Sunday 15 May 2011

If Eurovision used FPTP

I can't say I liked Azerbaijan's entry for the Eurovision song contest last night - but then none of entries were songs I'd actually go out and buy. But a bizarre comment on Twitter last night from one @georgeowers that "I notice that uses First-Past-the-Post" (what?!) set me thinking: what would Eurovision be like if it actually did use First Past The Post instead of its present system (a version of the Borda count)?

Last night's results are here - and it's clear from this table that under First Past The Post, if each country had had only one vote, and had given that one vote to the country it gave 'douze points' to last night, the winner would have been Bosnia & Herzegovina, who actually came sixth last night. Bosnia & Herzegovina had only 11.6 per cent of countries' first preferences, but under a First Past The Post system that would have been enough to propel them to victory. First Past The Post does love a loser, it seems.

But the more interesting issue is what would happen in successive years. We all know that voting in the Eurovision song contest is about the politics not the music - heaven help us if it's about the music! So presumably in the years that followed Bosnia & Herzegovina's win, a 'stop Bosnia & Herzegovina' movement would build up among other countries, who would begin to coalesce around whichever country was most likely to achieve the support necessary to topple Bosnia & Herzegovina.

Fewer votes (under FPTP countries would have only one vote, remember) would go to other countries as more and more efforts were made to oust Bosnia & Herzegovina. Countries who would have achieved only one or two points in Year 1 would receive the dreaded 'nul points' year after year as votes concentrated around Bosnia & Herzegovina and its nearest opponent.

After four or five years of receiving 'nul points' it's hard not to imagine some of these countries dropping out altogether, to avoid the expense of what was clearly going to be an expensive and predictable annual humiliation. The pool of entrants would become smaller and smaller year on year, until the whole thing was reduced to a ritual and increasingly fierce scrap between half a dozen Balkan states, while viewers across the rest of Europe became totally disengaged and switched off in their droves.

I can't imagine for a minute why that reminds me of the current state of British parliamentary politics - no, I really can't.

(h/t to @stuartbonar)

Saturday 14 May 2011

Snakes and ladders

The fall of David Laws, and his resignation just 17 days into his role as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was surely one of the legendary moments of the coalition government. His appearance at the dispatch box on 27 May last year won praise from all sides, making the events of the following day all the more shocking. Since then, he has been waiting for the outcome of the inquiry into his expenses arrangements which, it seems to me, has taken far, far too long in reporting.

In the interim, Laws has been portrayed as a sort of 'king over the water', waiting for the moment when he can return in triumph and set the nation to rights again. He has acquired an almost demi-god status to which, should he ever return to the front bench, it will be impossible to live up (Vince Cable, anyone?).

I will confess that I've never particularly been a paid-up member of the David Laws fan club, although I was impressed by his performance that day last May, and acknowledge that he has a sharp mind. However, I thought he handled the events of a year ago with immense courage and dignity. Punishment of MPs over expenses has been extraordinarily random in its application, with some MPs paying back large amounts of money or even being imprisoned, while others who committed far greater abuses have somehow emerged scot-free. (Incidentally, I largely blame the Daily Telegraph, and its drip-drip-drip serialisation of the expenses story, for this, as it militated against a logical overview of the matter and in favour of an ooh-ah firework display). David Laws has been punished more severely than many who did much worse.

But I believe that the adulation in absentia of David Laws is a dangerous phenomenon, and one into which we who wish him well should not be drawn. The media thrive on movement as opposed to stasis - politics is a game of snakes and ladders to them, and politicians are either on the way up or on the way down. It's that movement that gives them their stories, and while for five minutes they would be quite happy to report the resurrection of Laws from his political ashes, they would be equally content the following day to kick the stool from under his feet and watch him twitch.

I wish David Laws well, and hope that he can soon find a way in which his undoubted talents can be put to use for the benefit of the party and the nation. But he's not Aslan coming to defeat the White Witch and melt the perpetual winter, and ultimately we do him a dangerous disservice if we allow others to suggest he is.

Saturday 7 May 2011

Another of those 'where did it all go wrong' blogposts

Across the country, bleary eyed progressives have sat down in front of their computers over the last 24 hours to share their analysis of what went so very wrong with the referendum on moving to a fairer voting system. It's possible, I suppose, that some good may come of the collected outpourings, informing future campaigns on other issues. But for many of us, I suspect it's just cathartic.

When disappointed - and that's a mild word for knowing that I will now never cast a vote in a fair UK election - it's easy to lash out at others. And, my God, isn't there a queue of others to lash out at. The No campaign, of course, for its daily torrent of what Nick Clegg memorably and accurately described as 'ludicrous bilge'. Cameron, for fronting such a duplicitous campaign. Labour, for failing to back something which was in its own manifesto only twelve months ago. Ed Miliband, for appearing to support the Yes campaignwhile sticking the boot into its main supporters and allowing more than half his MPs to run riot on the issue.

But there were fatal flaws in the Yes campaign, and it would be only a partial tale simply to blame the enemies of reform.

The AV referendum asked voters not merely to accept change, but positively to choose it. Yet the Yes campaign appeared to have little interest in explaining why change was needed, what the proposed change was, or what it would achieve. It left all the actual explanation to the Electoral Commission, whose output it could not control, and whose booklet on the referendum was so appallingly badly presented it might as well have been written by the No campaign.

The message the Yes campaign put forward managed to be both simplistic and unclear: that somehow changing the voting system would mean MPs working harder, when there was no obvious connection. The early television advertisements, showing caricatures of troughing MPs being doorstepped by newly empowered voters, were both ghastly and irrelevant. The war the Yes campaign was fighting was last year's battle on MPs' expenses, and there appeared to be no effort to explain why this was affected by writing 1, 2, 3 on your ballot paper instead of putting a cross.

The bevy of middle-class white luvvies lined up to front the campaign didn't help either. I enjoy Richard Wilson in One Foot in the Grave as much as the next man, and Eddie Izzard's stand-up comedy is always fun, but I'm not sure what qualifies them to advise on electoral systems. They embodied all that was wrong with the Yes campaign - the assumption that the rightness of their cause was so self-evident that it didn't need explaining, and that everyone would automatically share their view. There seemed no attempt to understand what was needed to reach out to people who didn't live in Hampstead or follow Stephen Fry on Twitter, or that it was important to do so.

When I was a councillor, I attended a brilliant presentation by Richard Olivier, son of the great Laurence Olivier. It was intended for council chief executives, but I begged, blagged and wriggled my way in to the overcrowded event because I knew it would be worth it (and it was). Olivier uses Shakespeare's plays to train managers, and on this occasion he was using The Tempest to talk about managing change. He said something very memorable to begin with: that when you want people to accept change you need to start with three things - discontent with the present, a vision of the future, and an acceptable first step. The Yes campaign offered none of these things - indeed, it didn't even seem to understand why it should.

The general level of information about what was at stake was woeful. A polling clerk was telling me about how she'd been at a polling station on the day of the referendum, and a couple had come in to vote. She'd handed them their ballot papers, and the wife had looked at the referendum ballot paper and said "What's this?" It was explained that it was about changing the voting system. She asked what this change was to be, and her husband said he wasn't sure, but he thought it was about being allowed to vote on the internet. "Oh," said the wife, "but I like coming to the polling station. Oh, no." Such is the basis on which millions of people have been denied a meaningful say in our democracy for a generation.

I honestly don't know how we move forward from here. A hundred years ago, the suffragettes didn't give up on votes for women; two hundred years ago, Wilberforce didn't give up on abolition of the slave trade. There have always been No campaigns, blocking progress in the interests of those who benefit from the status quo. I suspect it will take a long, long time now. But we can't go on like this, with governments elected by smaller and smaller percentages of the population, with less and less of a mandate, and a political system that alienates more and more people. One day. One day.

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