Oh, no, not that wedding again? Calm down, dear, it’s only a footnote. According to the tabloids and the internet, Pippa Middleton, sister of the new Princess William formerly known as Kate, stole the show yesterday for many viewers, not only more than rivalling her sister’s good looks but prompting excited comments about a particular aspect of her figure. A Daily Mirror headline, for example, screams:
Pippa Middleton bridesmaid dress sparks Facebook fan page for her bottom
and sure enough, there’s the facebook page in question, already marked as ‘liked’ by more than 44,000 connoisseurs of the anatomical feature in question. But on a more elevated level, the catapulting to national celebrity status of the lovely Pippa must have sent at least some of us to our collected poetry of the now much neglected Robert Browning:
from Pippa Passes
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn:
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!
– of which the last couplet at least has achieved immortality, if the rest of the long narrative poem hasn’t.
SRD GIRL. [To PIPPA who approaches.] Oh, you may come closer: we shall not eat you! Why, you seem the very person that the great rich handsome Englishman has fallen so violently in love with! I’ll tell you all about it.
Here Browning evidently foresees the impression that some observers claim to have got from the proceedings yesterday that Prince Harry, brother of the groom, sharing responsibility for the young bridesmaids and page boys with Pippa, the sister of the bride, appeared somewhat smitten by her, being overheard (or lip-read) to whisper to her a gallant tribute to her beauty, although whether Browning’s description of young Harry as “the great rich handsome Englishman” fits the bill is for others to judge. Anyway, I doubt if Harry’s long-time girlfriend Chelsy Davy has anything to worry about.
Cole Porter also obviously had a premonition, putting words into the mouth of the groom on the red-quilted palace balcony (only confusing the prince’s nickname with his Dad’s):
FRED:
So, kiss me, Kate, thou lovely loon,
‘Ere we start on our honeymoon.
So kiss me, Kate, darling devil divine,
For now thou shall ever be mine.
But let Shakespeare have the last word, even if he also gets a little confused over who would be speaking — William, obviously, not Harry, still on the balcony:
Kate, I cannot look greenly nor gasp out my eloquence, nor I have no cunning in protestation; only downright oaths, which I never use till urged, nor never break for urging. If thou canst love a fellow of this temper, Kate, whose face is not worth sun-burning, that never looks in his glass for love of any thing he sees there, let thine eye be thy cook. I speak to thee plain soldier: If thou canst love me for this, take me: if not, to say to thee that I shall die, is true; but for thy love, by the Lord, no; yet I love thee too…
Now, welcome, Kate: and bear me witness all,
That here I kiss her as my sovereign queen.
Well, his queen-to-be, anyway.
Brian
It was magnificent and on the day it went without a hitch. Good luck to William and Kate, whose patent happiness together made a few million others happy too, a matter not to be sneezed at. But some of the underlying politics were darker.
Like all such patriotic union-jack-waving occasions, hyped up by television and the press until one felt like being force-fed with clotted cream, this one will have given a boost to the government’s popularity almost as potent as if David Cameron had just liberated the Falklands. There’s no logic in it, but there it is. It’s a highly convenient time for the Tory-led coalition to get a boost, just as the evidence begins to come in that its ill-judged, self-defeating economic and fiscal policies are choking off growth and recovery, its doctrinaire plan for effectively privatising the National Health Service is beginning to fall apart, and the impetuous decision to commit British air and naval power, what’s left of it, to the defence of civilians in Benghazi has increasingly obviously landed us in gross mission creep and yet another military quagmire. On top of that, the AV referendum is imposing genuine strains on the coalition’s marriage vows. The royal wedding euphoria will help for a while to compensate for all these Westminster woes.
On the other hand, Martin Kettle in the Guardian makes a convincing case for the proposition that the Tories are full of self-confidence now that they’re back in the saddle, and that the royal wedding will have cemented in the feeling that life has returned to normal after the brief aberration of Labour government. Cameron has succeeded beyond all rational expectations in capturing the centre ground from Labour, and clearly means to keep control of it by constant repetition of the myth that it was Labour’s failures which brought Britain almost to its knees, with the implication, both implicit and explicit, that Labour must never again be entrusted with responsibility for the economy, once Cameron and Osborne have completed their rescue of it (with a little help from their junior coalition partners). Cameron’s other spectacular success — seducing the LibDems into the Tory embrace instead of having to rule as a minority government, vulnerable at any time to parliamentary defeat on controversial issues — further sidelines Labour by pushing into the far future any risk of a left-of-centre Labour-LibDem alliance against the Tories. The LibDems are now tarred with the Tory brush, perhaps irretrievably; they are compelled to join the Tories in defending the Tory record, and (even more usefully from Cameron’s point of view) effectively prohibited by their membership of the coalition from advocating radical changes of policy at future elections that would mean disowning what they themselves have been doing in government. Kettle reasons from this analysis that Labour’s only hope of regaining government may lie in the success of the AV referendum. He urges Labour supporters to take the long view accordingly, and vote Yes to AV. I’m not convinced by this argument, however. AV would inevitably bring more votes and seats to the LibDems, making single-party government even more unlikely: the LibDems, despite their present dire ratings in the polls and probably dire results in the elections on 5 May, would be overwhelmingly likely to hold the balance of power in any post-AV-election to the house of commons, with the ability to decide whether to hand the keys of No. 10 back to Cameron or to pass them over to Ed Miliband; and after (probably) five years locked in marriage to the Tories, forced to accept responsibility for virtually everything the Tories will have done, a transfer of affection to Labour would seem much more unlikely than likely. But Kettle’s arguments are certainly not to be lightly dismissed.
How does the Wedding come into all this? Very consistently. Not only is it a classically Conservative occasion, emphasising ceremonial, continuity, monarchy and triangular hierarchy, the supremacy of our social superiors: not only does its success seem to redound to the credit of the government of the day, like winning a war or the World Cup: but also the (surely deliberate) exclusion of any trace of a former Labour government from the spectacle reinforces the idea that Labour is discredited, exiled and irrelevant — in the sin-bin, off camera. It’s naive to suppose that the spiteful denial of invitations to the wedding for Blair and Brown, so that only Tory former prime ministers (Thatcher and Major) were invited, was an oversight or a clerical error. Martin Kettle sees in this, as in other aspects of the arrangements for the wedding, the anti-Labour hand of Prince Charles (“bad-tempered and self-pitying”, Michael White had called him earlier in the same issue; “reactionary” was Martin Kettle’s word for him) : I’m more inclined to see the arrogant and vindictive hands of Cameron and Osborne in it. Whoever was responsible, Martin Kettle’s harsh verdict is right: the failure to correct these two glaring omissions “only confirms the miserable, petty, ill-advised disdainful nastiness of the original deed.” Kettle sums it up: “Not inviting Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to the royal wedding, while inviting Lady Thatcher and Sir John Major, is a cold, calculated act of high establishment spite against Labour.”
Another related point, less obvious: we know that Ed Miliband was invited — he could hardly have been excluded, as leader of the opposition — and that he had accepted, promising to wear morning dress like the higher orders; but I have yet to find anyone who had even the briefest glimpse of him in the television coverage, in the Abbey. We saw plenty of Cameron and his sensible-looking wife, Ken Clarke (seemingly a non-singing member of the Abbey choir), Sir Elton John, royals galore (the lesser royals had arrived in a fleet of minibuses!) and of course those top celebs the Beckhams: but no sign of Ed. Perhaps Mr Miliband was strategically seated behind a pillar. Labour has been shown the red card for allegedly fouling up the economy, and sent off. Labour is simply invisible in the Tory game plan, and the scandalously partisan character of the wedding guest list was a singularly nasty part of it.
The extent of party political meddling in the guest list was amply confirmed by William Hague’s cowardly capitulation to media ignorance in ordering the withdrawal of the invitation to the hapless Syrian ambassador, casually ignoring the presence at the wedding of a host of ambassadors and assorted kings and sultans representing even more despotic and murderous régimes than Syria’s. It’s obviously Rule 1 for state occasions that you invite either all or none of the diplomats representing countries with which you have diplomatic relations, whatever you think of the human rights records of some of them. The moment you start treating formal invitations to formal occasions as a reward for good behaviour, you’re deep in a morass of invidious, inconsistent and indefensible judgements. The proffered excuse that this was not officially a state occasion is laughable: if it was not a state occasion, why were the whole diplomatic corps (except the Syrian, himself only uninvited at the last moment) and a dozen foreign heads of state invited to the wedding? This is an even more insulting excuse than the explanation for not inviting Blair and Brown that unlike Thatcher and Major, neither is a Knight of the Garter. What kind of fools do they take us for? As Simon Jenkins, gadfly Tory and former editor of The Times, put it with his usual incisiveness in another Guardian article, –
The global brain clearly has trouble dissociating the fascination of a happening from its significance, or otherwise. Confusion has certainly been sown by the wedding being attended, unwisely, by so many of the pseudo-trappings of statehood, such as the attendance of dotty foreign monarchs and dodgy ambassadors. This was bound to pollute a family occasion with political controversy, and so it has done. Whoever thought the occasion suitable to the diplomatic corps should be fired. William is not a serving monarch but a serving junior air force officer.
Simon Jenkins stresses in the same piece the essential triviality of the whole occasion, pouring scorn on the fantastic resources devoted to reporting it by, for example, the BBC, NBC (which he says flew over its entire anchor team) and most of the print media. The hours of time and acres of print devoted to speculation about the wedding dress, the bride’s hair style, and which units of the three armed services would be honoured by having their uniforms worn by the assorted princes who participated in starring or supporting roles — all these are indeed matters of the utmost insignificance. But it’s right to pay attention to an event which obviously made millions of people happy, if only for a day; which unarguably demonstrates that for all the antics and follies of some of its members, the royal family continues to exercise an almost mystical hold over a large section of the population, anyway in England; and which was expertly manipulated by an arrogant, cocksure and otherwise incompetent Conservative party leadership to promote the permanent banishment of Labour from the national scene. You’ve got to hand it to the Tory toffs!
Brian
Dear *****,
I hope you saw my tweet:
Maths Prof D Broomhead demolishes some AV myths, eg that AV ends need for tactical voting and that AV or PR can be fair: http://j.mp/f3NPpX.
You’re a mathematician in your spare time, or were: has the Prof got his maths right? Looks convincing to me, but then maths gave me up as ineducable at age 14 or thereabouts (my age, not maths’).
In any case it irritates me to hear tactical voting dismissed as a culpably negative feature of First Past the Post. Under both FPTP and AV, if the party you really like has no realistic chance of winning either the relevant seat or the general election, and if you want your vote to influence the outcome of the election (however marginally), then the rational thing to do is to vote in such a way as to maximise the chances of election of the candidate who does have a chance of winning the seat, whose party does have a chance of forming a government, and whom you prefer to all the other candidates with a chance of winning. To vote for (or give your first preference to) a candidate with no chance of winning the seat is pure self-indulgence and achieves nothing except to make a gesture and allow your favoured candidate and party to feel very slightly less bad about losing.
I remember that in the Labour Party leadership election under AV my inclination was to make a gesture by giving my first preference to Diane Abbott, whose views and policies were the closest to mine, and then my second preference to Ed Milibrother who, along with D Milibrother, did have a chance of winning the leadership. You persuaded me that this would be a risky thing to do since it implied a bet that Diane would be eliminated at the first or a very early count, causing my second preference to be transferred to Ed M, whereas if some other candidate or candidates were eliminated before Diane, my second preference wouldn’t get to be redistributed, and meanwhile the second preferences of (e.g.) Ed Balls and/or the other one whose name no-one now remembers would be reallocated, probably mainly to the wrong Miliband, perhaps in sufficient numbers to put David M past the 50%+1 mark before my second pref for his little brother could be counted — thus frustrating the outcome I wanted and causing my votes and preferences to be wasted. So I gave my first pref to Ed Miliband, and (since it was obvious that he would come either first or second and that his second prefs would therefore never be redistributed and counted) didn’t bother to register a pointless second or lower preference at all. Sorry about that, Diane.
Then too I wish the Yes side would stop saying that AV is a Good Thing because it will “make MPs work harder” (they work much too hard cultivating their constituents as it is, at the expense of their primary jobs at Westminster) “to reach out to all shades of opinion and not just to their own party faithful” — i.e. to trim their policy pronouncements and commitments to attract second preferences from candidates certain to be eliminated early in the counts, such as the BNP, the Monster Loonies, UKIP, the England Firsters, and other sinister or frivolous groups of the far right. Is that really what we want?
And I wish someone in the Yes camp would admit that no single party ever, in modern times, gets the support of anything like 50% of the whole national electorate, and that therefore it’s inevitable, under any system, that most candidates in a general election won’t get the support of 50% + 1 of the votes in their constituencies either (tactical voting is never likely to take place on a sufficient scale to affect this logical reality). This means that the claim of AV that in order to be elected they will all have to win the support of the majority of their constituents’ votes must be false. Of course it’s made to look plausible by pretending that the second and third etc preferences of voters who gave their first preferences to some other candidate are of equal weight as indicators of ‘support’ to first preference votes, which is patently false.
I liked this letter in the London Review of Books:
The Problem with AV
Whatever Ross McKibbin may say, opponents of AV are not ‘cave dwellers’ (LRB, 18 November). AV maximises the votes of extremist candidates, since anyone voting for them knows their second preference votes will still count, while the second preference votes of the last candidate to be eliminated have no impact on the result, though as many as 40 per cent of the votes may be affected. In constituencies where the Labour and Lib Dem candidates are the leading contenders, for example, only the second preferences of Conservative, UKIP and BNP supporters will matter. It is possible, however, that if their own candidate is defeated, Labour voters would prefer to be represented by an ‘honest-to-God’ Tory than a ‘pragmatic’ Lib Dem. The second preference votes of the last candidate to be eliminated should take precedence over those of the least successful candidates. Under the standard counting procedure, AV is demonstrably less democratic than first past the post.
Bill Myers
LeicesterLRB 2 Dec 2010 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n23/letters#letter16
Lastly (almost), I wish the Yes camp would stop banging on about AV being so much “fairer” than FPTP, as if the whole debate were about which system will most often produce a house of commons that most accurately reflects in its composition the spread of political opinion in the electorate. Actually the main purpose of a general election is to produce a government that can govern, govern long enough to be able to rise above short-termism, and govern in accordance with its pre-election promises and policies (not only those in the manifestos) so that it can be held to account. Other objectives of a general election are to elect a house of commons that can sustain an elected government in office, hold it to account, make it change course if it errs, and in the last resort throw it out. None of these functions requires a mathematically accurate correspondence between numerical support in the country and numbers of MPs of the different parties. To produce, sustain and when necessary dismiss a government it makes very little difference whether the biggest single party has a majority of ten or a majority of fifty. If, as will more often happen under AV, it has no majority at all, and the country has to be governed by a cobbled-together coalition or a minority government at the mercy of a majority opposition, then many of these vital functions can’t be performed at all. Let the candidate with more votes than any other win the seat, and let the party with more seats than any other form a government. It’s fair, it’s simple, and it almost always works. Vote No to AV, which neither produces more proportional representation nor ensures durable and accountable governments!
Oh, one other thing (sorry!): please, you worthies of the Yes camp, stop arguing that because AV rarely produces hung parliaments in Australia, it won’t produce more hung parliaments than FPTP here either. This is fallacious because Australia is to all intents and purposes a two-party state (the third party is in permanent coalition with the main party of the right and they effectively fight elections together as a coalition — right, John?). So there is no medium-sized third party holding the balance of power in a more proportional system, whereas our LibDems, struggling to win as much as one fifth of the national vote and currently threatened with virtual wipe-out, would certainly gain votes and seats from both the Conservatives and Labour under AV and would therefore be more often in a position to choose which of the Tory and Labour leaders to put into No. 10 Downing Street — a choice that ought to be made by the biggest single group of voters, not on the whim of Mr. Nick Clegg, nor of any other single politician.
Best wishes for a good referendum,
Brian
It’s an article of faith among some good folk on the left, Guardian readers every one, that the British empire was a rat’s-nest of racism, oppression and exploitation, and that its eventual dissolution was achieved only by a series of armed liberation struggles against the British imperial power. Here are two texts that seek to question that innocent but unhistorical view of our colonial past:
[1] Letter: The Guardian, 21 April 2011
The truth about the end of empire
Madeleine Bunting over-simplifies and distorts Britain’s predominantly successful, peaceful and honourable decolonisation record (The endgames of our empire never quite played out – just look at Bahrain, 18 April[a]). In most of the few territories where independence was marred by violence, it arose from conflict between rivals fighting each other to inherit power from the departing British (as in Aden and many other places), only rarely from an “independence struggle” against the colonial power.
Resistance to independence with one man, one vote came mainly from white settler groups (Kenya, Southern Rhodesia) or from local minorities which feared domination by the majority when the UK withdrew its protection (Nigeria etc). Mau Mau was not primarily a movement seeking Kenyan independence but a tribal movement in conflict with other tribes and with the settlers over land.
The Gulf states were never British colonies as such and were not administered by the Colonial Office, and it’s misleading to cite them as typical. In the majority of colonies the move to independence was conducted in collaboration with local elected leaders and with their agreement on the pace and modalities of the change. Where there was brutality by the colonial government against local people, as clearly happened in Kenya, it was inexcusable, but by no means typical or widespread. Whatever we may think of our mixed history of empire, there’s reason to be proud of the way we dismantled it.
Ms Bunting sees something sinister about the efforts by all UK governments to maintain their influence and good relations, and to promote UK interests, with former British colonies after their independence (what else should they have done?), but to see this as a continuation of colonial domination is ridiculous. It’s what governments do in their relations with other countries and it’s called international relations by diplomacy.
Brian Barder
Colonial Office 1957-64, HM Diplomatic Service 1965-94; London
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/apr/21/truth-about-end-of-empire
[a] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/17/bahrain-foreign-office-empire
__________________________
[2] Unpublished letter to the Guardian from Ian Buist, an eminent retired public servant with extensive knowledge and experience of East Africa (including especially Kenya) and of Britain’s decolonisation record generally, from his service both in Africa and in Whitehall, commenting on an article about the UK colonial record by Seumas Milne in the Guardian of 7 April 2011 (“Ignoring its imperial history licenses the west to repeat it”):
Seumas Milne’s colourful “anti-imperial” rant was free with its facts as well as its adjectives.
The claims that “hundreds of thousands” of Kikuyu were “interned in concentration camps” and “tens of thousands killed” were carefully analysed by the historian David Elstein and dismissed (his article was recently republished on “OpenDemocracy”).
How can the Israel-Palestine 50-year conflict be the “direct result” of British policy? In issuing the Balfour Declaration, accepting the League/UN Mandate, or surrendering it?
Where is the “reflex imperial resort to partition” found in Ceylon/Sri Lanka or Kurdistan? On Somalia, we helped our own Protectorate, as it wished, to achieve its independence in union with the former Italian colony. And so on and on.
It is a pity when reputable journalists try to shape the facts to fit a thesis, even if many of us also sometimes feel this temptation.
Ian Buist
[J.L.F. Buist C.B.]
Ian Buist also commented on my own Guardian letter (above) that “You could also have made the point that all these divisions stemmed from local history and conflict — eg Sri Lanka — and that our efforts were always directed to preventing their irruption if we could — cf Donoughmore Constitution for Ceylon etc.“ A good point.
I hope those who contribute comments here strongly disagreeing with these attempts to put the record a little bit straighter will spare us a catalogue of examples of brutality, exploitation, racism and other inexcusable abuses in the colonial territories and protectorates for which Britain was once responsible, either in the heyday of empire or during the period of decolonisation following the second world war. No-one is denying that such abuses did occur. Some are well documented. Many aroused powerful protests and objections at the time, both in the territories concerned and in Britain. Some were not viewed as wrong or immoral according to the ethical beliefs of the time: it’s fatally easy to apply our own settled views of what is and is not acceptable retrospectively and with hindsight to another age (slavery and discrimination against women and black people were once seen as fundamental to an orderly society, even by people who were personally decent and humane).
This post is not an attempt to justify the indefensible or to assert that terrible wrongs were never done in British colonial times. It does however aim to point out that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the process of bringing British dependent territories to independence was peaceful, orderly and consensual, negotiated in great detail with the elected leaders of the territories concerned and almost entirely with their agreement; and that where there was violence during the decolonisation process, it was extremely rarely, if ever, generated by British resistance to local demands for independence. From the election of the Attlee Labour government in 1945 to the virtual completion of decolonisation in the 1960s, no British government sought to prolong colonial status in any territory whose people wanted it; indeed, governments in London increasingly regarded our status as a colonial power as a yoke round our necks and an impediment to the exercise of Britain’s influence in international affairs. In a number of cases London was in much more of a hurry to bring a territory to independence than the leaders and people of the territory concerned, some of them apprehensive about what would happen to them after a generally benign British colonial administration handed over power. Some of those apprehensions, alas, turned out to be all too well founded.
The end of empire was an infinitely complex process, combining generous doses of self-interest and hypocrisy with much good-will and genuine idealism on both sides. Nothing is to be gained, and the past is denied its due, by pretending that it was all bad.
Brian
If you get an invitation seemingly from a friend or contact to join ‘Quepasa’, please take no action on it of any kind except to delete it. I’m sorry to say that the wretched nuisances at Quepasa have once again sent out a fresh crop of fake “invitations” purporting falsely to have been sent by me . I did of course change my email password when this happened before (please see http://www.barder.com/3171) but there’s no way to prevent Quepasa using the email addresses which they copied and evidently stored from my email account a few days ago as often as they like. It seems that this odious practice is probably not technically spam (because those who have been tricked into authorising Quepasa to send invitations to their friends have formally given their permission) and it probably doesn’t break any laws. The only thing you can do if you receive one (or more) of these fake invitations is simply and promptly to delete them.
A few people who received what appeared to be invitations from me to join me on Quepasa understandably accepted the ‘invitation’ and authorised Quepasa to inform their other contacts. In some cases Quepasa has been able to access these persons’ address books and I am now receiving identical fake invitations pretending to have come from them. If you start to receive messages from Quepasa indicating that anyone has accepted your invitation, the first thing to do is to change your email password. But unfortunately that won’t stop Quepasa continuing to use the data that they have already got from your address book and emails. All you can do is to delete all these Quepasa messages and take no other action on them.
For further information on this tiresome business, please see http://www.barder.com/3171. Quepasa is a mainly Hispanic dating agency which makes a bigger profit from selling advertisements on its websites the more ‘members’ it can claim to have recruited. Hence these fraudulent ‘invitations’. Even if only a minority of these are accepted, it swells the nominal number of members that Quepasa can claim to have on its books.
As I’m once again receiving a great many of these ‘invitations’ and messages from friends and contacts notifying me that they too have received one or more of them, I can’t reply to each one individually, so please don’t think it necessary to let me know about them. If it’s to do with Quepasa, just delete it! (Unless of course you want to use Quepasa to meet a Hispanic boy-friend or girl-friend.)
Brian
I have unwittingly been instrumental in causing dozens, possibly hundreds, of innocent people, including some complete strangers, to receive messages purporting to contain invitations from me to become my “friend” on a website called Quepasa. As far as I can make out, this is some kind of predominantly Hispanic dating service.
I have no idea what this is all about. I received a message purporting to have come from someone I’m working with on an editing project, a colleague whom I am naturally anxious not to upset, which seemed to be inviting me to be a “friend” on Quepasa; and it seemed churlish to refuse. The website said it was sending messages to three people I know who appeared to be already members of this Quepasa, so I clicked OK and only then realised, too late, that the damn thing was sending out these invitations to everyone in my (substantial) address list.
I have now been receiving dozens of messages, some from friends and other people whom I know, many from complete strangers, either notifying me that they have accepted my invitation to be a friend on Quepasa, or asking what’s going on, who I am, and how I know their email addresses (which in many cases I didn’t).
This is evidently a tiresome form of spam (but as far as I can discover, not involving a virus and not listed by Hoaxbuster or other similar sites that expose online hoax sites). I suggest that you do not try to access the Quepasa web page and do not authorise it to access your email account. If you have already done so, it would be wise to disable the Quepasa access authority in your email web page, and then, but only then, to change your email account password.
I am sorry to have caused you this trouble. I have now received too many messages about Quepasa, both personal and automatically generated, to be able to reply to them all individually. I hope some of those affected may read this post and accept it as an apology for my action in unintentionally exposing them to these time-wasting and mysterious communications. I shall not visit this tedious and unscrupulous website again and I shall delete all future messages from it unread. I have removed Quepasa’s authority to access my email account (which I unwittingly granted) and changed my own password, so I hope the nuisance will now, or soon, stop.
Damn. Sorry!
Brian
A letter of mine opposing AV (the Alternative Vote electoral system) prompted an exchange with an AV fan which explores some of the arguments, good and (especially) bad, for and (especially) against. This is my letter to the Guardian that started it all:
BB: There are cogent arguments against AV, but the main one being used by the luminaries of the No campaign, Lord [formerly John] Reid, William Hague, Margaret Beckett and Sir Malcolm Rifkind, among others, isn’t one of them. Their claim that under AV some voters will have more votes than others is nonsense. All the valid votes are counted again at every recount. Those giving their first preferences to the two candidates who come first and second, and who are therefore never eliminated from the next recount, don’t get their second and lower preferences redistributed and counted, but that’s not a disadvantage: their first preferences continue to count right to the last round.
The No to AV campaign needs to focus on the real objection to AV, i.e. the fallacy in the only serious claim for it, that AV, unlike First Past the Post, ensures that all MPs have the support of the majority of their voters. But this is simply not so. An MP whose majority depends on votes transferred from other candidates eliminated in early counts no more has the support of a majority of voters than an MP elected on a minority vote under FPTP: in both cases, a majority of those voters preferred and voted for someone else. This reflects the inescapable reality that nation-wide no one party has the support of a majority of the electorate (none has done so at a general election since 1935, which was one of only two such results for the past 105 years).
There are also other unanswerable objections to AV. By increasing the number of seats won by third party candidates, it would make hung parliaments much more frequent, and thus produce more coalitions or minority governments, which in turn undermines the convention of the party manifesto mandate and the public accountability which that entails. Votes for mainly right-wing extremist or lunatic parties such as the BNP and the Monster Raving Lunatics, most of which are thankfully wasted under the present system, would tend to flow upwards, as each in turn is eliminated, through second and subsequent preferences to the more right-wing of the last two surviving candidates, often in sufficient numbers to give the seat to the candidate with fewer first preference votes than his or her main rival. Candidates of the serious parties would be compelled to “reach out to” the lunatic or neo-fascist fringe to try to win their preferences by offering concessions to their generally reactionary demands. The need to attract second and subsequent preferences across the political spectrum will favour the candidate who is all things to all men (and women), who avoids or blurs what should be stark policy choices, leaves doors open, sits on every available fence. It’s frustrating that the noisiest opponents of AV ignore these genuine objections to it and concentrate instead on the one argument that is easily exposed as false.
This drew a number of comments from RS, an old colleague and friend. Here they are, with my (now slightly edited) responses to each:
RS: I agree with you that the argument put forward by William Hague et al is nonsense. But I don’t agree that the other objections to AV are unanswerable. To take the last point first, I think that:
1) if you accept democracy and the principle of one person, one vote, you have to accept that the votes of people who vote for the BNP or the Monster Raving Loony Party are as valid as yours and mine. I don’t much like that conclusion, but it seems to me to flow inescapably from the basic concept of democracy (incidentally, the BNP is urging its supporters to vote no to AV). So if we get AV, yes, those people will have the same right as all other voters to indicate their second and subsequent preferences.
BB: I am not questioning the right of (eg) BNP voters to have their votes given equal weight with others’, not their right, under AV, to indicate second and subsequent preferences. I am simply saying that it’s generally undesirable for the health of our politics that votes cast by stupid or reactionary people (or both) for stupid or reactionary candidates (or both) should continue to be included in the counting process even after their first preference candidates have been defeated and eliminated, and that these votes should still end up actually influencing the outcome of the election. In other words, I don’t like the idea that a (perhaps perfectly reputable) Conservative candidate could win a seat in the house of commons, and a say in which party is to enter No 10, on the backs of BNP voters and supporters. Nor do I like the idea that the same candidate might feel obliged to bend over backwards to appease the BNP, or at best to avoid antagonising them, e.g. by adopting an illiberal position on immigration, in the hope of winning BNP voters’ preferences in the final count. Under FPTP these characters vote for the BNP, the BNP is defeated, their votes disappear down a black hole, like the votes of everyone else whose favourite candidates lost the election, and the candidate who has won the most votes wins the seat – simple, fair and straightforward.
RS: …but –
2) by no means all the people who vote for smaller parties are on the right. What about all the people who vote for the Green Party (which is in favour of AV)? What about people who vote for left-wing extremist parties? What about the situation in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? The electoral landscape is much more complex than you suggest. I think it’s a very questionable argument to suggest that the introduction of AV would make candidates more inclined to look for votes from the “neo-fascist fringe” than some, including some Labour candidates, already are under the present system.
BB: Of course I accept that there will sometimes be candidates of smaller parties whose second etc. preferences may well end up going to the Labour candidate (or, in a constituency where the front runners are, say, the Tory and the LibDem, to the LibDem). But if you look down the list of the candidates and their parties at election time, I think you’ll generally find that the majority of the no-hoper parties and candidates, those who are certain to be eliminated early, are zanies or more sinister figures of the right , not the left-of-centre. However, even where this is not the case, the directions in which the preferences travel on their way to one or other of the last two candidates left in the race after the final count, if not politically regressive, are liable to be almost random or whimsical. Australian experience shows that a significant percentage of voters simply number their ballot papers in the order of the candidates shown on the ballot paper, or else put a ’1′ opposite their favourite candidate and then number the rest in alphabetical order from 2 to 10, or however many there are (the so-called ‘donkey vote’). I believe that in Britain, where if we move to AV it won’t be obligatory to put a number against every candidate listed, research suggests that under AV a sizeable majority of voters wouldn’t bother with second etc. preferences – they would just put a ’1′ opposite the candidate they wanted to vote for and leave the other boxes blank. If enough voters did that, we’d effectively be back to FPTP, although the few preferences actually entered, when redistributed after each count, would then have a wholly disproportionate – and random — impact on the result. Of course the vagaries of varying turnouts can have a similarly randomising effect, but two such random effects are at least twice as bad as one.
As for Scotland and Wales, I’m not sure what conclusions can be drawn from their experience. Six different electoral systems are used in the UK, and it’s almost impossible to guess how results have been affected by the variants between the systems. In Wales and Scotland, where forms of PR are used, the current results are a minority government in Scotland, only able to pass legislation (including the budget) that the opposition parties are prepared to let through, and a coalition in Wales in which neither coalition partner can do anything that the other partner objects to, with the threat of different permutations replacing the current Labour-Plaid Cymru coalition at any moment (“senior civil servants before the election were preparing for three possible coalition administrations: Labour/Liberal Democrat, Labour/Plaid Cymru or Plaid Cymru/Liberal Democrat/Conservative”[1]). Northern Ireland, with compulsory power sharing, is sui generis. Because the devolved executives have such limited powers, the fact that due to their electoral systems all three are hamstrung or vulnerable or both, is not fatal, just inconvenient and inimical to firm, clear, long-term policy-making. Such defects and difficulties at Westminster would represent a threat to good government in the whole of the UK.
RS: I don’t think it’s right to imply that every election since the war would, if held under AV, have produced a hung parliament. That implies that no voters would have given their second or subsequent preference to a Labour or Conservative candidate, which seems very unlikely. I’m quite sure, for instance, that under AV, Labour would have won an overall majority in 1945, and the Conservatives would have done so in 1959.
BB: I didn’t say or even imply that under AV every election since the war would have produced a hung parliament – although clearly many more of them would have done so. I pointed out that nationally no one party ever has the support of a majority of the electorate, and that no party has done so at a general election since 1935, which was one of only two such results for the past 105 years. This is the reason, obviously, for relatively few MPs winning 50%+1 of the votes under FPTP (or for the few who would win 50%+1 of the first preferences under AV). By pretending, nonsensically, that first and second and lower preference votes are all of equal value and therefore should all be given equal weight in the final count, AV purports to disguise the reality that overall, no single party in modern times ever wins an overall majority of the votes cast nationally. The opinion polls generally reflect this too. We should stop fussing about some MPs being elected without an overall majority of votes cast: it’s a function of the actual situation in the country.
I don’t know the basis for your confidence that under AV Labour would have won an overall majority in 1945 and the Tories in 1959. Labour didn’t win an overall majority of the votes in 1945 (nor even in 1951 when they won more votes and a bigger share of the vote than in 1945, in both cases more than the Conservatives, yet lost the election to them); nor did the Tories win an overall majority of the votes cast in 1959. Neither would have won an overall majority in either election under PR, and in general AV tends to produce results closer to PR than FPTP. In 1959, although the Conservatives had a huge majority of 100 seats over all the other parties combined, and the Liberals won only 6 seats, Labour and the Liberals together won more votes than the Conservatives. Now a Tory-led government without either a mandate or an overall majority in parliament is able to dismantle the welfare state, thanks to the perverse distortions of a coalition government. So it seems uncertain that under a more proportional system the Conservatives would have had an overall majority of seats in either 1959 or 2010 – and absolutely certain that under a fully proportional system, they would not. Of course these somewhat freakish results can be cited as proof of the ‘unfairness’ of FPTP, but actually they have delivered rough justice in swings and roundabouts terms and above all they have delivered reasonably decisive and durable government – much the most important objective of a general election, as the vast majority of voters will always confirm. Almost everyone votes in the hope of producing a government of his or her chosen party with enough support to enable it to govern on its own; very few indeed vote in the hope of producing either a coalition government or a house of commons arithmetically mirroring opinion in the country as a whole, which, in truth, would be largely pointless anyway. A proportionally representative assembly would be fine for a debating or revising chamber such as the house of lords, but it’s clearly a dysfunctional way of electing an electoral college (the house of commons) responsible for producing a government.
RS: But yes, under AV hung parliaments would be more frequent. Would that be a bad thing? I am much less convinced than you that under the existing system, we get a clear picture from the manifestoes of what parties will actually do once in office. None of the parties said clearly at the last election how they would actually tackle the deficit, which was by far the most important question. You will search the 2001 Labour manifesto in vain for any indication of a plan to invade Iraq. I don’t think any system is perfect, but I don’t see why coalitions are automatically worse than one-party governments.
BB: I agree that manifestoes give only a partial picture of what a party will do if elected to government – not least because all sorts of issues will come up between elections that couldn’t have been foreseen and which are accordingly not mentioned in the manifestos at the previous election (Iraq, which you mention, being an obvious example; Libya is another). As to the deficit, all three of the serious parties did give a clear indication of how they would approach the deficit – halving it in four years, eliminating it in five, etc., the LibDems being much closer to Labour than to the Conservatives on this issue. The hung parliament and the coalition enabled the LibDems to ignore their manifesto and other pre-election promises and go over shamelessly to the Tory position on the deficit. You will remember St Vincent Cable explaining that the coalition agreement, negotiated secretly after the election, supersedes the two parties’ pre-election manifestos. Parties do often include quite specific pledges in their manifestoes, if only as a precaution against having the draft legislation enacting them rejected in the house of lords, which has to respect the governing party’s manifesto commitments under the Salisbury Doctrine. Some peers are already arguing that the Salisbury Doctrine is now dead, since manifesto commitments have been replaced by the coalition agreement, which enjoys no electoral mandate. In other words, coalition governments can do what they like without any fear of being accused of breaking their election promises. In future we can expect the more honest manifestoes to include a warning that if the party turns out to be a member of a coalition or minority government, all bets are off. That won’t be a great help to the undecided voter.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assembly_for_Wales_election,_2007
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BB: Conclusions:
The ageing warriors of the No campaign (among whom I include young-old Mr Hague), with their unerring nose for the feeble and fallacious argument, also place great emphasis on the alleged cost to the Exchequer of any change in the electoral system, and the supposed difficulty that voters would experience in numbering the candidates in order of their preferences. Both points insult the intelligence of those interested in serious debate, and indeed of ordinary voters. The irony is that as the No-sayers flail aimlessly around with their rubber swords, they neglect the cold steel sabres that could win them a solid victory. Perhaps they are all double agents working for that nice Mr Clegg and his Yes campaign. Remember how once they all used to ‘agree with Nick’?
Brian
