Simon T. Kaye

Electoral reform, improbably enough, is now at the heart of everything. This is the long-discussed ‘dream scenario’ for the Liberal Democrats, and of course they’re terrified by it, even as Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, David Laws & co. expertly manoeuvre us into the ideal equidistant central position for the last day or so of negotiations. The excellence of David Laws’ “Seven Rules” for coalition-bargaining cannot be underestimated here.

Yesterday, Gordon Brown launched his dramatic final gambit – he sacrificed his own political career so as to increase the likelihood of a fourth parliamentary term dominated by Labour politicians. Regardless of whether this actually works, I rather suspect that Brown has secured a spot in the history books (as well as a total tenure as PM which longer than that of James Callaghan) thanks to the gentle levering from power which Nick Clegg has done so carefully over the last few weeks. We all knew Brown was going – and he used his career as a weapon.

The Tories’ response revealed for the first time the deeper outline of the deal that is taking shape between themselves and the Liberal Democrats. They have taken their common ground on environment, education and civil liberties. The Lib Dems appear to have made the large-scale concession that cuts to the deficit must begin this year, rather than next year. I can only presume that a similar concession has been worked out on immigration, as David Cameron will surely face internal revolt if he doesn’t manage to cap non-EU immigration. Issues pertaining to the EU and Trident renewal must, quite rightly, have been put on the back-burner for now.

In return for these concessions, the Liberal Democrats seem to have got their tax proposals accepted, which is a significant victory, and have also picked up, after yesterday’s Corbomite Manoeuvre, assurance of a free vote on a referendum on electoral reform to the Alternative Vote System, along with the introduction of fixed-term parliaments.

However, there is a third plank to the Conservatives’ interest in electoral reform, and it is this third plank which has spooked Labour out of wanting what must otherwise seem like an appealing term as a strong opposition party with the prospect of powerful renewal under a new leader. The Conservatives will almost certainly make radical constituency boundary changes before the next general election. By equalising the size (in terms of population) of every constituency, they will effectively destroy the source of Labour’s strength. In 2005, their handsome majority of Commons seats only existed in Scotland and Wales. This year, they kept a better grip on their core seats than many expected, but were still wholly defeated by the Conservatives in England alone. The Scottish and Welsh constituencies tend to be less populous. The great worry in the high command is that, if these changes come in, Labour would have to win the next election in England as well: no mean feat.

Scratching out a (probably) unstable alliance with the Lib Dems is therefore perceived to be Labour’s last hope before a generation in the wilderness. This may be completely wrong – the next government is sure to be pretty unpopular as it deals with the deficit and Labour could revel in chastising the Conservatives and Lib Dems together. But the electoral mathematics gets very sticky indeed with the regulation of constituency size. The tories have clearly decided that they can afford AV as a trade-off with this advantage over Labour.

As I write these words, we’re half an hour into polling day.

These last four weeks have been historic. But we’ll have time (lots and lots of it) to pick over that in the future. Today, we are greeted by our semi-regular Great British democratic moment. About once every half-decade, we are asked our opinions on the economy, immigration, nuclear power, defence, international relations, education, global warming and social care. And after a good month of listening to a lot of fairly biased opinions and somehow forming our own stances, we’re asked to report back.

We report back by drawing two intersecting lines next to the name of a candidate from a party which seems to most closely share our worldview. Somehow, we reduce our extensive and inter-relating matrix of preferences into one or two choices.

And that’s when the system is working well. When it’s working badly, we feel the need to vote for a party more distant from our own views so as to ensure that a third, even more distant party does not come to power.

There are no conceivable perfect democratic systems. I’m writing a PhD thesis largely inspired by this fact. But this is not to say that some electoral systems are not preferable to others.

The first and most important reason to vote for the Liberal Democrats today is that they, and only they, guarantee root-and-branch repair to our voting system.

Why Libertarians Should be Sceptical of the Big Society

I’m not an ideologue. At least, I hope I’m not. Philosophically, I find much to admire in the Conservative manifesto. Idealistically and artistically I find myself drawn to Labour. Both pitches ultimately fail to satisfy me. Let me explain why.

The Conservatives’ ambition to build a ‘big society’ – to encourage the growth of a bottom-up public sphere to fill the vacuum that is about to be created by anti-deficit spending cuts – is not without merit. Any measure promising to clip the wings of the state is going to find an attentive audience with me, and it strikes me as intelligent that the state’s best, most effective role might be to facilitate and nurture an independent and localised approach to public services.

But this ambition is also horribly mistimed. This is a rebalancing of the shape of our civilization which ought to take place thoughtfully, emergently, and incrementally. It is also a concept of the role of the state better suited to the shepherding of a society in times of strong economic growth. Ironically, this band of Conservatives might have done a pretty sound job in the high years of the late nineties and early noughties. Now is not the time.

David Cameron’s bad timing is not helped by his extraordinary failure to actually express how this apparently central, binding ideological theme will work in practice. His education measures are simple extrapolations from reforms already made under Tony Blair and New Labour, which makes the Conservative attack on Labour’s record on education quite funny. Encouraging academy schemes does not strike me as the fundamental change that Cameron implies that it is – especially as, presumably, the DCSF will still be required to carry out a modicum of quality-control.

The more important problem for Cameron’s Conservatives lies in cross-policy contradiction. How are we supposed to believe that he trusts us – as a ‘big society’ – when he hasn’t enough faith in the reasoning capacity of the electorate to support meaningful voting reform? Why should we accept that he is a modernising ‘Liberal Conservative’ rather than an authoritarian in the George Bush tradition when his spending commitments are greater than Labour’s, greater than the Liberal Democrats’, and he has less published ways of tackling the deficit than either of those parties as well? He aims to spend more and has so far explained only what he is unwilling to cut in terms of public expenditure.

In these conditions, a cut in inheritance tax does not feel like a correction to the unfair levy system, but a very misguided misdirection of inconceivably precious funds. Why protect this one policy, with such a paucity of economic nous elsewhere? Because the modern face of the Conservative Party is surrounded on every side by an army of parliamentary backbenchers who, more than any other group in this country’s political class, live by the darkest of vested interests and the oldest of prejudices.

Labour’s Last Stand

Gordon Brown has somehow drawn an enormous amount of my sympathy over the course of this campaign. We have seen brief hints of the political boldness for which he used to be known – his acceptance of television debates, for one thing: surely he knew he was destined to lose (or be perceived to have lost) in these encounters. The New Labour project started as a bold experiment in political centrism, mixing healthy economic liberalism with a large social conscience. Many genuinely important things have come to pass over the last 13 years.

Brown’s late conversion to substantial constitutional reform is also very appealing. AV, of course, does not go far enough as a change to the voting system (and coalition-minded Liberal Democrats would do well to remember that the Labour party has hinted at nothing more substantial as of yet). That said, I’m willing to be fairly generous with them – they haven’t delivered on electoral change in the past, but I don’t really doubt their sincerity this time around.

So what, fundamentally, should cause a voter to abandon Labour for the Liberal Democrats?

Civil liberties. What else? Labour has shown a shameless tendency to erode our traditional rights and freedoms in the name of enhanced security. We are filmed, databased, biometrically analysed. Our right to trial before extended detention has been chipped at, pushed back, and Labour has tried manfully to push even harder. They would like us to carry identification documents at all times, and to submit to inclusion on a universal register containing absurdly fine detail. And for these things, we are expected to pay as well. We would be required to tell the state where we move, how our situations change, what our names become. If we don’t do it quickly, we’ll get fined. ID cards are designed to be not only revenue-neutral, but revenue raising. They expect to make some money out of their catalogue.

No Liberal-minded person can trust Labour until they bring in a leader who is willing to accept the broader consensus on human rights and civil liberties. Gordon Brown had a shining opportunity, in his happy first days as Prime Minister, to draw a line under Blair’s authoritarianism. Instead, he chose to take a stand on it, to fight for it. When he did this, he lost my vote for good.

In my post yesterday I pointed out a few things which I felt were being overlooked by the swarms of commentators and media folk who are trying to predict the outcome of this election. Specifically, I explained my view that we would end up with a hung parliament of some description. In fact, I am increasingly convinced that Labour will remain the largest party in that hung parliament.

This brings us to a massive problem for the Liberal Democrats, and again, I don’t think many people have talked about this yet – but I reckon it’ll be the deciding factor in any future talks about coalitions.

As a party, the Lib Dems been pretty coy about who we’d most like to work with in the event of a “balanced parliament”. The older stance, which received much airing during the last few party leadership campaigns, was that the Liberal Democrats would work informally with other parties rather than in full-on coalitions: expecting no cabinet positions, supporting the minority government in a vote of no confidence, decision-making at the point of the Queen’s Speech. That sort of thing. It’s pretty clear why this came about: it avoided the internally contentious question of whether we were closer to Labour or the Tories, and reflected the many bruises that were caused by the aborted lib-lab “friendship” of 1997.

This line doesn’t seem to cut it any more. It’s fairly plain, as it turns out, that the Labour policy platform is much, much closer to the Lib Dem one in 2010 – even if only because they’ve helped themselves to many of our oldest aspirations in the electoral reform, parliamentary reform and voting-age reform departments. Vince Cable has definitely looked more SDP than Liberal of late, and his tag-teaming with Alastair Darling against George Osborne at the Chancellor’s debate was fairly obvious. Even if it can’t be said of the parliamentary party, it’s more or less certain that the Lib Dem grassroots would prefer cooperation with Labour.

Yet we now face a scenario where it is perfectly possible that Labour could hold the larger number of seats in Parliament even with the Tories miles ahead in terms of popular vote-share.

Nick Clegg has spoken countless times that, after the election, “the largest party will have the moral mandate to form a government”. Larger – in what sense? Larger number of seats or larger public support?

Can the Liberal Democrats, long term advocates of proportional representation in Parliament, support a minority government which is not the clear winner of the popular vote?

Setting aside the piquant irony of a electoral-reform hating Conservative party being cheated of victory by the mores of the first-past-the-post system, the Liberal Democrats could find themselves in very difficult territory if they attempt to form a coalition with, or even informally support, Labour.

They might be ‘kingmakers’ for a while – at the cost of their very hard-won reputation for honesty and fair play. The move that would make the Liberal Democrat party could break it in the eyes of voters forever.

Of course this has already occurred to the Parliamentary party – and it’s on this basis that I make my second General Election prediction: in the event of a hung parliament, the Liberal Democrats will choose to form a formal coalition with nobody at all.

It’s obviously incredibly couragous of me (in the suicidal Yes, Minister sense) to stick my head above the parapet with anything that looks like a public prediction of the outcome of this election. But here are a few things that I think aren’t being included in the debates – specifically, some reasons why (despite the predictions of most Men Behind The Polls) Cameron’s Tories might not get their outright majority on May 6th.

1. The Liberal Democrats will hold on in the South

I’ve obviously got an interest which doesn’t need to be declared here, but all the same. Uniform swing predictions are absolutely useless when talking about the Lib Dem/Tory marginals in the South of England. I had the pleasure of helping out in Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake’s south London constituency of Carshalton and Wallington. The figures suggest that this place is on an electoral knife-edge, and the seat is high on the Tories’ target list. But local people are big fans of Tom Brake, who happens to be an incredibly hard-working MP, one of the very few who came out of the expenses scandal looking like a saint, and also happens to be rather good at his job. In other words, I’d still put my money on Tom holding on (at pretty good odds, but anyway). Seat-by-seat, I think the Lib Dems are going to hold on rather well in the south – better, that is, than many predictions suggest. And this means that the Tories will have to do all the better in places where, traditionally, they tend to struggle to attract votes – places like…

2. The North

People are talking a lot right now about how the Conservatives have ‘won’ the first week of campaigning. Perhaps they have – they’ve seemed to control the agenda, at least. But all Labour really needs to do at this point is look like a tenable government. If they achieve the appearance of anything like a votable or supportable political force, then the electoral hill the Tories must climb in the North of England turns into a mountain. And I’d argue that the first week of campaigning has at the very least shown Labour to be competitive in this minimal way. The credibility gap has been bridged. By a similar token, the Tory ‘coup’ of getting into bed with apparently every single businessman in the country in the NI debate could backfire badly beyond the South. They’re publishing an endorsement from the former head of Meryll Lynch, for crying out loud. Have we forgotten about the financial crisis already?

3. Labour gets the credit for escaping the recession

It’s been little reported, but a number of polls have shown that a healthy majority of British people thank Brown, Darling et al. for fixing the economy. It’s a pretty simple rule of electoral analysis, actually: the sitting government always gets blamed for a bad economy, the sitting government always gets rewarded for a bouyant one. We can explain the majority of all electoral outcomes in history by pointing to the personal finantial situation of the average voting citizen, and frankly things could be a lot worse for Labour in this regard. Cameron may find himself having to explain why he opposed (and opposes) many of the measures which appear to have done the trick, whether or not this line of questioning is fair.

4. Brown could win the debates

Don’t laugh, it’s perfectly possible. I’ve just been discussing this with a friend who suspects that Brown will simply look too uncharismatic and ponderous and dull next to Clegg and Cameron, but I have my doubts. Surely Cameron will have the greatest expectations heaped upon his shoulders? In the US, where these debates are not novel at all, the Democrat and Republican political machines have become adept in the art of ‘expectations management’: minimise the general expectation of your guy’s performance as much as possible, and then any kind of success will have a strong effect. Woe unto the candidate who is expected to perform brilliantly and merely performs well. Cameron is this candidate, and for all his preparation, I think he does rather better in the direct, adversarial type of debate that we see in PMQs every week. Brown will be fine in the carefully clinical, rules-driven encounters that people will actually watch. Never underestimate the pursuasive strength of a statistic. Brown likes statistics.

Of course, the biggest opportunity in the debate belongs to Clegg, and he may very well shine. But anybody ‘winning’ who isn’t Cameron will be a disaster for the Conservative campaign. My friend points out that the narratives are pre-set: the newspapers and commentators have probably already decided who won these debates. But this is a chance to talk directly to voters, and get a precious thirty seconds of speech into the news: very hard to argue with.

Last note – Just so you know, my long-promised, long-delayed political science analysis of AV voting reforms will emerge soon.

Well, the political news is full of the planned Commons vote-on- referendum for electoral reform. This is one occasion where my job and political beliefs as a Liberal Democrat coincide very nicely with my vocation and my research for a PhD in Political Theory – so I hope you’ll permit me to indulge in a little bit of an academic approach to this situation.

The system to be voted on is a classic – the old ‘AV’ system. This is no surprise. Elements of the Labour party have long preferred the Alternative Vote or ‘Instant Runoff Voting’ as the basis for electoral reform (though I suspect that the majority of that parliamentary party has never quite seen the point).

The political motivations of Labour’s move appear to be twofold. Firstly, they hope to show up the Conservatives as visibly opposed to a reform that, following the whole Adventure of the Abused Expenses, may be viewed as a popular measure to hand stronger accountability to the public.

The other reason boils down to electoral mathematics: by building the mandate for electoral reform now, Labour is eyeing a future election where the tories are still broadly the most popular party nationally, but will be unable to build anything resembling Labour’s 1997-2005 unofficial supermajority in the Commons. It’s possible that serious treatment of voting reform could only ever emerge from a vaguely leftist, unpopular government. The truth is that the vast majority of voters for Labour would rather vote for the Libdems than the Tories, and that most (though a few less) Libdems would rather have a Labour government than a Conservative one. Together they’re a (50%+) majority, so at the most basic level the maths of this make sense for Labour. Moreover, the motivation for such reforms evaporate with the promise of political success in the First Past the Post system (FPTP) – why kick away the ladder that let you climb up?

Labour’s political machinations aside, as a Liberal Democrat I can only get excited about any half-serious approach to a change in the voting system. There’s no question that the Libdem preference – Single Tansferable Vote (STV) – would be more proportional in effect, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of our MPs demurr during the vote on the basis that the reforms don’t go far enough. But there are other grounds for criticism of the AV system, beyond the “it goes too far” or “it doesn’t go far enough” cries that you’ll be hearing for a the next few weeks.

As part of my research, I’m working on something called Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. I won’t go into too much detail here, but Kenneth Arrow basically came up with mathematical expressions of democratic norms, and then asserted that within the boundaries of these requirements there could be no voting system between three alternatives that could guarantee stable and non-arbitrary outcomes.

Well, since Labour’s announcement I’ve been doing some thinking about this, and worked up a couple of examples, and I think I’m ready to assert that the AV system is not capable of increasing Democratic meaninfulness even as we know it has only limited ability to improve the proportionality of electoral outcomes.
I’ll leave it there for now, and put up part two, with all my more academic objections, very soon.

With the Copenhagen Summit underway and the low rumble of discontent over the hacked emails debacle still audible, I feel the need to communicate my feelings on all the claims and counter-claims on the ‘science’ of global warming.

I marched on the ‘Copenhagen Wave’ last weekend, along with tens of thousands of other people from all around the UK. It’s a worthwhile cause, I’m strongly in favour of firm emissions reduction targets, and I believe that human activity is responsible for the climate change going on around us. Note, however, the use of the word ‘believe’ – I don’t know anything – not scientifically, anyway.

‘Scientific facts’ are curious beasts. Science may be said to be incapable of producing hard-and-fast facts. One formulates a hypothesis; one tests it; if the hypothesis is upheld, and is upheld repeatably, then surely we have a scientific fact on our hands? Well, yes and no.

Within the framework of the experiment, we have shown a ‘fact’ – but it’s possible that laboratory conditions or the specific arrangements of a test differ from what we’d assume to be ‘normal’ conditions. Test conditions are capable of presenting spurious, irrelevant or simply untrue ‘facts’. It works the same way as the framing of verbal logic.

So, scientific facts prove only the specific hypothesis which are tested. More importantly, they can only be assumed to do so temporarily. Facts have use-by dates. The first relevant experiment to come along and throw new light on a question or display slightly different results will once again throw doubt onto any ‘scientific fact’, and it is a part of scientific method to assume that proofs are finite in this way. A statement is true until proven false, just as the accused is innocent until proven guilty. The difference is that reasonable doubt runs the other way: if there is reasonable doubt as to the truth of a scientific statement, then it cannot really be called a fact. For this reason, there must be much, much more evidence in support of a claim of scientific fact than there need to be made against it in order to ‘disprove’ it – which is parallel to our legal metaphor, where the onus lies with the prosecution to eradicate reasonable doubt.

The third important point about scientific facts is that, in an important way, they can never get beyond inference. We may observe the correlation between two different things a hundred times in experiments – but all we’ve really seen is the same correlation, a hundred times. So even with the non-existence of contrary evidence, ‘scientific fact’ requires someone to look at the evidence and draw a causal conclusion about it all – to claim “these things are not coincidental: one causes the other”.

These three question-marks can help us to look at the human-caused (‘anthropogenic’) global warming argument objectively:

First of all, anyone who tells you that anthropocentric climate change is proven, certain, a done deal, is either lying to you, or doesn’t know much about science. These will be the sort of people who say ‘climate change deniers’ instead of ‘skeptics’. Even in so far as there is any such thing as a ‘scientific fact’, I cannot in good conscience write that anthropogenic climate change is one – no matter how useful that could be politically.

Why isn’t anthropogenic climate change a scientific fact? First of all, our planet’s atmosphere does not constitute a nice, stable test condition. It has its own ups and downs, is sensitive to the activity of the sun and to its own internal weather patterns, such as el niño. Even today our weather and climate can be altered by unpredictable, freak occurences. Trying to draw a general trend out of this mess, even over fairly long periods, is very hard work. Even worse, climate change scientists will always be frustrated in their efforts to project changes into the future, and a key element of scientific proof is in the success of a model: can we extrapolate our findings into a means to predict what will happen next? In this case, the short-term answer is no.

Instrumental data on warming. The range since useful records began is about 1 degree centigrade in total. From Wikicommons.

Secondly, even with something like an upward trend (which is more or less visible in the data – see the diagram above), there is the problem of cause-attribution. This is made a bigger issue by the fact that the two curves under scrutiny here do not scale particularly well together.

I take as absolutely true that greenhouse gas levels are increasing significantly in the atmosphere, and that these gases are being released because of human activity.

More difficult to prove, but still, in my opinion, true, is the general trend of a warming climate over the last fifty years or so.

But these facts together signify only correlation. I, personally, believe that there is enough evidence to link them causally. This third leap is required for ‘scientific fact’. But the problem is that the rate of the increase in temperature does not match in terms of scale the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, or adhere to the predictions of scientists. There can be little doubt of an increase in CO2 levels – whereas warming levels can be attributed to other causes, such as solar activity or the (thus far barely understood) planetary rhythm of ice-age to warm-patch.

One word of warning  – stick to the instrumental data. Information on the ‘medieval warm period’ is worse than useless, because of course there is no reliable measurement information from that far back. We are limited to the last hundred years or so, and this is both bad news and good news for climate change scientists. It means we must discount the geological probabilities that this planet has been considerably warmer and considerably cooler than it is now at various points in its history, over the course of millions of years.

But these ‘good’ records do show a temperature increase, and it corresponds in terms of timeframe with the start of human industrial activity in earnest. This is enough for me.

Skepticism, it must be noted, is a good thing. It is the scientist’s responsibility to be skeptical, which is why the activities of the UEA scientists is particularly reprehensible. But skeptics must be skeptical always: there is far, far less evidence for ‘alternative’ causes of temperature increase than there is for the greenhouse effect argument, and this is what must be said at the Copenhagen summit.

It is with healthy skepticism that we ought to take action against CO2 emissions. We don’t know anything for certain – but shouldn’t we hedge our bets? I don’t think that scientific rationalism should ever form the basis, by itself, for public policy. But the intuitive response to all this information is to detect a cause, and the response to that intuition is clear.

And wouldn’t it be a noble human objective to cut down on pollution regardless of its relationship with climate-change? Why does no-one ever make that argument?

There’s been another long fallow period on this blog.

My thinking at the moment is that I should really re-orient what I do here around my work as an organiser for North East Hertfordshire’s Liberal Democrats, and leave lots of space for off-the-cuff ideas, fun and academic resources.

So, a few things:

Today has seen the launch of ‘Act’, which is the Liberal Democrats’ new social networking and organisation tool. Visit Lib Dem Act. I’ve just joined, and I’m not quite sure how long it will take for it to pick up enough members to start being really useful, but it’s very swish stuff. Go and take a look, and do join!

If you live in North East Hertfordshire, then you should get onto Facebook and join the debate at the new LibDem group there, specifically for your region. The group is a work-in-progress, and I’m keen to see how much support I can get together for a very-local social networking party presence. Everyone welcome.

Things will stay slow here for a little while, but change is coming!