How many surveys can one man produce? “Yet another Chris Lightfoot effort”:http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/ , which places you on two axes: “crime and punishment, internationalism” (where I’m apparently “very left-wing”) and “economics, etc.” where I turn out to be a “centrist”. Again, rather Britocentric I’m afraid. (You can see my position “here”:http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/scripts/quiz?s=AAGBHBEFDBAEABEEEDAABCCBDDBBDDBDBCBEBBBDDA . ) (Hat tip: Robin Grant – who is collecting results over at “perfect.co.uk”:http://www.perfect.co.uk/2005/04/political-survey-2005 )
From the category archives:
UK Politics
The preliminary results from the first 13,000 voters on the “Who Should You Vote For?”:http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/press4.php site are interesting ….
bq. Party the user expected:
Labour 21%
Conservative 20%
LibDem 37%
UKIP 2%
Green 6%
NONE GIVEN 14%
bq. Actual party suggested: Labour 4%
Conservative 9%
LibDem 58%
UKIP 12%
Green 17%
“Over at John Band’s site”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/full_post.asp?pid=970 they’re all doing Chris Lightfoot’s “Who Should You Vote For?”:http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/ (in the coming UK general election) test. Annoyingly, I came out Lib Dem on this though I fully intend to grit my teeth and vote Labour anyway. But for the purposes of this post I’m going to go all meta and discuss what we are trying to do in voting and how that affects how we should vote. Here’s something I posted on the philos-l list just before the 1992 general election:
bq. A friend asked me to provide him with an argument against tactical voting and I came up with this – derived very loosely from some of the things Geoff Brennan says in his ‘Politics with Romance’, in Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit eds The Good Polity (Blackwell 1989).
bq. The only situation in which an individual voter can affect the outcome is one where there is a tie among the other voters. But in a large electorate this is unlikely to be the case. I want to do two things with my vote: express a preference and secure an outcome. But since my chances of the latter are so small, I may as well concentrate my deliberations on the expressive side. If I am a positive identifier with a particular party — and this is more important to me than my negative feelings towards another party — then even if my party is third I should still vote for it (if I vote). By doing so I secure one of my objectives (the expressive one) but run only a vanishingly small risk of incurring the cost of bringing about a worse outcome than if I had voted tactically. The rational voter should therefore vote for the party she prefers unless it is more important to you expressively to declare your hostility to the party you loathe most – in which case vote for the best placed challenger to that party.
In other words: it is a waste of time and effort to try to bring about a determinate outcome. You’ll almost certainly make no difference. Tactical voting is an attempt to bring about some determinate outcome. But if what is important to you is saying “Blair hooray!” or “Howard boo!” then you can do this perfectly well (voting being only one way of doing it of course). And there’s no merit to the argument that voting for the Lib Dems, Respect, or even the Monster Raving Loony Party is a “wasted vote”. It is no more wasted than any other. So vote for whom you like best, or against whom you hate most, instead of making micro-calculations about effectiveness.
(BTW I realise that this argument deprives me of one lot of nasty things I might say about people who voted for Ralph Nader in either 2000 or 2004, but there are many other nasty things to be said about such people anyway, so I don’t care that much.)
Blair has “called the UK general election for May the 5th”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4409935.stm . Though the polls seem to be indicating a Tory surge, the “current odds at bluesq”:http://www.bluesq.com/bet?action=go_events&type_id=850 are Labour 1/14, Tories 13/2, and LibDems 100/1.
Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the St Pauls in Bristol riots that initiated a period of urban unrest in Britain which ultimately led to the “Scarman”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Scarman report. The riots followed a police raid on the Black and White cafe on 2nd April 1980. The Bristol Evening Post has “some”:http://www.thisisbristol.com/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=144936&command=displayContent&sourceNode=144919&contentPK=12141802&moduleName=InternalSearch&keyword=riots&formname=sidebarsearch “coverage”:http://www.thisisbristol.com/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=144936&command=displayContent&sourceNode=144919&contentPK=12145074&moduleName=InternalSearch&keyword=riots&formname=sidebarsearch , but I’ve not managed to find much on the web (the BBC’s “On This Day”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/default.stm page ignores the events entirely). The following day’s Daily Telegraph headlined with:
bq. 19 Police Hurt in Black Riot
and editorialized thus:
bq. Lacking parental care many (black youths) ran wild. Incited by race-relations witchfinders and left-wing teachers and social workers to blame British society for their own shortcomings, lacking the work-ethic and perseverance, lost in a society itself demoralized by socialism, they all too easily sink into a criminal sub-culture. (Quotes from “an academic paper”:http://www.psa.ac.uk/cps/1995%5Crowe.pdf .)
I doubt that even the Telegraph would dare to cover such events in these terms today. Contrary to the Telegraph’s fantasy version, neither these riots nor the ones of the following year in Brixton, Handsworth, Toxteth and elsewhere were race riots — black and white youths were involved together, though systematic racial harrassment by the police (throught the “Sus” law) and pervasive racial discrimination undoubtedly underlay the events. This was an important moment in postwar British history, now all but forgotten.
The Times Higher Education Supplement “is leading with the story”:http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2020705 that the British government — having recently introduced student fees of £3000 pa but having promised (as a sop to the opposition) to keep them capped until 2010 — has been pushing senior figures in the sector to campaign for the abolition of the cap. Not that they’ll need much persuading to do that, of course. Whether or not you agree with the principle of fees, a government that pursues its secret policy by galvanising opposition to its publicly declared policy might be thought to be acting a little unethically.
Oliver Kamm “has a crack at me”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/james_callaghan.html for my judgement that Jim Callaghan & Co. let us in for 18 years of Tory misrule. He struggles somewhat to rebut my claim that Callaghan had not a “single policy achievement worth listing to his credit.” After all, as the convoluted one reminds us, Callaghan
bq. had been undistinguished – failing to devalue sterling early enough; the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968, which violated this country’s obligations to British citizens in East Africa; and his role in the defeat of industrial relations reform in 1969 …
Never mind:
bq. His greatest single achievement was to destroy Socialism as a serious proposition in British politics.
Not a “policy” achievement exactly, and hardly something for a self-proclaimed socialist (as Callaghan was) to boast about, but still….
I know that FrontPageMag (and everything Horowitz-related) is bonkers. But I wasn’t really prepared to see I face I know staring out at me. Today they have “a piece attacking Brendan O’Leary”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17538 , political scientist at UPenn, formerly of the LSE. I’ve know Brendan since we were undergraduates together in the late 70s. For most of the time I’ve known him he has been gently chiding me from the right for my “infantile leftism”. He’s been an advisor to top Labour politicians on Northern Ireland, always on the side of moderation. Now Brendan is a “leftist” and a “terror apologist”. Well, as I said, I knew that Horowitz was crazy, but it is helpful to have a marker against which to judge just how crazy.
Update: One small thought – Brendan’s reputation in the UK is such that he could sue FrontPageMag for libel in London. He’d stand every chance of success and some serious damages.
2nd update: the full text of the remarks that FrontPageMage characterize as “terror apology” are “online”:http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v48/n04/OLeary.html for all to inspect.
Fans of the Hotelling/Downs Median Voter Model will be truly gratified by the latest two policy initiatives to be chucked in the general direction of the National Health Service. From the Conservatives (NB to non-UK readers: they are our right-wing capitalist party, which means that they are in favour of socialised medicine and abolishing university tuition fees).
” We will bring back matrons to take charge and deliver clean and infection-free wards”
And from the Labour Party (NB to non-UK readers: they are our left-wing socialist party, which means that they are in favour of privatisation of local government services and identity cards)
” Matrons will take the lead in setting standards for hospital cleanliness”
Three reasons why I find this particular piece of policy-by-Daily-Mail-editorial-page rubbish particularly disspiriting.
1. Some nurses are men; if I was one, then I think I would be pretty cross at the idea that a senior position was being created whose name came from the Latin for “mother”.
2. A “matron” in the NHS today is a ward sister with extra managerial responsibilities; ie a quite senior medical professional. If I was one, I think I would be quite cross that in the view of my political masters, my real role in life was to be a comedy battleaxe running a finger over the dusting.
3. This whole business is a response to a stream of tabloid hysteria about MRSA. MRSA is a bug which colonises the noses and skin of lots of human beings, and becomes a problem when transferred to burns or wounds patients through poor quarantine or lack of handwashing. It’s a problem completely unrelated to “dirty wards”, as anyone who ends up spending an hour or two reading the free leaflets in hospital waiting rooms can confirm. If you put every hospital in the UK into a big pot and boiled them, there would still be an MRSA problem as colonies of it are endemic in the population and it is spread by people, not wards. Apparently, the manifesto-writers for our two leading political parties either don’t know this, or do know it and have decided that what the Mail thinks (plus the opportunity to pander to the turn-back-the-clock tendency in British public life) is more important than the facts.
Like I say, democracy isn’t working.
The 15-year-long “McLibel” case came to an end yesterday. Two anti-McDonald’s protesters won their fight in the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled that they did not recieve a fair trial in the UK. They were not provided with legal aid to assist them in their defense against libel charges brought by McDonald’s (thus the ruling was against the UK government rather than McDonald’s itself; Mickey D’s won the original libel suit in 1995). I think the Independent is right in calling the original suit, over a leaflet accusing McDonald’s of bad labor practices and worse food “one of the biggest own goals in the annals of corporate public relations.” Seriously, they should have just let that slide.
Slightly OT: damn, y’all have really got some supra-national organizations over there in Yurp, dontcha? It’s like faceless bureaucrats in Strasbourg are telling everybody what to do, or something. Voting for some incompetent Tories would probably straighten that right out; you might want to look into it.
Useful site of the year, and it’s only January. Chris Lightfoot has (I think with a couple of his mates) put together this extremely useful site which will allow you to send a communication to your MP, free gratis and for nothing (Americans, spammers, and loonies[1], you are out of luck I’m afraid and will need to wait for someone to invent a different service for you). It’s very useful for sending letters to MPs who don’t have readily available email addresses but (for example) helped sort out a parking ticket for you a couple of years ago and you want to say thank you. Or for that matter, if you want to ask them not to start any more wars, introduce ID card schemes. Or to suggest to them that the government is unlikely to do any better picking winners among immigrants than it did among nationalised industries. If your local MP (or MEP, MSP, etc) is a Tory or a LibDem, you can have a go at him or her too.
Personally, I think that democracy is basically doomed in the UK, but Chris still thinks it’s worth saving, so well done him for trying.
Footnote:
[1]Other than loonies who happen to live in the constituency of the MP they are trying to write to, I suppose.
Nick Barlow has the details on the new political party “Veritas”, launched by former TV presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk (Yanks; kind of like Jerry Springer meets Tucker Carlson, uptown!). I hope he will form some sort of bloc with the Ulster Unionists, simply because I’ve been saving up an “Orangeman” joke for that eventuality for the last three years.
Below the fold I reproduce (with minor editing) an old D-squared Digest post, explaining why these parties are doomed, and why it’s a big mistake for Kilroy et al to extrapolate from their strong showings in European and local council elections to any hope of not getting carted out at a General Election. This analysis generalises, by the way, and that is why (full disclosure time) I have a chunky bet on Oona King to keep her seat in a two-way fight against George Galloway. As and when a spread betting market opens up, I will be a seller of Kilroy-Silk’s chances, in reasonable size.
Longtime readers will remember that there was quite an active debate a few months ago on the subject of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the fundamentalist imam, and his visit to London. There have been a few developments since then. Ken Livingstone (mayor of London, for our non-UK readers) has produced a dossier justifying his decision to share a platform with Qaradawi, out of the apparent belief that this is in some way a substitute for meeting the crowds of outraged Londonders who thought he shouldn’t have. Harry’s Place has a lot of material on whether or not this dossier cuts the mustard; they think it doesn’t.
On a number of issues; apologism for suicide bombers, advocacy of killing gays, wife-beating, etc, it seems pretty clear that Qaradawi is possessed of some fairly horrible reactionary views. This isn’t much of a surprise; to be honest, it was free information which could simply be read off the fact that he is a fundamentalist imam. But Ken’s dossier does contain one important point.
That is, that the particular offence which caused us at CT to come off the fence and condemn him – a statement that it was OK or even required for jihadis to kidnap Western civilians in Iraq – is a statement which Qaradawi denies ever having made. In general, while I can’t emphasise enough that he is not someone who I would ever like to see gaining influence in the UK, Qaradawi appears to have repeatedly, consistently, and at some personal cost, maintained the view that fundamentalist Islam does not impose any duty of violent jihad against the West, and that killing infidel civilians is wrong. This raises a quite important issue as to what kind of fundamentalist Muslim we need to be talking to (I’m trying to talk in general terms here to avoid issues specifically related to Qaradawi; I am not yet sure whether his view on suicide bombers is just the general apologism common throughout the Arab Middle East or something more virulent).
There’s a lot of debate in the Harry’s Place comment threads that I’m not going to try to summarise here, but below the fold is the text of an email I sent to the editors (I was having a bit of technical trouble so I decided to summarise my views in an email. I think it makes sense as a standalone, but you’ll probably need to read this to see what I mean by “David makes a good case”).
I’ve been wanting to post some observations on the British government’s proposal to criminalize incitement to religious hatred. The issue may be now be moot, thanks to the departure of David Blunkett, but there were assumptions made in the standard blog critique (SBC) that I wasn’t happy with. There were also considerations omitted that I thought should have been given some weight. Let me stress that I don’t think that this bill should have passed. Nevertheless the arguments in the SBC were seriously defective and/or incomplete.
So what was wrong with the SBC?
Gosh, my pet issues are piling up today! George Galloway won his libel case against the Telegraph.
The week before last I suggested that “Galloway wins, but wins small as he is in large part the author of his own misfortune by cuddling up to Saddam so much.” Well, he won, but he didn’t win small – £150k is a lot of money given that UK libel awards are de facto capped at £200K these days. Basically, I suggested at the time that “much will depend on the judge’s interpretation of a Telegraph editorial at the time which contained the phrase ‘there is a word for taking money from a foreign power … treason'” and it did. The judge decided that the Telegraph had crossed the line between neutral reporting of (after all, pretty damning) facts, and putting the boot into Galloway. This more or less amounted to malice, and the word “qualified” in “qualified privilege” is there to indicate that you can’t use this defence to make statements motivated by malice.
If the Telegraph had won this case, we would have the public interest defence for newspapers established, and the British press would have been that much freer from our ludicrous libel laws. So it’s a bit of a bummer all round.
Galloway’s name is not cleared by this (nor could it be; the truth of the allegations was not an issue in the trial because of the Telegraph’s use of the privilege defence). There are still big questions outstanding over the funding of Galloway’s charities, which are being investigated by Parliament. The really irritating thing here is that the Telegraph threw away a potentially very strong story simply because they could not resist the temptation to throw a load of nasty abuse at a prominent lefty and anti-war figure. This is a lesson which I hope that the pro-war side will pick up (and one I’ve commented on in the past ; it’s simply not on to claim that people who disagreed with you about the specific rush to war in March 2003, did so because they were supporters of Saddam Hussein. That’s not an honest way to carry on the debate, it’s unpleasant and it is, apparently, in the strictest sense, malicious.