Daniel

It appears that John was entirely right to be suspicious of the “Unite Against Terror” campaign. Just a few weeks after collecting signatures, signatories might be interested to know that your name is apparently to be used for a campaign against the BBC for apparently not “framing” the debate in a suitably congenial way.

The question of whether the BBC was right or wrong on this issue is irrelevant here. I didn’t watch the BBC tonight so I can’t say whether they were or they weren’t. The facts are though, that this was ostensibly the “Unite Against Terror” petition, not “Unite Against People Who We Consider To Be Insufficiently Cooperative In The War On Terror”. Anyone who has no particular views about BBC bias, but who out of goodwill and solidarity signed up to a nonspecific statement of opposition to terrorism in the belief that the people behind UAT[1] had too many scruples to start using them for an entirely unrelated political agenda, has the right to be bloody angry at this little shenanigan. I for one am glad I didn’t. My own reasons for not signing UAT were rather more visceral than John’s and are summarised below the fold, in literary form

Update: Alan Johnson has now removed the “News and Forums” section from the UAT website. I have to say that in general he has behaved really rather well about the whole thing.

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Over on my other site, a further installment in the series “Everything I Know, I Learned in MBA School At Great Expense And My God Are You Lot Going To Suffer For It”. In this episode, I discuss what the theory of risk management and process control can tell us about the desirability or otherwise of shooting suspected suicide bombers.

The Church of England is currently having a vote about the advisability of ordaining women as bishops. Apparently up to 1000 clergy are thinking about leaving the C of E over this issue. While pondering this grave crisis in the spiritual life of the nation while watching Newsnight last night (it was my turn to take the bins out), I came up with the following theory, which I think has some predictive power.
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Noel Coward was a fine Englishman …

London Pride has been handed down to us.
London Pride is a flower that’s free.
London Pride means our own dear town to us,
And our pride it for ever will be.

Every Blitz your resistance toughening,
From the Ritz to the Anchor and Crown,
Nothing ever could override
The pride of London Town.

Update: Lord (Lenny) Hoffman is only an adopted Londoner (like myself) and is the quintessential Hampstead liberal, but he demonstrated that the spirit is still strong, not so long ago.

There may be some nations too fragile or fissiparous to withstand a serious act of violence. But that is not the case in the United Kingdom. When Milton urged the government of his day not to censor the press even in time of civil war, he said:

“Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governours”

This is a nation which has been tested in adversity, which has survived physical destruction and catastrophic loss of life. I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups of terrorists to kill and destroy, but they do not threaten the life of the nation. Whether we would survive Hitler hung in the balance, but there is no doubt that we shall survive Al-Qaeda.

A few thoughts on Galloway’s victory in Bethnal Green & Bow, below the fold. More detailed psephological analysis, including how me and Martin Baxter got it so wrong[1] tomorrow, but somehow the BG&B result seemed more important to me than the rest of the election.

[1]Yes yes yes and how the betting markets got it so right, are you bloody happy now James.
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Quickly quickly, here’s my prediction. I’m using vote shares from the IG betting market, because I think that “The Wisdom of Crowds” probably works quite well for mass estimation problems like this, but maybe not so good at projecting the results of its mass estimation onto a difficult electoral college problem. So I’m working on the assumption of 32.5% Conservative, 37% Labour and 24% LibDem and using my own Allocated Regional Swing model, documented here last week.

That gives me the following seat predictions:

Labour: 388
Conservative: 190
LibDem: 53.

Labour majority 130, and presumably Blair decides that it was a referendum on the war (and the lying about the war) after all.

Note that the LibDems get royally screwed by first-past-the-post; they get a swing of 5% and pick up three seats. I have a really ace triangle plot showing this but I don’t know how to upload images on the new WordPress site (Update: thanks Henry!)

I’ll do a proper post after the election explaining how I got it so wrong. Meanwhile, below the fold is my list of possible seat changes; it’s longer than Martin Baxter’s, but this is mainly because the list is drawn from a slightly different model; I wanted one as long as would be possible consistent with my overall predictions to be a bit more interesting.

Now I’m off to vote (LibDem, if anyone cares. Sorry Dobbo, you’re a really nice guy but you’re not standing for the Frank Dobson party. You’re standing for the Labour Party and that means Blair).
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We’re having a live, almost Presidential-style “debate” in the UK on the program “Question Time”, ahead of our almost Presidential-style election. If you fancy “live blogging” it, like the Americans did, the place to go is perfect.co.uk. I won’t be myself; I will be sulking because an impromptu meeting at work plus childcare duties has caused me to miss out on a drink with the creme de la menthe of the UK blog community. Or maybe I will; much depends on how much of a fuss I think there is going to be over the Attorney General’s advice furore. Never has the phrase “the coverup is always worse than the crime” seemed so apposite; if they’d just published this straight off it would have convinced those who supported the war, and not convinced those who didn’t, for no net loss. Publishing it now after having fibbed so much about its contents, looks pretty bad.

I’ve just been watching the Newsnight item on the Attorney General’s advice furor, and it seems to me that this issue is a lot more clear cut than people are trying to make it. Blair keeps saying “look, I had to take that decision”. But there were two decisions taken in the first quarter of 2003, with the intelligence they had, the legal advice they had, and a UN resolution not coming along as fast as wanted. Those decisions were:

1. The decision to get rid of Saddam
2. The decision to sell decision 1 to the public by misrepresenting the evidence.

With regard to the first decision, there is a case to be made that it had to be done, and that it had to be done right then. As regular readers know, I don’t agree with this case, but it can be made forcefully.

But the second decision … well, there’s no defending it, is there? The war might have needed to be fought, but it didn’t need to be lied about. Tony Blair controls the British Army, not us. He could have fought that war on the basis of Saddam having to go. And it would have cost Labour votes, so he didn’t sell it that way; he took a gamble on the likely existence of WMDs and lost. So in other words, decision 2, was a decision that had nothing to do with saving the Iraqis; it was a decision to mislead the British public in order to help the Labour Party’s electoral chances. Somebody took that decision; very false claims were certainly made and they weren’t made by accident (or by mistake).

There’s no justifying that, is there?

A week late and a dollar short, I am now ready to unveil my election forecasting model. Gosh what fun it was to make; there really is no substitute for wading in and making a model if you want to learn about a dataset. I am not uploading it here, because the bloody thing is a 1MB Excel file and I suspect that the bandwidth consequences of this for CT would cost me my stripes. However, if you email me at daniel dot davies at gmail dot com, I’ll send it across to you if you like. Or alternatively, you can download the data yourself from Martin Baxter‘s site and produce your own version which may be safer from my trademark incomprehensible spreadsheet design and boneheaded calculation errors. Below the fold, the recipe for my model, the forecasts themselves, and a bit of psephological analysis which suggests why I think that the Liberal Democrats are really, really badly screwed.

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By way of recompense to our readers for the dull bout of egotism below, here’s a link to one of the finest and most life-affirming things on the internet (Harry B, this one in particular is for you).

“Hold Your Plums”, featuring Billy Butler and Wally Scott on Radio Merseyside, is just an extraordinary piece of improvised folk-theatre. To begin with, it was a fairly banal bog-standard quiz, loosely based on a fruit machine (hence the double entendre). But as time went on, a combination of the native Scouse wit and the slight vagueness of housewives who have been able to have their first drink of the weekend as the kids set off for Sunday school, it turned into something far more comic.

Billy basically developed this Quixotic urge to ensure that everyone got the answers right. So he gave them clues. And they still got them wrong. It’s basically a phone-in quiz show for the very confused (and for people taking the mickey on purpose). Oh, it’s indescribable, just have a listen to it. The extracts on the BBC website are all named after the phrase that the caller is meant to be guessing. The most famous extract is “What did Walter Raleigh bring back from the New World?”, but my personal favourite is “Springboks”. This all falls apart on a strange point of local microgeography; there are some part of the North West of England where “book”, “hook”, “look” etc are all pronounced to rhyme with “puke”. But anyway; there’s about an hour’s listening pleasure here; forward the link to an expat Scouser of your acquaintance and they will be grateful.

PS: Someone once tried to describe my personality problems to a mutual acquaintance by saying that I bore the same relationship to the world that Billy Butler did to his callers. Make of that what you will.

I was going to write up my election forecasting model and I will (taster; the LibDems might be in a lot more trouble than anyone thinks), but I am too damnably tired this evening. So instead, here’s my responses to that book quiz which was so very hot about two weeks ago. I think it was passed on to me by John Band or Ted or somebody.

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Yup, Thomas “Airmiles” Friedman is off on one again. Globollocks back in full effect, this time reminding us of the War For Innovation going on in his head. He’s got a book of this stuff out, apparently, bless.
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And still they come … another mySociety project, aiming to kick some life into the carcass of democracy in the UK. Give up guys, it’s dead, that’s what I say.

No seriously. Notapathetic.com is a laudable effort, allowing those of us who really really don’t think voting is worth bothering with to differentiate ourselves from those who merely don’t understand the question, can’t be bothered or (surprisingly many) didn’t realise that there was an election on. You can record your reason for not voting for posterity. Don’t be put off by the fact that a lot of the putative reasons on the website look a bit pathetic; there is going to be some proper analysis of the reasons (I’ve apparently signed up to hand-classify a hundred, so make yours interesting), so the unsystematic ones will tend to cancel out. So if you’re intentionally not voting (even if live in Birmingham or Blackburn and thus suspect that you will end up voting Labour by post anyway), pop along to notapathetic and tell the world why.

I had sort of promised to put this link up last week, but well, you know.

Backword Dave notes, cogently:

I hate those in power. I look up, and others see the stars; I see the shit up our leader’s arses.

Since it’s National Poetry Month in America and there isn’t enough scurrilous Welsh Nationalist verse on the internet, I reproduce below the fold the poem to which Dave is alluding; “Anglomaniac Anthem” by Harri Webb
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