bloke with a particular interest in the welfare of small children and young women? Well you’d be perfectly at liberty to vote in the following way:

1. Peter Barlow (Labour)
2. Graham Proctor (Labour)
3. Dierdre Rashid (Green)
4. Kevin Webster (Independent)
5. David Platt (Labour)

But how does STV actually work? Well the counting is a bit complicated, but we only really need to concern ourselves with how you vote (which we’ve described above), and what the end result is likely to be.

Imagine a town in the UK which currently has five FPTP constituencies. For the purpose of this example, we’ll assume that all the constituencies are the same size (i.e. have the same number of voters) and have the same turnout (i.e. the same proportion of people voting).

----          Con1   Con2   Con3   Con4   Con5   City Total
Labour        66%    65%    75%    58%    22%    57%
Conservative  7%     16%    5%     14%    57%    20%
LibDem        26%    17%    19%    27%    19%    22%
Others        1%     2%     1%     1%     2%     1%
Winner        LAB    LAB    LAB    LAB    CON

So under FPTP, we get four Labour MPs, one conservative MP, and no LibDem MPs, even though the LibDems actually scored a higher percentage of the vote across the city than the Conservatives. Also, note that every single one of those five seats is a “safe” seat. Unless future elections deliver huge swings from one party to another, we pretty know that the result is always going to be four Labour and one Conservative. Which mean the actual selection of the MPs is entirely in the hands of political parties themselves.

So how would it work under STV? Well this city would form one large constituency, rather than five small ones, with this single constituency returning five MPs. Given the above voting patterns we’d expect the final result to be three Labour MPs, one Conservative MP, and one Lib Dem MP.

Even if the vote proportions don’t change much, this is still going to deliver a tight, meaningful election. Why? Because parties would typically put up at least one more candidate than they were expecting to get. In other words, they would put up the number of candidates they would hope and dream they would get, if their campaign went well.

So lets say that at the previous election, the vote shares were as above, Labour 57%, Conservative 20% and LibDem 22%, with the result being Labour 3 MPs, Conservative 1 MP and LibDem 1 MP. But now imagine that since that election, Labour have significantly lost support, with both the Conservatives and the LibDems increasing support. In this case, both the Conservatives and the LibDems might hope to increase their share of the vote enough to pick up a second seat.

Labour would probably only put up three candidates – their existing three MPs, just hoping to hang onto all of them. But both the Conservatives and the LibDems would put up two candidates each, their existing MP plus a new candidate. So you now have a right old dog-fight. Seven serious, major-party candidates, each with a realistic chance of being an MP, fighting for five seats.

Two LibDems fighting for what will most likely be only one LibDem seat. Two Conservatives fighting for what will most likely be only one Conservative seat. And three Labour candidates fighting for what might well turn out to be only two Labour seats.

You’ve got Conservative versus Labour to push Labour down to only two seats. LibDem versus Labour, again to push Labour down to only two seats. Conservative versus LibDem, fighting over who will get that third seat, should they prise it away from Labour. Labour versus Labour, to ensure that if that third seat is lost, they’re not the MP being lost. Conservative versus Conservative, to ensure that if the Conservatives remain on only one seat, they’re the Conservative that gets it. And LibDem versus LibDem, to ensure the same, that if there’s only one LibDem seat, it’s them.

And this is before we add in the effects of transfer votes, with parties appealing to supporters of other parties to give them their later transfers (like the Labour voter in the above example voting Green) and individual candidates appealing to voters to rank them higher than their fellow party candidates (like the Labour voter in the above example ranking the Labour #2 and #3 above the #1).

This is why I love STV. It delivers a broadly proportional result, while eliminating tiny fringe parties (but without any arbitrary threshold), and yet still manages to be all about individual candidates rather than parties. Independent candidates have just as much chance to get elected as those belonging to party. Every contest is meaningful. No party can afford to impose (“parachute in”) an unpopular candidate, because they risk losing that seat. Power really is in the hands of the voters.

The obvious disadvantage is that the constituencies can be rather large, but that can be partly mitigated against (with some loss of proportionality) by having three member constituencies in thinly-populated rural areas where five member constituencies would be huge. And I think that losing some geographical linkage (but only some) is a worthwhile price to pay for all of STV’s other benefits.

So what’s the “problem”? If STV’s so great, why is Ireland thinking of moving away from it, to systems that, while still proportional, rely on party lists.

Well put simply, where every single contest turns into a huge, vicious dog-fight, where no candidate is ever safe, and candidates are often fighting their fellow party members as much, if not more, as they are the opposing parties, politics can become very insular and local. When there is such a strong bond between voter and individual representative, when voters have so much say over who represents them, national issues can go out of the window in favour of local issues.

In our FPTP system, voters ask: “Why should I vote for your party?” After all, you only have one candidate per party, so it’s usually the party that is the determining factor between each candidate. Add in the fact that 80% of the constituencies are safe seats with the result a forgone conclusion, and you end up with an election that is very much fought nationally, on national, “political” issues.

But under STV, voters can end up saying: “Okay, you’ve convinced me that I should vote for your party, but why should I vote for you?”

And that too often leads to voters asking not what the candidate can do for their country, but what they can do for their local area. They became literal servants of the people, whose job it is to fix problems and get resources for their area. Future loyalty is bought by the services they’ve rendered in the past.

And they can never relax. No seat is safe. Even in an area that is solid for their party, a lack of attention to constituency issues (perhaps because they’re busy serving the country as a cabinet minister) risks their local party putting one extra candidate up at the next election who will be fighting to take their seat away from them.

I love STV. But I can see how, in Ireland’s case, a system where general elections actually consist of 43 viciously fought local elections isn’t perhaps the best way to run a country.

Your next MP would have to aim to get more than 50% of the vote to be sure of winning. At present they can be handed power with just one vote in three.  They’ll need to work harder to win – and keep – your support.

Too many MPs have their ‘safe seats’ for life. Force complacent politicians to sit up and listen, and reach out to the communities they seek to represent.

So no more safe seats for central party leadership to “parachute” candidates into. Good thing, right? Are you sure? Consider this:

Since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, no bald man has been elected US president, despite the fact that male pattern baldness (MPB) affects roughly 40 million men in the United States. So that’s a baldy-free run of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush Snr, Clinton, Bush Jnr and Obama. (Yes, Gerald Ford was bald, but he was appointed by the US Senate).

Looked at in this light, (Black) Barack Obama’s victory over (balding) John McCain appears less of a historic breakthrough, and more of a depressing confirmation of a clear historical trend – that in today’s looks obsessed society, bald guys don’t get elected US President. (And add in the fact that Obama’s taller than McCain, another factor that often suggests the winner, and it’s pretty clear that McCain’s campaign had early on boarded a direct flight to Failure City, Republic of Loserland).

And this bias against chrome-domes isn’t something unique to the US Presidency:

Research from the early 1990s found that the proportion of bald men making it to elected office in the US was four times less than the number of follicularly challenged males in the population at large.

…

The last time a bald politician was elected to Number 10 was Winston Churchill in 1951 – and he was up against the equally receded Clement Attlee.

[BBC News]

Where am I going with this? Well that’s just if you’re bald. Imagine how difficult it would be to get elected if you were not merely bald, but ugly as well? And how about if on top of being bald and ugly, you suffered from what could perhaps be most charitably described as a certain lacking in the charisma department? Actually, we don’t have to imagine that one.

He was up against a widely despised, smug, lying war-monger, and lost huge. You get what I’m saying.

Now I wasn’t sad to see Howard lose. But what about more talented candidates? Imagine you have someone who is simply brilliant. Who will make a terrific lawmaker, tenacious in committee and analytical in debate, someone who will surgically remove the flaws from proposed laws and expose the lies and evasions of those who parliament is required to hold to account. Someone who might make a brilliant cabinet minister. The sort of man or woman you want in charge of the economy in difficult times like this.

And then imagine that this brilliant person, this person who all concerned agree would be an asset both in Parliament and in government, is cursed by being both ugly and uncharismatic. Is there not possibly an argument here in favour of safe seats? Is there not perhaps some benefit in having seats where a non-domiciled, pedophile pit-bull terrier could get elected provided you shoved the right colour rosette on it?

Now you might say that I’m being over-cynical here, and yes I am a bit, and my tongue is somewhat lodged in my cheek. But only partially. It’s all very well saying that surely we can trust the electorate to make the right choices, to pick the brilliant but ugly bald guy over the slick, smooth-talking wanker with a sharp hair-cut and a well-worn suit, but they don’t do they?

Dwight Eisenhower. 1956. Fifty-four years of hurt. Bald men should perhaps stop dreaming.

And it’s not just me thinking this, although those other thinking it might not describe it in quite the same terms. Some believe that the roots of Ireland’s economic disaster lie in its highly democratic STV system, in which every MP is directly elected/chosen by the voting public, and in which there is pretty much no such thing as a safe seat. This has supposedly led to TDs (MPs) who are good at getting elected, but perhaps not so good at making laws or running a government.

Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have committed to changing the electoral system, to a still proportional, but more list based system. But perhaps the most succinct explanation is given by journalist and campaigner Fintan O’Toole in his petition for reform:

3. END CLIENTILISM

Change the electoral system that turns TDs into constituency fixers. Replace it with a mix of direct election and a list system similar to that used for the Scottish parliament.

Such a system would massively remove the power of individual voters to select who they want to represent them. Most of the direct election seats would be “safe”, meaning that it would be the relevant local party who would ultimately select the MP. And then the list would provide extra opportunities for central parties to “parachute” in bright and brilliant but ugly and tongue-tied candidates.

And I can’t help but notice the similarity between the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign’s “Force … politicians to … reach out to the communities they seek to represent” and O’Toole’s “[End] electoral system that turns [MP]s into constituency fixers”.

You know, this was supposed to be a satirical post. But I don’t think it is. I really am starting to think that an electoral system can be too democratic.

Which is a bit of a pisser really. Bugger.

He turned up with long hair, tattoos and an insatiable appetite for climbing trees. Few people suspected anything odd of the man who introduced himself as Mark Stone on a dairy farm turned spiritual sanctuary in North Yorkshire.

He had come alone on 12 August 2003, in the middle of a heatwave, for a gathering of environmental activists known as Earth First.

Apart from the fact that “Stone” was apparently well-paid and ate meat, he appeared no different from the hundreds of other activists who gathered under marquees to smoke weed, play guitars and plan protests.

What no one could have known was that, despite appearances, the 33-year-old “freelance climber” was actually PC Mark Kennedy, an undercover police officer beginning an audacious operation to live deep undercover among environmental activists.

Source: The Guardian [Full Story...]

But after seven years undercover the story took a sensational turn.

Kennedy’s personal journey also appears to have ended with a remarkable twist. In recent weeks, after protesters discovered his hidden identity and circulated news that he was a police agent, Kennedy is said to have “gone native”. He has expressed remorse to betrayed friends and is seeking some way of securing redemption.

…

Kennedy is now living abroad, but recent developments suggest his desire for redemption is sincere. In email exchanges with activists and their lawyer, Kennedy talked of taking a “leap of faith”, giving the defence evidence that would “assist” them. “I want to help,” he said.

Kennedy is now apparently in the USA, but what should he do now? Well I think the course of action he needs to take now is clear. See, when I said that his story was “like something out of a Hollywood movie” I was speaking only a partial truth. It is like something out of a Hollywood movie, but only the start of one. There is half a story here, a beginning that leads to personal growth and then to a painful transformation, but there is no ending, no redemptive arc.

Kennedy needs to get back into the environmental movement, openly, as himself, offering the insights that only a poacher turned gamekeeper can offer, and endeavour to earn the forgiveness of those who once counted him a friend but now consider him an enemy.

Because only then is his story complete. And only then is his story option-able to a Hollywood movie-studio for a shitload of money.

You’ve probably read this in the news. If not, you can read about it on the above link, or here, here, or here.

But basically, a Conservative councillor, Gareth Compton, was listening to a radio discussion programme featuring the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown when she (allegedly) said something that provoked him into making the following “joke” on twitter.

“Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.”

She complained, along with many others. He has been arrested under the Communications Act 2003 and suspended from the Conservative party.

Where do I stand on this? Well at the moment, I’m thinking that this was a highly offensive joke for which he probably should be expelled from the Conservative party, but that it was clearly a joke, and not therefore something he should be prosecuted for. But I do think we need to judge what he said in the context of the statement of hers to which she was replying. Which is where it gets murky, because there doesn’t seem to be a definitive account of exactly what it was she said.

He claims that she stated the following:

The councillor claimed she had said, with reference to David Cameron’s trip to China, that no politician was morally qualified to speak out about human rights abuses, including the stoning of women, bar the likes of Nelson Mandela. [link]

But I can’t seem to find any authoritative, neutral account of what she actually said. The most I can find is Alibai-Brown now stating:

If I, as a citizen of this country, cannot even express an opinion about human rights and the moral authority of our politicians, what does that say about how equal we are? [link]

…which doesn’t confirm his account, but equally, doesn’t contradict it either. Why does it matter? Well firstly, because if he was responding to a statement which itself could be considered offensive (which we can only fully judge if we know exactly what she said and the way in which she said it), then his statement is perhaps less of a unprovoked and gratuitous attack, and perhaps more of an admittedly harsh, but perhaps satirical comment.

But I think it’s most important because of this:

She added that she regarded Compton’s remarks as racially motivated because he mentioned stoning. “If I as a Muslim woman had tweeted that it would be a blessing if Gareth Compton was stoned to death I’d be arrested immediately.” [link]

The implication here being, as the Telegraph puts it:

She told The Guardian they amounted to “incitement to murder” and as a Muslim of Indian descent, his remarks could be seen to be “racially motivated”. [link]

The question here is: who first mentioned “stoning”, him or her?

If she never mentioned stoning, then yes, there is a racial aspect to what she said, much as if a white American were to joke about wanting someone (who “happened” to be black) killed, but specified that it should be by lynching (ignoring far more obvious methods such as by gun, knife, car, lethal injection, gas chamber, electric chair etc.) .

But if she specifically mentioned stoning, and especially if it was in the context of a specific discussion about the current high profile stoning cases in Iran (Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani in particular), then I think there’s no real justification for assuming that the joke was racially motivated. (It might well have been, but I don’t think you can accuse people of racism on the grounds that racism could theoretically be a motivating factor in their actions).

Finally, I think when she says:

“If I as a Muslim woman had tweeted that it would be a blessing if Gareth Compton was stoned to death I’d be arrested immediately.”

…she’s guilty of a certain amount of hyperbole. Given the response to the Channel 4 Dispatches programme Undercover Mosque (no charges were eventually bought against those saying that gay men should be thrown off cliffs, or that Indian businesses should be bombed and Jews killed, but the police did request that the CPS bring charges against Channel 4 for broadcasting a programme including material likely to stir up racial hatred), I think her implication that being a Muslim makes her more likely to be arrested, were she to say something like this is not borne out by prior events.

Anyhow, yesterday I read a piece in the London Evening Standard by their City Editor Chris Blackhurst (who’s perhaps a little older than me, but probably a fellow Generation Xer), in which he strongly opposed the raising of the tuition fees cap. It’s a good, fairly written, and passionate piece, but he managed to completely rub me up the wrong way with one particular angle that he was taking. Here’s the relevant bits (emphasis mine):

In our days, as I recall, we never had this double-whammy worry. We got a grant from the local council and we spent it. If we wanted more, we got casual work, we asked the bank manager or our parents, or both.

We weren’t bothered about being saddled with heavy debts when we graduated: what jobs we would end up doing and, more to the point, how much they paid, never dominated our thinking. When we did get jobs, we were able to join the property ladder and to take out mortgages — we did not have a sizeable loan already hanging over us.

…

How can we do this? We, the people that enjoyed free education, that basked in the lengthy post-war prosperity of our parents’ generation and the expansion of the university system? How dare we turn round now and tell our children to pay so much?

…

And that dilemma is not one they should face. It’s not one that we had to confront and neither should our successors. Our hypocrisy in this regard is appalling. Shame on us.

Of course, upon reading that, my deep, gut reactions was: what’s with this “we” shit? You might have gone to university Chris, but I didn’t, and neither did hardly anyone I knew². I just didn’t come from the sort of background³ where people went to university, and as a result I was frankly too scared to go.

People seem to be harking back to a “golden age” where everyone got to go to university for free, but there never was such a golden age. Some people (ten percent maybe, with a disproportionate number of them coming from good middle-class backgrounds) were given free university educations, paid for by the taxes of a whole bunch of people whose own children weren’t going to go to university.

Taxing the poor to educate the rich seems to me neither fair nor progressive, and now that the poor have decided that they’d quite like to go to university too, it’s become horribly apparent that it’s going to need more money.

Like I said, I don’t know the solution. But let’s not kid ourselves about how great it was in the past, because it wasn’t.

¹People say this will enable those people getting degrees to earn more money. But how? And why? The way to help everyone in the country earn more money is to train them to provide goods and services the the rest of the world wishes to purchase. But historically, the reason why people with generic liberal-arts degrees earned more money was because in an era when only 10% of people got a degree, possession of a degree would take you straight into the top 10% of management jobs, where you would be a highly paid “chief” bossing around nine lowly paid “indians”. Those liberal-arts degrees made their possessor’s richer, but they didn’t make the country any richer. If we succeeded in getting 50% of people to have some sort of generic degree that won’t mean 50% of all jobs will now be highly-paid managerial positions. It will simply mean that if you want a top 10% highly-paid managerial position, you’ll need at least a masters degree, if not a Phd. So I fear we risk spending huge amounts of money and saddling kids with massive debts, only for them to end up doing the same 20-30k generic white collar jobs that they would have ended up doing thirty years ago, except that then they’d have started them at 16 instead of 21.

²There were 250 people in my year at school. Of those, 16 (6%) stayed on to do A Levels. Most of them failed those A Levels. I know of at least one person who went to a university or polytechnic to do a degree level course (Lawrence, who went to the University of Lancaster to do maths). I think one, perhaps two max, of the girls went to a university as well. And my friend Stuart who left school after O Levels and got a job in a bank later went back to College to get a BTEC National Diploma in computing, and then, on the strength of that, went to Bristol Polytechnic (now the University of the West of England). So that’s somewhere between 0.4% and 1.6% going to university or polytechnic.

³At the time I got to 18, I knew of only one person in my family, ever, who’d gone to university, and that was a great-grandfather (my mother’s, father’s father, who was quite well off, but then did for his family by dying young of TB). Other than that, of my mother, my father, my brother, my two older cousins, my two uncles and my three aunts, my three great-aunts, and my four grand-parents, not one had been to university. That’s not to say that they were stupid, or even ill-educated. Both my mother and my uncle Alan were teachers (two-year and three-year teaching certificates respectively), my father was a surveyor (part-time Higher National Certificate in Mining Surveying), my uncle Gerry was a policeman, my auntie Ruth was a nurse, and my auntie Jean got very high up in the civil service. Since then, my two younger cousins have both got degrees and my uncle Alan got an Open University degree. But at the time, university seemed a scary place full of better educated kids from posh schools – so I went to a local college and got a BTEC (in cartography and surveying).

Let’s follow some links:

We start with an election that delivered an inconclusive result from which was created an unlikely and awkward coalition between a conservative and perhaps even regressive larger party, and a smaller, supposedly progressive party. Presumably necessary compromises were made, leading to harsh criticism from voices on the left you might have presumed sympathetic.

Economic circumstances and a spiralling deficit forced the coalition government into a programme of huge, harsh, deep cuts, resulting in huge protests, and the government becoming one of the most unpopular ever. Banks were controversally bailed out of huge losses, creating a widespread and angry perception that the poor were suffering to rescue the rich.

Many members of the smaller party were deeply unhappy about the polices their party was following, with several in elected positions resigning in protest. Knowing that were the government to fall they would face electoral oblivion, the smaller party was forced into defending the unforgivable. But the smaller party persists in remaining in coalition, ignoring calls to let the people have the new election they want, knowing that their only hope of survival is to ignore damning criticism and instead prop-up the government through a full parliamentary term in the hope that by then, the savage cuts will have started to bear fruit.

Should I, as a member of the UK’s Liberal Democrats, feel ashamed of the story told by the above links?

No, because while I have huge sympathy for those experiencing the problems inherent in being the junior member of a ruling coalition, every single one of those links refers to Ireland, and its ruling Fianna Fáil – Green Party coalition.

Ashamed? You’d have to ask a member of the Irish Green Party.

One stranger was Theresa Bystram, 45, who travelled 480km (300 miles) from Weybridge, Surrey, on an overnight coach with three of her teenage sons to be at the crematorium.

She said: ‘I absolutely loved him. I just think he is a hero and I wanted to pay my respects.

‘He kept them coppers on the run all that time. Fair enough people died but they must have deserved it.’

One of the people Moat shot was Policeman David Rathband. He was sitting in his car when Moat shot him in the face at point blank range. This wasn’t self-defence. This wasn’t even a fight. There wasn’t any dispute. This was a just a totally random, cowardly, vicious attack.

Rathband survived, but is now blinded for life.

And what about the man who was killed, Chris Brown, who Moat first shot in the legs and then executed with shots to the back and the head? His only crime appears to have been that he got into a relationship with a woman who’d previously dated a psycho. (I once did that. Don’t figure it would have justified him killing me.)

I have no problem with people expressing some degree of sympathy for Moat. He was clearly in need of psychiatric treatment, and in a more just society he might now be alive, and his victims unhurt.

But to go beyond sympathy into suggesting that his victims deserved their fate? Now that’s just sick.

I don’t know who Theresa Bystram is, but having presumably been born with at least some sort of brain she ought to perhaps start using it. And yes, I probably am being very unsympathetic to a woman who’s most likely not all there, but I think I’m still giving her more sympathy than she’s showed to Moat’s victims.

(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.

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.