Posted in: news | Comments (1)
“Britain’s First Past The Post voting system could be scrapped if Labour wins the general election, under plans which have been outlined by Gordon Brown. The prime minister wants a referendum on changing to an Alternative Vote system, where candidates are ranked in order of voters’ preference”.
Whereas superficially this proposed referendum to move to what appears to be a fairer voting system appears to be a step in the right direction, I believe the Alternative Vote system – in the context of English politics – to be fundamentally undemocratic.
Why? How AV works is the voter gets the list of candidates & ranks them in order of how much they want each candidate to win. The candidate who received the fewest ‘1′ preference votes then gets all their ‘2′ preference votes transferred to the other candidates accordingly, until one of the candidates has received over 50% of the votes available.
In a system where there are a multiplicity of parties – ie, where views within parties are sufficiently diverse that splits have occurred – that’s fine. But in English politics, and to a certain extent the other nations of the UK, we are, to all intents and purposes, a three party system. Sure, we’ve got the Green Party, the British National Party, the Unofficial Monster Raving Loony (Rainbow Alliance) Party, & Dr Richard Rogers’ Common Good Party, etc, but we only have three serious parties. And by and large, if supporters of Conservative or Labour are likely to put a second preference on their ballot forms, more often than not they are most likely to allocate that second preference to the Liberal Democrat candidate rather than to the other serious party or one of the amateur candidates.
Which means that in all but the safest seats, the LibDems will be favoured disproportionately to their actual support. All credit to the LibDems, they are saying the plan doesn’t go far enough.
It’s possible that if AV is introduced more serious parties might emerge – most likely as a result of the broad coalitions of the three main parties fragmenting, leading to such as the Judean Peoples’ Front and the Peoples’ Front of Judea, alongside the Popular Front of Judea. But would that really be such a good thing? Party politics is divisive enough, without it being made even more divisive; all that would happen would be the introduction of coalition governments comprising the same actual people, but just paying their subscription fees to more parties.
If Gordon Brown is serious about improving democratic accountability, then not only does he need to think about something better than replacing one flawed vote counting system with another flawed vote counting system, but also think more radically about the whole relationship between the People and our elected representives, and the system of cabinet government with winner-takes-all.
Tags: democracy, politics
simon @ February 3, 2010
Posted in: news | Comments (4)
“A quarter of people living in England’s countryside will be over 65 by 2020, a campaign group has said. The National Housing Federation said figures estimate a 40% rise in older residents over the next 10 years. The federation, which represents England’s housing associations, said the number of over 65s living in rural England is expected to be 3.23m by 2020, compared with 2.32m in 2008″.
For me, there are two issues here. The first one is the one of the social contract which makes Society what it is; one of the problems the increasing number of rural over-65s increases is that of care for them. If there is too high a proportion of old people to young people (for want of more appropriate – but more cumbersome – language), then it makes it so much more difficult, and costly, to provide suitable care; at its most basic level, fewer younger people in the village means fewer younger people able to simply pop to the shop on behalf of their elderly neighbour who doesn’t find it so easy to get out of the house for themselves any more.
This is of course sad, but the thing is – and here I’m conscious of sounding quite uncomfortably tory – the social contract of society is a two way contract; if Society contracts to look after the elderly who’ve paid in to the National Insurance system for 50 years etc, do not ‘the elderly’ have a correspondent responsibility to facilitate being looked after? Is it really so unreasonable to suggest that somebody who has a high level of caring needs moves from their four bedroom house on the edge of a village in the middle of nowhere (with three buses a week) to somewhere a bit more, y’know, central?
And then there’s the second issue – the dirty little secret of the countryside.
“The rising cost of housing in rural areas is driving out younger people as houses are, on average, £40,000 more expensive than those in towns and cities – even though wages are far lower, it said. At the same time, better-off older people are retiring to their dream country home”.
We’ve been hearing for years how awful it is that young people who are born and grow up in rural villages end up leaving when they come to need a home of their own, because they can’t afford to now buy a house there due to rising countryside property values; this is made out to be the fault of rich urban dwellers buying second homes, and Government Intervention Is Called For.
What always seems to be overlooked is that if rich people are buying all the houses in the countryside, who is selling them to them? Is it not the people already living in the countryside? Fair enough, you sell your house, you try to get the best price for it – but ‘the countryside’ can’t collectively sell itself out to the highest bidder & at the same time collectively complain about pricing its own children out of the market to remain there. Similarly, ‘the countryside’ cannot enjoy the peace and quiet that disconnexion from the urban rat race provides, and at the same time complain about the inconvenience which comes from that disconnexion.
simon @ January 31, 2010
Posted in: technology | Comments (4)
Just as the country was unfreezing itself from our unaccustomed lengthy period of snow and ice, Dave Harte, as part of his taking over the running of the hyperlocal blog in his local area, laid a challenge before Birmingham City Council to make freely available – in an easy importable and mashable format – the data of which roads the gritting wagons go down.
Sounds a bit dull when described like that, but the point of it being in a mashable format is that would allow other websites to easily import that data for their own use – to produce a map of the routes just for your own local area, or for the whole city. Dave’s point was that he had to do a whole bunch of unnecessary work in making a new map by drawing lines on Google Maps taking the text information on the council gritting routes pages, when surely since the council already has the mapping data from its own mapping systems, why can’t it just make that data available from source?
Which is a reasonable question, if you don’t know the answer! Actually, most councils (or at least the people within them who use or have other interests in the data themselves) would love to release this data – after all, as Dave points out, at its crudest it’s a way of enabling community volunteers to do useful things with it instead of the council having to do (and therefore pay for) it.
The sad fact is, much as councils would like to release this data, central government, in the form of its various quango agencies, won’t let them. The mapping data for the gritting routes is derived from mapping by the Ordnance Survey – ie, the mapping .kml (or whatever) files are generated by somebody clicking on an Ordnance Survey map in a piece of mapping software, which then makes that data subject to OS’s rather restrictive licensing conditions – meaning that if those councils were to release that data, they’d get sued by the OS. No ‘might get told off’, most definitely will get sued – when it comes to protecting their intellectual property, the OS make Disney look cuddly. And sadly, over 90% of local government geodata (especially the interesting stuff) is compiled in this way – not by council workers walking around with handheld gps devices doing their own survey.
“But wait!”, I hear you shout, “OS are due to make their mapping free from April 2010!”
Unfortunately it’s not as simple as that – OS are indeed making the maps free, but any data which is derived from those maps (ie, by somebody clicking on it) will still be restricted.
So the target for ire about the inability of local activists to easily produce a map of, say, local lollipop operatives – aka School Crossing Patrols – should be central government, not your local council.
You’d think, though, that with the launch of www.data.gov.uk – central government’s new open data repository – we’d be seeing the Dawn of a New Golden Age of Peace and Prosperity, with the possibility that this extra data will be in the second wave to be freed?
However, it looks unlikely, with the announcement that the petition to free the Royal Mail’s postcode data, which a number of interesting online applications were using until the Royal Mail threatened to sue them, has been rejected.
Don’t forget, all this data which the government continues to prevent us from using in our own applications, we have already paid for. We have a moral right to it. In the USA, not usually known for its free, open, and uncommercial attitude to things, absolutely anything which is created by a government employee is free for others to use, on that very basis that the taxpayer has already paid for it.
Tags: open data, social media
simon @ January 22, 2010
Posted in: news | Comments (0)
“The British armed forces could be forced to shrink by up to a fifth because of a lack of money, a military think tank has predicted. The Royal United Services Institute said the number of trained military personnel could fall from 175,000 to little more than 140,000 by 2016″.
So? It’s already widely discussed that public sector spending needs to be cut anyway, so why should the military be exempt from the pain? Are soldiers more important than nurses, teachers, librarians, and benefits clerks?
As it is, defence spending is currently 5.8% of total UK Government expenditure. What would the RUSI cut in order for defence not to share the pain of public sector cuts?
Tags: economy, politics
simon @ January 13, 2010
Posted in: news | Comments (0)
“The home secretary has said he will back any request from police or local government to ban an Islamic group marching through Wootton Bassett. Alan Johnson said he felt ‘revulsion’ at the thought of Islam4UK’s proposed march through the Wiltshire town”.
Now indeed, it is quite offensive that the group is indeed planning on holding its protest march in the town which has become synonymous with returning dead soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, and by choosing to hold their protest march there – regardless of their rationale that by proposing to hold it their they well get maximum publicity which they almost certainly wouldn’t have got anywhere else, by choosing to protest in such an inflammatory manner, they will almost certainly drive more people away from their point of view than bring them to it, especially in the current climate of broad public sympathy for members of the armed forces regardless of broad public opposition for what those forces have been sent to do. If they have any sense, Islam4UK will reconsider.
However, what I do find even more offensive and repugnant is that the home secretary wants to ban the march, simply on the grounds that he doesn’t like it. So much for freedom of speech.
Tags: freedom-of-speech, politics, protest, v-for-vendetta
simon @ January 5, 2010
Posted in: birmingham, wibble | Comments (7)
Dear Dean Davies (Customer Services, British Waterways West Midlands),
I’m writing to complain to you in the strongest possible terms about the lack of gritting along the towpath of the Farmer’s Bridge lock flight, Birmingham City Centre.
This morning, between the top lock and lock number seven (where I disembark) walking along it to work I slipped and fell over not once but four times; I was reduced to descending the lock ramps by squatting & sliding myself down with my hands behind me for balance. You can imagine I’m sure the dangers inherent in slipping on the ice next to a lock, especially if one fell into the frozen lock itself.
I appreciate that British Waterways can control neither the weather nor the temperature, and that there’s little you can do to ensure passage for boats when the canal itself freezes over. However, you can control the pedestrian environment, with the application of salt / grit to ensure key strategic pedestrian routes such as this are safe for the people who use them regularly; the nature of that section of towpath route is such that once one has started going that way you are pretty much committed, as leaving the towpath to take a different route isn’t so simple. Once I reached the normal pavement – which the council is responsible for – my passage was completely fine, so if the council manages to grit the pavement, how can British Waterways not manage to grit the city centre towpath ?
Fortunately neither myself nor my laptop and phone were damaged in my four falls due to British Waterways’ negligence in failing to make the towpath safe, however be assured that had anything been damaged, I would be holding you liable. In this age of no-win-no-fee personal accident law firms advertising on television, I urge you to arrange for the key strategic pedestrian routes in Birmingham to be gritted and made safe as soon as possible, before another member of the public has a more serious accident, and my British Waterways licence money has to be used to pay out on a hefty compensation claim rather than its proper use of paying for the maintenance of the network.
in Friendship,
Tags: canal, complaint
simon @ December 21, 2009
Posted in: news | Comments (2)
“Cheques will be phased out by October 2018, but only if adequate alternatives are developed, the UK Payments Council – the body that oversees payments strategy – has said. The Council said there should be ‘no scenario’ for using cheques by 2018. The target date for the closure of the system that processes cheques has been set for 31 October 2018, after the board described the payment method as in ‘terminal decline’”.
I can’t remember the last time I wrote a cheque; in fact, it’s so long ago that I can’t even remember when my last cheque book ran out of cheques and I didn’t get a new book because they stopped sending them out, and the process of ordering a new book had become so cumbersome that I couldn’t be bothered.
All the news coverage of the arguments from the banking institutions about why in nine years time there should be no more cheques has focussed on how in the modern era supermarkets stopped accepting cheques years ago, and anyway everybody is doing their shopping online with their cards anyway; there’s been a little discussion about the small trader (the plumber, the rooder, the small seller of handmade jewellery at a local craft fair) who currently doesn’t have the ability to accept payment by card, and that has been turned around into how the banking industry still has work to do to make it easy for those people to accept electronic payment.
Now it’s true that modern business needs to adapt to the modern world, even if the business you are in is the oldest business in the world.
But what is – as always in situations like this – being ignored is that it’s not just business which needs to hand over money from one party to another.
What about the scenario of the auntie who wants to give her nephew a hefty cash present for a significant birthday? She can hardly withdraw a hundred notes from the cash machine and put them in the envelope with the birthday card, can she? She admittedly could do a bank transfer, but (a) it’s not the same as receiving the actual token of cash, and (b) it’s more faff for her. Internet banking is an option for many, but even me - Digitally Engaged™ since 1982 – doesn’t bother with that because of the faff involved, and as more and more people take up mobile internet options as their primary if not sole internet connexion that option is so much faffier. Or the scenario of the mate who needs to borrow some money from another mate – again, it’s technically possible for an electronic funds transfer to take place from one account to another, but practically, it’s a major bother, when simply writing a cheque is the easiest option for them.
But then that’s the modern world, isn’t it? Stuff The Customer.
Tags: economy, technology
simon @ December 16, 2009
