Don't vote labour.

For past elections I've got to this point and posted a careful explanation - the case, as it were - for voting the way I planned to vote. I've been, over the last week or so, thinking through what I might say about the issues in this election.

And then I remembered that my wife's aunt, born in Manchester and living in Leeds, wanted a Magen David - she insisted it had to come from Israel. We have got her one. It came to me that there really is only one issue in the election and that, for the first time, I'll be asking you not to vote for a particular political party - asking you not to vote Labour.

At the weekend a few thousand Jews and supporters gathered in Parliament Square - to do one thing, to say no to antisemitism and to issue a plea for the rest of us non-Jews to listen to them when they talk about the threat to their community. A threat made worse by the fact that the Labour Party, at the highest level, is infected with that antisemitism.

The antisemitism at the heart of Labour means that otherwise good people, folk who see themselves as decent and caring, are considering voting to put a man described by most Jews as an antisemite into the highest political office in the land. Here's how Gideon Falter from the Campaign Against Antisemitism described Corbyn:

Referring to the days of Corbyn as a backbench MP, “when he could speak his mind without fear of scrutiny,” Falter described a man who committed countless blatantly antisemitic acts such as blaming “the hand of Israel” for Islamist terrorist attacks committed in Egypt, honoring a sheikh “banned from the UK for saying that Jews drink non-Jews’ blood,” calling a Hamas terrorist his brother, holding a “repulsive event on Holocaust Memorial Day in which Jews were accused of being the successors to the Nazis,” trying to have the word Holocaust removed from the title of Holocaust Memorial Day, laying a wreath at a memorial for the Black September terrorists responsible for the Munich Massacre, and much more.

Jewish organisations and individuals have gathered together the evidence - you can read many at the Labour Against Antisemitism website - from hundreds and hundreds of Labour activists. Not, as often claimed, people upset about Palestine but the full range of antisemitic nastiness - images of hook-nosed Jews straight out of Nazi propaganda, tropes about Jews controlling the media, the government and international finance, lies about the origins of Ashkenazi Jews, calls for the destruction of Israel - from the river to the sea - with the genocide that entails. And the Labour Party has failed to respond to this infection out of fear that, in doing so, it would get too close to its leader.

The response of many people has been either to deny the antisemitism - "you're confusing anti-Zionism with antisemitism" - or to say a bit of racism is acceptable to get a progressive government. The Guardian, in endorsing Labour summed up this position when it said:

"The pain and hurt within the Jewish community, and the damage to Labour, are undeniable and shaming. Yet Labour remains indispensable to progressive politics.”

A shocking attitude, essentially 'throw the Jews under the bus so you can get all that free stuff from a Labour government".

So I'm not asking you to vote for a particular Party just pleading with you to listen to those worried, frightened Jews. I don't care whether you vote Lib Dem, Conservative, Brexit Party or Monster Raving Looney. I don't care if you scrawl a rude picture on your spoiled ballot paper or stay indoors reading a book rather than voting. Just don't vote Labour. Please.

....

"It's a culture clash": how VoteWatch frames Pakistanis as uniquely guilty of election fraud.

It seem innocent enough, even noble - VoteWatch they call it and it, we're told, does this:

Exposing ballot burglars, reporting on elections, opening-up politics & producing documentaries

What could be wrong with an organisation dedicated to exposing electoral bad practice and to hold the feet of those running elections to the fire? The answer is pretty simple, VoteWatch isn't really about any of this as a quick visit to its website would tell you - just on the 'UK' section of that website we see:

An attack on Labour MP David Lammy's expenses claims

More on David Lammy as they look at whether the hate mail he receives is self-generated

A report on the resignation of the UK ambassador to the USA

A nasty police siege in Peterborough - badged as in the 'Multicultural District'

Gordon Brown attacking Corbyn over anti-semitism

A tenuous link to a convicted vote fraudster describing his nephew in a 'drug fuelled rage'

Eventually we come to a video that says it's a 'guide to the Pickles Report'. And this is where we begin to see the real agenda of VoteWatch and why the Brexit Party (and the right of politics in the UK should be concerned). You can read the Pickles Report (here) and you'll find that it gives a series of proposals for tightening up the administration of of elections and the prevention of illegal and corrupt practices at the polls. This covers the location and management of polling stations, the intimidation of voters, postal voting, personation and the administration of the count. Pickles was critical of the Electoral Commission and strongly supported the use of an easier election petition system rather than that commission.

What Eric Pickles didn't say was that the problem was confined to places with concentrations of Pakistani or Bangladeshi population. Reference is made to concerns raised by people from those communities (over intimidation, family voting - where a man accompanies a woman into the polling booth, and political party access to absent voter lists) as well as to the shocking Tower Hamlets case where the failure of police and Electoral Commission to act was eventually exposed by a private petition. More than anything it was the scale of Lutfur Rahman's electoral fraud that shocked:

Lutfur Rahman was found personally guilty by the court of making false statements about a candidate, bribery, and undue spiritual influence. The court also found Rahman guilty by his agents of personation, postal vote offences, provision of false information to a registration officer, voting when not entitled, making false statements about a candidate, payment of canvassers, bribery, and undue spiritual influence. A finding that corrupt and illegal practices for the purpose of securing Rahman's election, and that such general corruption so extensively prevailed such that it could be reasonably concluded to have affected the result was also returned.

It remains a concern that, in general terms, public authorities are loath to take strong actions in investigating election offences but although Pickles alluded to 'political correctness' as a factor his main concern was that the Electoral Commission set itself up as both rule-maker and policeman. Nor can we dismiss - as my colleagues in Bradford know well - the malign impact of clan and birideri politics in some Asian communities.

It is clear, however, that VoteWatch is not interested in encouraging improvements to the way in which we ensure fair elections but rather to suggest that malpractice is a specific problem for Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities and for nowhere else. Here is a map and graphic showing where the organisation has set up branches and, I assume, an image of the sort of people (South Asians) who are doing the alleged fraud:



So we have an image of South Asian men (plus a child) and a list of towns with large Pakistani or Bangladeshi populations. Returning to VoteWatch's article on the Pickles Report, we find that a good part of it isn't about voting fraud but about the street grooming scandals in Rotherham and elsewhere that did largely involve Pakistani men. Challenged on this apparently racist targeting, Jay Beecher who runs VoteWatch said:

"...voter-fraud is carried-out predominantly by members of the Pakistani community..."

Given that Lutfer Rahman in Tower Hamlets is of Bangladeshi heritage and noting the constant references to street grooming, we can only guess that VoteWatch want us to join the dots and come up with the word 'Muslim'. By inference VoteWatch want us to believe that, were it not for Muslim voters, there'd be no problems with elections. Here's Beecher again:

It's a clash of cultures. Democracy is seen in different forms, with varying attitudes towards it in certain countries. Voter fraud is rife in Pakistan for instance, along with cultural voting, bribery etc. Those methods are now employed over here in the UK

I have some news for Jay Beecher - our laws on bribary, cultural voting, intimidation, impersonation and false registration date back to the nineteenth century when there were at most a couple of thousand Muslims in the UK and none of them from Pakistan because it didn't exist. This handy list of election petitions - filled with bribery, personation, intimidation and general skulduggery - gives a flavour.

This isn't to say that we have no problems with corrupt and illegal practices in our elections - false registration, dodgy nominations, postal voting abuse and personation - or indeed that some of these may be more prevalent in Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. Rather it's to notice that in the world of VoteWatch all the baddies are brown (or privileged white people too scared of the brown people to act).

Last year (2018) the Electoral Commission reported:

Of the 266 cases that were investigated, 191 needed no further action. A further 55 were resolved locally with informal advice given either by the police or the Returning Officer. 17 cases are still under investigation or are awaiting advice from the Crown Prosecution Service. We will continue to monitor these.

There has, to date, been just one conviction - for forging signatures on a nomination form - relating to elections in 2018. Even if the Electoral Commission could up its game this does not suggest that there are widespread problems with the administration of elections or with corrupt and illegal practices. Furthermore, half of the 2018 allegations related either to "allegations about someone making false statements about the personal character or conduct of a candidate" or for not including an imprint on a leaflet. And there's no obvious difference in investigations between years with metropolitan council elections (covering more than half of the Muslim population) and those without.

I've gone on at length here because VoteWatch and other organisations that focus on Muslims as peculiarly criminal or strangely 'culturally distinct' represent a real threat to politics on the right. You only need look at what became of UKIP when it turned itself from a centre-right eurosceptic party into an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim campaign group. With close associations between the Brexit Party and VoteWatch, it seems to me that there's a real risk that its noble cause of securing democracy gets compromised by these links to a campaign saying "Pakistanis are stealing elections - look at Peterborough" despite there not actually being much evidence that this is the case.

VoteWatch link voting fraud with street grooming and use reports of criminal activity by Asian men to reinforce a message that in Beecher's words - it's a clash of cultures. What lies behind this is the worrying - and too widespread - view that, in some way Islam is incompatible with British life and culture. It is this lie that marginalised UKIP and it will do the same for the Brexit Party if it allows Jay Beecher and people like him to set the agenda. What's also important is that my party - the Conservatives - set clear water between the racially-tinged campaigns of groups like VoteWatch and our response to legitimate desires to ensure voting is safe and fair.

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Folk memory and voting behaviour - why protest votes aren't all you might think

My Dad lived for the last part of his life on the Isle of Sheppey, so I always take a look at elections results there. Here's the result for the ward he lived in from last week:

There were three contested seats in Sheppey Central ward.

• Elliott Matthew Jayes, Swale Independents, 1019 votes
• Peter John MacDonald, Conservative, 488 votes
• Pete Neal, Conservative, 461 votes
• Trudi Louise Nicholls, Conservative, 325 votes
• Chris Shipley, Green Party, 383 votes
• Paul David Steele, Labour, 339 votes
• Mad Mike Young, The Official Monster Raving Loony Party, 330 votes

Elliot Matthew Jayes, Swale Independents, Peter John MacDonald, Conservative, and Pete Neal, Conservative were elected to Sheppey Central.

One suspects that, had the Swale Independents stood a full slate of candidates they'd have won all three seats (and a surprisingly good performance from Official MRLP - Sheppey is a hotbed of political luncacy). On the face of it, given the seat was held by the Conservatives, this was a shock result - matched by ten other independent gains across Swale. But maybe not - here's the 2007 result:

And in 2008, Independents won a further seven seats on Swale District Council. In this part of the world, there's a tradition of the alternative to a conservative being a local independent - my Dad was wont to say that, just maybe, we should have more independent councillors.

We saw last Thursday the same effect across North Yorkshire where the most popular chosen vehicle to kick Conservatives with was a vote for Independents. Elsewhere in the country the popular choice was voting Liberal Democrat but, again, the local folk memory determined where this would happen - almost always where the Lib Dems have, at some point, controlled or been in leadership on the local council. Here are some of that party's big wins this year:

Winchester (Lib Dem control 1995-2004 & 2010-2011)
North Norfolk (Lib Dem control 2003-2011)
Bath & NE Somerset (Lib Dem minority leadership 1995-2011)
Hinckley & Bosworth (Lib Dem control 2007-2015)
North Devon (Lib Dem control 1991-2007)
Chelmsford (Lib Dem control 1988-1991, 1995-1999)
Vale of White Horse (Lib Dem control 1995-2011)
Mole Valley (Lib Dem control 1994-1995)

Nearly everywhere we look the local folk memory would have predicted whether Independents or Liberal Democrats would be the choice of disgruntled voters. Elsewhere the results seem a lot more stable (they probably aren't) with it being harder to gauge who gets the protest - in remain voting areas without a folk memory of Lib Dem or Independent voting the protest is as likely to go to the Greens whereas in more leave inclined areas it's UKIP or similar (in places like Bradford South there's a less savoury folk memory in voting - the BNP).

So the great Liberal Democrat performance in many regards reflects a recovery from what might be called the 'Clegg Collapse' of 2011 when the party lost 690 seats. There are some results from last Thursday - Cotswold, for example - where the Lib Dems are building new strength (in very strong remain voting areas as a rule) but mostly we've seen the public's desire to punish the Conservatives without voting Labour reflected in wins dependent on the folk memory of past strength. In a weird old way, it's a reminder that we're all pretty conservative in our voting behaviour!

....

My Dad died last year. It seems some remainers are gleeful about this...

Your politics is very troubled if it takes you to a place where you wish your opponents - "the enemy" - dead. Yet this is precisely where we've got to with the Remain side of Brexit:

Enough old leavers will have died and enough young remainers will have come on to the electoral register to turn the dial on what the country thinks about Brexit.

This doesn't come from some little blog but from the UK's leading progressive news platform, The Guardian written by one of its star - and very well paid - columnists, Polly Toynbee. This position - we'll get what we want once all those unpleasant old people in provincial towns have pegged it - it a deeply unpleasant one. It sits alongside the idea - most recently from singer, Jamelia, that old people should have the franchise removed because, y'know, they'll be dead before the effects of their votes are truly felt.

Elsewhere:



Now the person who did this unthinkingly unpleasant site has taken it down claiming that he didn't mean to be nasty to people who are dying (they aren't, of course, all nasty old brexity people) or to the families of people who lost close relatives since the referendum. As far as I know, my Dad voted to leave and he died last year making him one of Polly and her pals gleeful statistics. I miss his wit and wisdom, things gained from a long life including 35 years as a local councillor - the idea that his views and opinions shouldn't have counted because he was at the end of his life is a truly unpleasant and undemocratic idea.

The people putting forward the idea that people dying is something to be celebrated because it suits their political positions demographics consider themselves to be intelligent, moderate, caring people. What these views show is that, in some respects, they are far more dangerous and damaging for our liberty and democracy than the UK's handful of right wing thugs - we sort of expect violent language from the latter but when establishment figures with columns in national newspapers start on the same line, unchallenged by editors or the wider media, alarm bells should ring. Old people are not an inconvenience but part of our society - wishing them dead because you think they might vote the wrong way is repulsive.

....

Was the Brexit vote a call for more accountable, less distant - even local - government?

Sociologist Geert Hofstede, as part of his work looking at the different dimensions of culture, created the idea of 'power distance' - “the extent to which the less powerful members of organisations accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.” Because people feel - physically or psychologically - a long way from where the decisions about their lives are made they become less engaged and involved. This may well explain why, in most developed world democracies, voter turnout rises as social class rises - and this difference has been growing:

In the 1987 general election, for example, the turnout rate for the poorest income group was 4% lower than for the wealthiest. By 2010 the gap had grown to a staggering 23 points.

While 'I can't be bothered' or 'I don't understand politics' might be the sort of explanation we get when we canvass non-voters from lower social classes, it is likely that people in these classes no longer feel that their voting makes much difference to what the government does once it's ensconced in nice warm offices down in London. More importantly, other than that periodic opportunity to vote, people feel unable to influence government in its process of decision-making on things that affect them.

If we look at the levels of government, from the parish council up to the EU and other international bodies, it seems more likely that people (and in particular people from lower social classes) are able to influence the decisions of their parish council far more than they are the decisions of the European Union's Commission and Parliament. Those people can and do organise to go to the parish council, a body filled with people much more like them than higher tier levels of government, and argue for a particular course of action. And, more importantly, see that course of action enacted.

The problem in England is that fewer and fewer decisions affecting people (and especially working class people) are made in places close enough to those people for their voice to be worth expressing. So people don't bother. Worse still, since the national decision is necessarily broad brush, the minutiae of how that decision is implemented in a given place are discussed by bureaucrats without reference to the voters these minutiae impact.

Since democracy is as much about how accountable decision-makers feel as it is about how many people vote, the systems we have at national and supra-national levels act to exclude people. Decisions are made about what's taught in schools, about how money for health care is distributed, about where houses should be built - a myriad of things that affect us directly - without the public having the means to contribute or, more importantly, for the decision-makers to feel in any way accountable to that public.

The answer is, of course, making politics more local, not just in homage to Tip O'Neill's maxim that 'all politics is local', but because local decision-making is more accessible and therefore more accountable. This probably makes it better decision-making and it certainly means the politicians can't hide behind layers of Kafka-esque bureaucracy when confronted with their dafter decisions. As Tim Worstall put it (in explaining one reason why Denmark works so well as a culture):

Instead they have what I call the Bjorn's Beer Effect. You're in a society of 10,000 people. You know the guy who raises the local tax money and allocates that local tax money. You also know where he has a beer on a Friday night. More importantly Bjorn knows that everyone knows he collects and spends the money: and also where he has a beer on a Friday. That money is going to be rather better spent than if it travels off possibly 3,000 miles into some faceless bureaucracy.

So, if you're looking for ways to improve English government perhaps, instead of moving decisions ever further up the tiers of government, we should do the opposite and move decisions down to the most local level possible. The EU called this 'subsidiarity', spoke at great length about it, then proceeded to ignore it in favour of ever more 'harmonisation' (bureaucrat speak for what the Daily Mail calls the "postcode lottery"). If you're looking for reasons why those disengaged lower social class voters turned out to vote in the Brexit referendum, the fact they felt - perhaps for the first time - that they were actually involved in making an important decision might be a big reason. And, although the stated reasons for voting to leave are many and varied, the fact that the EU is distant, complicated and (in the terms we've discussed) essentially unaccountable sits at the heart of people's choice. "Taking back control" isn't about sovereignty or the UK parliament, it should be a call for us to get decisions about peoples' lives right back down to where those people have a fighting chance of influencing what's decided.


….

The Conservative Party is the party of suburbia - we should remember this and build more suburbs

I remember canvassing with my Dad in true-blue Beckenham. At one house the woman who opened the door explained here reasoning in a strong Cockney accent - "we've always voted Labour before but we was in a Labour area. Now we're in a Tory area we'll be voting Tory." Who am I to argue with such a profound argument especially since further study - not least what us direct marketers call the 'Bestseller Effect' - tells me that this sort of decision (not necessarily expressed as bluntly) really is influenced by social geography. Here's Joel Kotkin & Wendell Cox on voting in suburban 'red state; USA:

Even if the tide is turning, it’s happening slowly, and the GOP has political and cultural advantages in both Texas and Florida that will delay any turning of the tide even if they don’t finally stop it. Latinos in Texas, for instance, are considerably more GOP-leaning than their counterparts elsewhere. And surely some of the blue-state refugees won’t be inclined to support the same policies that led them to leave these states in the first place. The suburban areas that attract newcomers still tilt decisively GOP, and in 2016, turned out mostly for Trump.

The assumption (and we've seen similar arguments in the UK about millennial suburban migration) is that the left-inclined young urban vote, when it moves to suburbia to do that old-fashioned raise-a-family thing, will carry on voting left despite this likely being against their economic and social interests. Moreover, the millennials cycling out from inner-urban places are, I suspect, more likely to be conservative in outlook if not in current voting choice.

Of course, other demographic factors (not least ethnicity) are significant too - like US Republicans, the Conservatives have less support among non-white voters and, in particular, among two established and economically bettering groups - Pakistani and Bangladeshi voters. This may change but right now these groups remain overwhelmingly Labour voting despite the Conservatives having both the first Pakistani-heritage Home Secretary and the first female Muslim minister.

It's still the case, however, that the left - influenced by its inner-urban core support - is inherently anti-suburb and anti-family providing conservatives with a core message to new arrivals in suburbia. Here's Kotkin & Cox again:

Contempt for suburbia, so common among Democratic-leaning academics, planners, and media, could make appealing to these voters more difficult. Many party leaders support forced densification, anti-car strategies, and the annexation of suburbs—ideas that lack broad appeal in a country where most people live in single family homes and rely on cars and roads to conduct their lives.

If UK conservatives want to build a future base, it will be in suburbia (just like it has always been - we are the party of the suburbs). This means we've got to be brave enough to recognise that building new suburbs and more family-housing should take priority over protecting agricultural monoculture, especially in the Home Counties.

....

ID checks are officious, mostly unnecessary, mistrustful and damage community.

When I was a young teenager, my Mum would give me the money to go and buy her some cigarettes - twenty Sovereign. It made sense because the newsagent and tobacconist was a mile away in Elmers End and I was going there on my bike to do a paper round. I'm sure I'm not the only person from my generation who bought cigarettes for their Mum or Dad.

These days, of course, this wouldn't happen. We live in an age of mistrust brought about by the decline of community, by the shopkeeper not knowing who is who in the little local community and, worse, frightened that if he doesn't ID every second customer some official is going to step in, throwing the book. Until a year ago I'd never been asked for any ID except for such things as getting a driving licence or passport (or overseas where they're a lot keener on ID stuff) - certainly not for any purchase, never in a shop or a pub or a bank.

The first demand for ID was in a London hotel. We'd booked, pre-paid and were staying one night - the receptionist requested a photo ID. I didn't have any on me and, after a brief (and smiling) exchange no ID was proffered and none required. It was, however, an indication of our society's mistrust - I could be someone other than the person who'd rung up, booked a hotel, paid for a room on a specified night. Unlikely but you never know...

We've become ID mad - supermarket checkout operators wear little badges telling me that if I look under 25 they'll ask for some proof of age if I try to buy a bewildering range of goods - fags, booze, fireworks, glue, knives, scissors, marches, cigarette lighters, drain cleaner and (so I've been told) large bottles of sugar rich fizzy pop. Operators demand ID to go in a bar, to attend a concert, to conduct a bank transaction - a million-and-one ordinary everyday actions that back when we trusted people were done without this officious rigmarole.

This ever expanding requirement to prove who you are so as to go about an ordinary life isn't a good thing. We're not safer, healthier or happier as a result of having to show some form of ID to a checkout operator or a doorman. Indeed, I've a feeling that this is a transfer of trust from the wisdom and judgement of people to a dumb pice of paper or plastic with a bad photo on it. And that in doing this we undermine community, the idea that nearly everyone, nearly all of the time behaves sensibly and doesn't require some self-appointed agent of the state (usually operating out of fear that not checking people's identity will bring down the wrath of that state) to second guess this truth.

As a conservative, the idea of community and the trust that comes from within that community is central to what we feel about the world. The moment we step away from this and say "don't trust anyone buying a bottle of wine or a packet of twenty fags, they might be lying" we lose a little more of that community. Places should be able to police themselves - they did so from time immemorial until we decided that managing drinking, smoking and such wasn't something we could entrust to a small community but needed national - even international - agencies to insist that the rules are enforced (for the children, naturally).

Today that ultimate measure of a community - going down to the local church hall to cast a vote in an election - is the latest ordinary action that is to be subject to ID checks. We're told this is to combat rising electoral fraud (despite the Electoral Commission repeatedly saying voter fraud is rare) - as they concluded "...there is no evidence to suggest that there have been widespread, systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with recent elections through electoral fraud." And remember that the only fraud ID checks might prevent is personation at the polling station, it doesn't prevent false registration, doesn't stop postal voting abuse, and doesn't halt voter intimidation (all of which are more serious problems).

To get this in context, there were over 50 million ballots issued in 2015 and just 34 cases of personation. There were only 481 allegtions of electoral fraud, two-thirds of which were deemed not to be offences. And we want to get Mrs Jones to produce a photo ID when she goes to the village hall in Lower Puddlebury because 0.0009% of ballots led to an allegation (0.0003% an investigation and less than 0.0001% a conviction) of electoral fraud. Worse, because Mrs Jones doesn't drive and hasn't got a passport, she'll have to go and get a special ID card to vote - all to prevent an almost imaginary problem.

We do too many ID checks. They are officious and mostly unnecessary. As conservatives we should remind those who govern us that trust is central to a good society. And that this constant checking up on people is mistrustful, undermines community and is bad for society.

....

Trust the people (but only the smart, well-educated, urbane ones)

Some of you will have had the dubious pleasure of seeing broadcaster Terry Christian on the BBC's Question Time programme. Mr Christian is an ardent enthusiast for the UK remaining a member of the European Union and, in broad summary, considers everyone who doesn't agree with him to be imbeciles. One of our intrepid broadcaster's shticks is to chatter about how the Brexit vote was cooked up by (anonymous) very rich people who then conned the working class. In simple terms, Mr Christian believes that the working class are too stupid to be allowed out in public with something as explosive as a vote.

This belief that ordinary people do not have agency - can't be trusted to make decisions about their lives - is widespread. Here's a chunk from a post at Tom Paine's blog talking about an academic psychologist from UCL's Centre for Behaviour Change:

He doesn’t mean to be a monster and I don’t want to see him as one, but in his presence my blood ran cold. I was afraid of him. I was even more afraid of the way the earnest folk in the room laughed as he joked about the unintended consequences of various programmes to clean up the act of the idiotic, self-destructive great unwashed, I realised that I might be the only one there who included himself in the category of “the people” to be shaped as opposed to the smug elite doing the shaping.

What we have here is an entire research centre - indeed something close to a whole academic discipline - dedicated to the idea that people should be stopped from making (what the academics consider to be) bad choices. These are, as Tom Paine observed, nice people - smart, well-educated, urbane, the very sorts you'd want your son or daughter to marry. The problem is that they believe they know better than you do and, they argue, have the research to prove this. They also believe that, because they know better than you do, you should be prevented from making a choice that the smart, well-educated and urbane don't approve.

It is odd that, at a time when we celebrate the widening of the franchise in 1918, a whole bunch of people are putting serious effort into removing choice, freedom and agency from people. The Brexit vote, for many of the smart, well-educated and urbane, has been the tipping point as they rush headlong away from the idea of democracy (while bizarrely trying to pretend that a polity where voting can't change the people in charge is a democracy) or at least from the thought that ruddy-faced older folk - gammon is the term our smart folk use - from slightly tatty northern towns should have a say in what happens.

The result is illustrated by the BBC - home to lots of those smart, well-educated and urbane folk - 'debating' the proposal from one of their number that old people shouldn't be allowed to vote:




How dare people say they won't vote for politicians who ignore their interests!

There are two things going on here but both of them reflect a new version of Plato's philosopher kings - a superior cadre of leaders who are intelligent enough to direct society. In the case of behaviour - poor lifestyle choices, for example - these overlords want, in the manner of Brave New World, to make you have a (long) life of unstressed, bovine contentment and this requires them to direct the choices of the idiotic, self-destructive great unwashed.

With democracy - whether you're Terry Christian saying working class folk were conned or Jeremy Paxman suggesting old folk hold politicians to ransom - the problem is that people have started making electoral choices that our Philosopher Kings don't agree with. The only way out of this is to either have less democracy or else to limit the way in which democracy operates most obviously by limiting the franchise. Following the referendum there was a great deal of chatter (from those who didn't like the result mainly) about how this shows how referendums are a really awful idea and we should stop having them. We elect politicians (nearly all smart, well-educated and urbane Philosopher Kings) and they should make all the important decisions so as not to cause upset or headaches among the masses.

Part of the problem is that the smart, well-educated and urbane simply don't ever get near to the lives of most people - they live in a snobby world where no-one goes to McDonalds (junk food is bad and unhealthy) except, it seems, by accident:

I was at a workshop on Friday, and whilst driving back home, I stopped off at one of their restaurants in a service station. I'll put this comment upfront, especially given that I work in Public Health; I am not advocating fast food consumption. The options available in service stations are rather poor, especially when looking for hot food (I have found a way around this which I'll mention at the end!). What caught my attention though was the way in which McDonald's understand how to influence behaviour, strategies that we could look at when working in Public Health...But they also understand - in very fine detail - how their systems work, how each component part operates, and how these parts can be refined to maximise efficiency.

For the smart, well-educated and urbane, McDonalds is the enemy - despite (or maybe because) the ubiquitous hamburger chain serves about 3.5 million customers every day in the UK. McDonalds and its franchisees know far more about the ordinary folk of Britain than most academics - this is because it really matters to them as a business, getting the detail right means happy customers. The problem is that our visiting academic doesn't see a great business delivering good food to happy customers. Like Terry Christian with Brexit voters, our academic sees wrongness, exploitation, manipulation - a con. How dare ordinary people make such bad choices and, worse, be happy doing so.

What the Brexit vote uncovered and Corbyn's surge confirmed is that the smart, well-educated and urbane people aren't really all that keen on democracy. They're very keen on votes but these orchestrated events should be like electing the supreme soviet - everyone gets a vote, we're really excited about voting, there are campaigns, speeches, debates but in the end nothing much changes. Democracy should entail the possibility of - people should be able to hope for - a change in the rulers but this doesn't suit the courtiers.

At the core of this is this belief that people (other people who aren't part of your smart, well-educated and urbane circle) don't know what's good for them. These folk are the living embodiment of Douglas Jay's unintentionally honest comment back in 1937:

"...in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves".

....

Why Remain lost (more evidence of bad marketing)

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Politico has done a long interview - really a cobbling together of three interviews - with Craig Oliver who, we're told, ran the 'Stronger In' campaign having previously between the PM's communications guru. Oliver's background is as a TV producer - reports tell us a very good TV producer - which, unless my education is wrong, isn't a professional marketing role. And, it's true that while Oliver did some good (well sort of) stuff getting the then PM on the telly this is a long way removed from running a comprehensive marketing campaign - which is what Remain needed.

How completely separated Oliver is from any understanding of marketing is shown in this paragraph:

That week, one of Oliver’s trump cards had flopped. A senior MP, Sarah Wollaston, had defected from the Leave camp because of its dubious claim that leaving the EU would save £350 million a week that could be spent on the NHS. He had given the story to the Times, thinking it would lead their front page, but instead they buried it and splashed on a wealthy Tory donor endorsing Brexit (even though the Times ultimately endorsed Remain).

So someone who nobody outside Oliver's bubble knew existed 'defecting' was a 'trump card'? As if Mrs Smith on Branksholme estate in Hull knew or cared. If Oliver had been running a decent campaign, he'd have known what the problem was, known why Remain weren't getting traction with undecided voters (let alone shifting wobbly Leave voters). The Politico piece sets out how wrong:

Remainers came across as “too mean,” an adviser to the Leave campaign told me later. The clips just played to Leave’s argument that Remain was trying to keep voters scared.

The core of Oliver's campaign - a media war - wasn't working and all people like Oliver and Will Straw (another marketing know-nothing who ran Stronger In) could do was what they knew: more media, more attacks, more clips on the evening news.

It's clear from the interview that Oliver isn't about to admit to error and is writing a book - presumably 80,000 words of self-justification over the disaster of the campaign to remain in the EU.

When people look at the Leave campaign they focus on the divisions (Vote Leave, Leave.EU, Grassroots Out) and the clunky media campaign filled with faux pas and dominated by defensiveness over a factual error they'd committed to at the start of the campaign - the £350m claim. But Leave got something else right - it got its message through to two important targets: non- or occasional voters, and voters who hadn't decided.

What we see from Oliver is complacency and a failure to realise that referendum campaigns are not like general elections. The latter are driven as much by personality - could you see Ed Miliband waving in front of Downing Street - as by policy. Referendums aren't, they're driven by policy and what people see as policy - by trying to turn the campaign into an attack on Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, Craig Oliver and his team completely misread how people respond when asked a policy question.

In the end there were lots of reasons for Remain throwing away its advantage but it seems to me that the biggest reason was that the campaign not only lacked a marketing strategy worth the name but was led by people who wouldn't recognise marketing if it danced before them in a tutu.

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Hey pleb, are you voting the right way?

There has been a whole pile of stuff written about how the poor deluded and misinformed - even ignorant - voters make the wrong choices. Much of this relates to the rather splendid decision of the British electorate to ignore the views of the great and good in voting to leave the European Union.

I was quite taken by Brendan O'Neill talking about the NME in a Spectator blog:

The rebels have become the squares, the youths have become the authoritarians, and the spirit of rock’n’roll no longer lives in the middle-class music scene or leftish activist circles, but in the hearts and minds of the little people.

The very location of this blog - given its subject - shows a world upside down. A former Marxist writing in the establishment's political journal about how the New Musical Express, the edgiest of music magazines from my youth, has sold out on the spirit of punk. But it's worse than this - we're in a world where the errors of voters need correcting, where the choices of plebs need nudging, directing, managing in order that they concur with the opinions of a self-appointed clique of educated, metropolitan sophisticates.

Here's O'Neill again:

What we have here is ordinary people, including vast swathes of the working class, saying ‘No’ to the status quo, sticking two fingers up at an aloof elite, channelling Rotten and Vicious to say screw you (or something rather tastier) to that illiberal, risk-averse layer of bureaucracy in Brussels.

Today I went to a meeting of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority where we received and discussed a report on the implications of Brexit. The report wasn't very good (it described 'long term' in its response to Brexit plan as January 2017-January 2018 - seriously) but it wasn't this that made my eyes widen. Rather it was the idea that, had we only communicated better - EU flags on pens were mentioned - then it would have all been different. Talk was of how we could, in the future, 'communicate' the poor, ignorant voters into voting the right way.

Bear in mind that these were, in all but one case, senior Labour councillors talking - the tribunes of the people spoke and told us that the people, bless 'em, didn't know what they were doing. The poor dears simply weren't aware of all the wonders that the EU had brought them (as they struggled to pay for the mortgage, find a reliable job, get the children off to a decent start, build up a nest egg for retirement).

It seems that everywhere people like this think democracy is rubbish. At least when people make decisions you don't like. I remember one of those same Labour leaders sternly suggesting that a balanced representation on votes cast meant 'they'd have representation, you know" - she meant UKIP but, like Voldemort, couldn't quite name the evil thing.

And this snobbish, 'voters should be shown how to vote properly' view isn't limited to the UK. Here's Tyler Cowan from Marginal Revolution:

It might have been a better situation when the elites, acting with some joint collective force, directed more of their energies to shaming the less elite voters than to shaming each other.

You've got this haven't you, darlings? This undoubtedly elite commenter writing on a blog with tens of thousands of readers thinks we should try to make ordinary working class voters ashamed of not voting the same way as their betters. It's little better than the squire visiting his workers to make sure they understood why they should vote for his son as the MP.

Instead of bribing, shaming or nudging perhaps the answer lies in actually sitting down and listening to these voters. Finding out what bothers them, understanding why they think government is run for the elites and that it is too far away, too complicated and too secretive for them to stand a chance of liking what is does - or, more importantly, what it represents.

If you start with the premise that the plebs have voted the wrong way, then you've already lost the argument. It you think attacking them, embarrassing them or shaming them is the way forward, you've lost that argument. And if you think the answer is for the great and good to decide everything then you're no democrat but a nannying authoritarian.

Two-thirds of Wakefield's voters chose to leave the EU. They didn't do this because they're 'left behind', 'excluded', 'ignorant', 'racist' or any of those other interpretations of "plebs, you voted the wrong way". They voted to leave because the EU was - and still is - an elite project run by and for the elite. A means - somewhat like too much international aid - of channelling cash from the productive in successful places to an unproductive elite in less successful places. A system where posh students get subsidised gap years paid for with the taxes of low paid workers and where grand European-funded offices filled with patronising middle-class development workers fail to make any difference to the communities they're supposed to be helping.

No-one voted the wrong way and the great and good need to get this into their thick skulls. People had a choice - a contested choice - and opted, in sufficient numbers to win, for the one that said Leave. To understand this you don't need to insult those voters or pretend that poor communication was the problem. What you need to do is realise that the EU is the biggest of all the elite projects - patronising, self-serving, suited, shiny-officed, out of touch, nannying, hectoring, bossy.

The problem is that all those people who benefited from the EU - and their friends, fellow travellers and useful idiots - think the answer to the problem is more bossiness, more nudging, more lectures and a mission to make anyone voting ashamed of voting their conscience, their feelings and their thoughts. It seems the elite still think the plebs are voting the wrong way and that this should be stopped.

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It shouldn't need saying but....

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Here are some words from my colleague, Zaf Ali in a message going out to people in his Keighley Central ward about the forthcoming referendum:

Having said that (Zaf is supporting Leave), I want to make it absolutely clear that I do not force, intimidate, harass and pressurise, bully, advocate and pester any one as to how they cast their vote. It's entirely up to each individual to look at both sides' arguments and debate through media, TV and newspaper - then decide yourself.

Can I echo those words. Too often we've seen unacceptable pressure - verging on intimidation - on voters to support one or other candidate in an election. I don't need to repeat the allegations made every year here in Bradford for people to understand that there's a better way of politics. It's fine to vote for someone because he's your friend, your brother. But it's not OK to put undue pressures on women or the young - indeed on anyone - to vote for that friend or that friend's side in an election.

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The switch to individual registration is a success

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Not that you'd think this listening to Gloria De Piero, Labour's "shadow minister for making sure the register is loaded with ghost voters" (or whatever her title is):

The shadow minister for electoral registration, Gloria De Piero, said the figures show 1.8% of voters have left the register since the move to IER. Ms De Piero said the drop-off had been particularly high in areas with a large proportion of students.

A while ago the whole exercise was opposed by Labour with cries of gerrymandering and accusations of some kind of evil Tory fix. It was, of course, nothing of the sort as these latest scandalous figures tell us. If the register has declined by less than 2% this is an indication that the result of the new system is a cleaner, more accurate and up-to-date system - a triumph really.

Moreover, most of the loss is accounted for by students not being registered in the place where they are students. This is (as a moment's thought might suggest) not necessarily an indication that they aren't registered but rather that they are registered at their home address - where mum and dad live:

"Among those students who were on the electoral roll turnout was relatively high. Yet it appears that many of them opted to vote at home rather than at their place of study..."

So the real figure - one we can't know without an expensive merge-purge of the whole UK register - for decline is likely to be significantly lower than 800,000. What seems to happen is that students who are registered in South Hams (to pick a place at random) then don't bother registering in Leeds North West.

From a scandal where 'millions' were going to lose the chance of voting because of the evil Tories we have reached a point where the transfer to a system of individual registration has resulted in almost no net reduction in the numbers registered. And remember that every person with an address who is receiving benefits of any sort (housing, child, JSA, in work) is automatically registered because that evil Tory government allowed, for the first time, DWP data to be shared with Councils for the purpose of registering people to vote.

What has happened is that local councils have been forced to spend time, effort and money getting the register accurate. Hundreds of thousands of ghost names - some fraudulent but mostly just the result of sloppy electoral registration - have gone but are replaced by the accurate collection of names of individuals who actually live at a given address. Students are almost the only group (single people in low paid work and rented housing but not receiving benefits being the other) that slip through the system.

The switch to individual registration has been a success.

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Britain's voting system isn't corrupt and the register doesn't exclude millions of voters.

Between UKIP frothing about postal voting and Corbyn's fanboys screeching about individual registration there's a load of nonsense talked about the UK's electoral registration system. The former are telling us that voting in any place featuring Asian Muslim voters is so corrupt as to be meaningless (or words to that effect):

The leader also claimed to see boxes where 99 per cent of the votes were for Labour's Jim McMahon – who branded Ukip supporters "rejects" last year.

He said: "It means effectively – in some of these seats where people don't speak English, but they're signed up to postal votes – effectively the electoral process is now dead."

Leaving aside how the Express calls Nigel Farage "The Leader", let's be clear about some things that went off in the recent Oldham by-election.

Firstly there was almost certainly some postal vote fraud (if by this we mean that some ballots weren't secret and a few might have been completed by someone other than the registered voter). Not very much for the simple reason that most voters and nearly all candidates aren't dumb enough to commit such a fraud.

Secondly the UKIP claim that 99% of the votes in any box were for one party is almost certainly complete nonsense. I've been watching election counts off and on for thirty odd years. I've watched literally thousands of ballot boxes opened up onto the table - including in places like Luton and Bradford where allegations about dodgy voting are legion. And I've never seen a box where all - or nearly all - the votes are for one candidate.

Thirdly and finally Oldham almost certainly saw (or didn't see) acts of personation - doing the Nigel Kennedy as we call it. But, like abuse of postal voting, these acts, however illegal, had no material bearing on the outcome. For what's it's worth, the result in Oldham was because Labour chose a good candidate with strong local presence (something UKIP didn't do) plus the reality that there is zero reasons why any Asian Muslim would vote for UKIP.

The electoral commission conducted a comprehensive review of electoral fraud - published in January 2014 - and concluded that, yes it happens but it's pretty rare even in places where there are lots of allegations of said fraud (like Bradford).

The thing with postal vote fraud is that there was just one event where it was widespread (I recall one candidate talking of another candidate - nothing like a bit of hearsay - farming hundreds of votes) and that was the bizarre decision of the then Blair government to 'trial' all-postal elections in 2004. Bringing about results like this one:



OK, I don't know if all that was down to vote farming but a striking result, no? And we know 2004 was a problem because nearly a quarter of those convicted of electoral fraud since 1994 were from that year's election. Since 2004 there's been no postal-only elections (choosing the Labour leader aside) removing the opportunity for the sort of wholesale vote farming that some say went on that year.

The electoral commission's conclusion about the significance of electoral fraud - and postal vote fraud in particular - is spot on:




Which brings us to the other issue - the one the left is so agitated about - individual registration.

It is believed that the Tories’ individual electoral registration (IER) reforms mean that 1.9 million people could fall off the electoral register in under six weeks’ time. Momentum claim that a further 8 million adults may not be on the register at all, meaning that 10 million will not be able to use their vote in next May’s elections.

Again there is some truth in this statement. Nearly two million names could fall off the electoral register under individual registration but this is mostly because those people don't exist, have moved, are registered somewhere else or simply aren't interested in being on said register. But the misinformation continues - here's Gloria de Piero MP who is leading Labour's charge on the issue:

We know what kinds of voters are more likely to be missing: they are private renters, people from BAME communities, the unemployed and lower-paid manual workers. But perhaps the greatest divide is between the older and the younger generation. Some 95% of over-65s are on the electoral register, yet the proportion of 18 to 24-year-olds is just 70%

In one respect there's nothing new here. Under the household registration system the young, ethnic minorities, private renters and the lower paid were 'under-registered' so all the new system has done is reveal the truth about the accuracy (or rather inaccuracy) of Britain's electoral registers. And much of the blame for this rests (other than with people who aren't bothered) with local authorities and especially councils in urban areas that tend to vote Labour.

Under individual registration people are automatically registered if they are receiving any form of benefit - JSA, ESA, housing benefit, tax credits, pensions or child benefit. So all those unemployed and low-paid that Gloria is worried for have been registered (assuming they're claiming the benefits to which they're entitled). Local councils have also been encouraged to use their other records - council tax and so forth - to transfer people to the new system. The result of this is that around 90% of the existing register transfers across.

And those who haven't transferred? They are people who are not claiming benefits, not the head of a household, not council tax payers and not otherwise known to the authorities (in the nicest way). The biggest such group isn't the BAME, the lower-paid, manual workers or such - it is students. Whereas before students were either registered by Mum or Dad on the form at home or else registered en bloc in student accommodation now they have to actually fill in a form to get a vote. And (surprise, surprise) they don't.

The switch to individual registration is a huge success - the register is more accurate, the (not very common but real) practice of signing up false names is ended, and people are encouraged to take responsibility for their own registration rather than rely on someone else. As a result a load of inaccuracies - 1.9m or so - have been cleared out of the system, local councils have been funded to get a more precise register, and we can have greater confidence in the register as a guide to who is living where. This isn't gerrymandering but a route to an accurate record of the electorate. The problem for Labour is that most of the system's inaccuracies are in places where Labour Councils have done a lousy job keeping an accurate register.

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In whose name? A comment on democratic will and other such stuff.

"Not in my name is the cry". Petitions are posted, letters are written, placards are badly spelled, frantic facebook rants are posted. "Not in my name".

Well, yes, absolutely. It's not in your name. Never has been in your name. Never will be in your name. That's whole point really. About this representative democracy lark, I mean. It's not done on the basis of individual approval but of collective approval. So long as fifty per cent plus one of the good folk we choose to represent us in parliament say we do it, we do it. What you and I think doesn't matter. We get to keep our powder dry until the next time we get to choose someone to represent us.

You don't think MPs are any good? Fine - that's your absolute right. But they're all we've got - the inadequate, incompetent, venal and self-serving bastion protecting us from rule by faceless bureaucrats, arrogant technocrats and anonymous securicrats. Depressing I know but that's it really which is why we should pay attention to the voting stuff and take it seriously. It's also why those people who say "we don't need any more politicians" are wrong - we need as many politicians as we can get if we want to hold the government to account - from parish councillors to peers of the realm.

Yesterday - and this is what has prompted all the 'not in my name' stuff - MPs voted to approve airstrikes against targets inside Syria. This followed a week or so of frenetic pseudo-debate and a full day of parliamentary debate culminating in that vote. And it's true that MPs, in arriving at a decision, did so with a variety of motives and reasons. Some will have supported (or opposed) airstrikes simply from loyalty to party - my party leader says one thing or the other, therefore I back that position. And this isn't a bad thing - we decry loyalty and trust too readily resulting in a world where such behaviour is assumed to be self-serving, shallow and essentially corrupt. But, for a complicated issue such as whether to take military action, it isn't copping out to take the view that, all things being equal, you'll go along with the foreign minister and defence minister appointed by your Party's government.

Others - and we saw a bit of this yesterday - will have made their decision on the basis of a moral stance ('I'm a pacifist' or 'ISIS is evil and must be stopped') without consideration of tactics. Again we see this described as sophistry or as disingenuous - as if politicians can never support something on grounds of simple conscience. Worse still, people (as they shout 'not in my name' again and again) make a moral judgement about the reasons for people making the choice - if that choice supports our view its noble and brave, if not its because of bullying, political calculation or stupidity (sometimes all three).

I'm not persuaded by the argument for bombing. Not because of any objection to war or crocodile tears over the civilian deaths that will happen whether or not we bomb. No, my concern is that there seems to be no idea as to what the end of all this looks like. I didn't listen to every word yesterday but I didn't hear an argument setting out a strategy aimed at creating a place to which several million refugees can return and live a fulfilling life in peace and happiness. And I didn't see how bombing Raqqa stops terrorists already in the UK, USA or France from machine-gunning or bombing innocents just to wave their murderous islamo-fascist ideology in our liberal democratic faces.

But my argument lost. Maybe for honourable reasons, perhaps because there's internal turmoil in the Labour Party, perhaps because too many MPs, ministers and media folk didn't understand the issues. But mostly because there was a feeling - one echoed outside the febrile world of Westminster - that, following Paris, something had to be done. And targeted bombing is something.

That bombing isn't being done in your name. It's being done by the UK government on the authorisation of parliament. If you didn't like how your MP voted on this then come the next election you get the chance to vote for someone else - it's how our imperfect system works. If you can stomach party politics, you can join one of the parties and make your case from inside. But shouting 'not in my name' is fatuous and serves no purpose except to make you feel a little bit better about the fact that parliament decided to do something you don't like.

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Why you should vote (and why libertarian non-voters are wrong)

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Before the last general election I wrote a piece about why you should vote and concluded:

So why vote? The answer is simple and it’s the answer your granny used to give. You vote because it’s the right thing to do and because, however insignificant it might be, voting is often the only chance you’ve got of getting something changed. People really did chuck themselves under horses, people really did get killed, people really did strike, march and protest so as to get that right to pick up a stubby pencil and mark a cross in a box once in a while. Don’t get me wrong, if you choose not to bother it doesn’t make you a bad person – you’re not really letting down your suffragette great grandma or the great uncle killed on D-day.

So go and vote it’s your chance to do something. And do it loudly, proudly and knowing that it’s the most significantly insignificant act you can undertake.

I realise that this is probably insufficient as a proper philosophical analysis of voting. But I find the libertarian argument for not voting to be founded on a profound misunderstanding of voting's purpose. Here's Sam Bowman from the Adam Smith Institute (quoted by Chris Snowdon from the Institute of Economic Affairs):

‘If your aim is to affect policy, voting is irrational. If you want to act ethically, voting is irrelevant. Mathematically, the chances of a single vote actually determining the outcome of an election in a meaningful way (that will affect policy outcomes) is infinitesimally small.’

And I guess that, if the purpose of voting was to influence policy, Sam might have a point. But, as we all should know, voting's purpose is the election of a person not a policy. In a representative democracy we use voting to choose someone to go off to parliament because all sixty odd million of us can't fit into the building. Technology will probably make this obsolete (for a description of the problems this might entail go and read Norman Spinrad's 'The World Between') but right now that's not an option. Now if Sam's not bothered who represents him then there's no point in voting - he can make the rational decision not to fuss himself with the minor inconvenience of toddling along to the polling station. But if Sam is bothered then casting his insignificant vote is the only way in which he can influence that choice.

To return to influencing policy, there is a modicum of smugness about the director of an influential think tank talking about how voting doesn't affect policy. After all that director has the means and the capacity to influence policy by virtue of being in charge of a think tank. And the same would go for the chief executive of some large organisation able to invest its PR pounds in lobbying. But spare a thought for Mr Crowther in Cullingworth who doesn't have a think tank and doesn't have the funds to lobby government officials about policy. Voting is one of the very few ways in which that man can have a say on things that matter to him.

Finally there's Eamonn Butler's argument (also cited by Chris Snowdon) that writing a message to the candidates on a ballot paper is better than actually using said ballot for its intended purpose. This is an observation made my someone who has clearly never been anywhere near the counting of votes at an election. As a candidate my access to that ballot would be for a fleeting second while we review spoilt ballots - the returning officer will point out that the writing means the person could be identified and therefore the ballot is invalid before moving on to the ballor with a neat drawing of a penis carefully inscribed in the Tory candidate's box (which is incidently a valid vote for that candidate). Eamonn's message will not be read - he would have wasted his time.

Voting is an insignificant act but not one without purpose or point and collectively those insignificant acts can be significant (Sam and his friends not turning up may result in a government that bans right wing think tanks). There may be a case for alternatives - lotteries, policy panels, military dictatorship and so forth - but, in practical terms, we have to engage with the system we have in place. Because that's an election the result will be determined by those who turn up and vote not by those who don't.

So go and vote folks!

For those interested in creative approaches to marking the ballot here is the current Electoral Commission Guidance on doubtful ballots (pdf|)

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In Praise of Idiots Redux

Michael White, that most Guardianista of Guardianistas, has had a pop at the electorate:

But millions more, not just the poor and demoralised, will forget, shrug or even boast “I never vote” before turning back to something that seems more important: football, golf, Spotify, Britain’s Got Talent. They don’t bother to engage, let alone to make the connections between what happens to them and the difficult policy choices that bring it about, good or bad.

This, in the intense minority sport of being a Guardian reader is a terrible sin. Only topped by thinking The Sun is a rather better written newspaper and certainly a better read. The electorate shouldn't be going about their lives as normal (or as normal as us politicians allow them to live). No those electors should be "engaged".

I beg to differ. Indeed back in 2009 I wrote this piece in praise of idiots (the word deriving from those ancient Athenians who chose not to engage in politics):

Now the good left-wing liberals at the Guardian think this grumpiness, this disengagement, this disinterest is a problem. And that’s where I disagree – the core consideration is the extent to which we are able to live as Greek idiots. Quietly, privately, without bothering our neighbours with our problems – and when such people want change they will get up from their armchairs, walk away from the telly and vote. The idea that not being bothered with voting most of the time makes them bad people is a misplaced idea – they are the good folk.

Above all we should listen quietly to what this “apathy” calls for – it is less bothersome, less interfering, less hectoring and more effective government. Such people want government to be conducted at their level not to be the province of pompous politicians with overblown and lying rhetoric. And they want the language of common sense, freedom, liberty and choice to push away the elitist exclusivity of modern bureaucratic government.

Above all today’s idiots want to be left alone to live their lives as they choose. For me that’s the essence of politics – I praise these idiots and applaud their apathy. 

And yes, I do think people should vote. Yes I think people should take the trouble to understand what's being offered to them by politicians. But I also think this obsession with 'engagement' and 'participation' is misplaced - if people want to be engaged they will get out from those armchairs. A year or so before I wrote that piece, over 400 residents of Denholme had crammed themselves into the Blue Room of the Mechanics Institute. They did this because something was happening that mattered to them - Bradford Council working with developers was planning to dump the city's rubbish in a hole just outside the village. They didn't want this to happen (and it didn't).

The wealthier we get - collectively and individually - the less important politics becomes and the more important it is that politicians are humble enough to recognise this fact. When we consider something to be fundamental or existential then we are engaged - look at the turnouts in the Scottish referendum last year. But even though this current election is unusual and hard to call (as the pundits put it), the result will be a government. And that government will change some things and tinker with other things but for most people the worst outcome will be mild irritation. There'll still be a school down the road, a hospital in the city and policemen driving around. Buses and trains will still run. The supermarket will still be open.

There's an image in Asterix in Britain of an Ancient Briton stood on his (prized) lawn with a spear pointed at the Roman soldier. "My garden is smaller than your Rome but my pilum is harder than your sternum" says the Briton as the soldier orders him out of the way. Until that tipping point is reached, people - in the tradition of those Greek idiots - will look to family, friends, colleagues and neighbours long before they consider politicians and the antics we get up to.

Here's to those idiots. And Down with The Guardian.

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You aren't disenfranchised because you live in a safe seat.

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It's a common line - you hear it all the time (especially from successful left wing sorts who've gone to live in the leafy suburbs): "my vote doesn't count because I live in a safe seat".

This is, of course, complete clap-trap. Of course your vote counts (and is counted). The problem is that your neighbours choose to vote a different way. And there are more of them than there are of you. So the candidate or party they prefer gets elected.

Bradford has 30 local council wards. And just eight of those wards have only elected councillors from one party (four Conservative, two Labour and two Liberal Democrat) since they were last redrawn in 2004. Going back further there are even fewer wards that have only ever elected councillors from a single party (Ilkley, Wharfedale/Rombalds, Tong, Bingley Rural). And yet I'm sure that many living in inner city Bradford believe that the proverbial donkey with a red rosette will always win.

So instead of moaning (here's a classic from a Lib Dem):

Confession time. I’m a political activist and I’m not currently registered to vote. I have dropped off thanks to individual voter registration and I haven’t sought to redress it.

This is something which I find reprehensible, yet I am lacking the motivation to correct it.

I live in Esher and Walton which since 1906 has only ever returned a conservative MP. The lowest majority was in the 1930s, it was 16%. Dominic Raab got 58% of the vote in 2010, a majority of around 18,000.

The rest of the post is essentially a personal attack on the MP in question but the 'activist' is complaining that there's no point in registering to vote because not only do the Tories always win but the MP doesn't see it as his personal mission to address all her political concerns.

Now while it is pretty soul-destroying at times to feel that the enemy has vastly more local fire power, democracy still matters and our vote matters. I know this because when the BNP got a thousand votes in Bingley Rural - without a great deal of effort - I wanted to understand what it was that was exercising the minds of my electorate. I didn't change my principles but I did think about how I talked and listened to my neighbours.

There's a debate to be had about electoral reform (but not too often or loudly because the voters aren't really that interested) but no-one in the UK is disenfranchised because their neighbours choose to vote a different way. And the opportunity exists - as Bradford's politics shows us - for people to break through that safe seat logic and persuade those neighbours to vote a different way. Indeed the City has two MPs who proved that to be just the case - David Ward and George Galloway.

There may be such a thing as a safe seat but no such seat, given effort and circumstance, is invulnerable. And no-one is disenfranchised.

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More politics should be local - if we want people to understand it and take part

Sam Bowman from the Adam Smith Institute has written - taking this piece from Ezra Klein as his text - about ideology, ignorance and information. Sam observes:

The vast majority of the public is shockingly ignorant of basic political facts, with the informational ‘elite’ also happening to be the more closed-minded. The alternative to closed-mindedness may simply be to be extremely uninformed.

I find this interesting because, as I am deeply embedded in an ideological system, I see the degree to which this lack of information dominates. Our debates are couched in terms of what will appeal to the voter (or a section of the voter audience) regardless of whether the position is backed by facts. We even - as evidenced by the Government's response to a Home Office report on drugs - lay claim to being evidence-based when we aren't, usually through a process of circular reasoning and appeals to our preferred 'experts'.

Because modern government is complicated, modern politics is also complicated (and, as Sam says, the world is complicated too - but then it always was). And since most people are not interested in politics, most people are ignorant of the 'truth' about the "basic facts" that inform political debate. The individual's typical engagement with politics is either half-hearted (turning out to vote) or driven by a specific and urgent threat to his interests or in response to something that has damaged him personally.  As Tip O'Neill put it, all politics is local - and there's nothing more local than our own garden gate or our own family.

We choose to be shocked that people don't know how many immigrants there are, how much money we spend on foreign aid and how much it costs us to be a member of the European Union. Yet why should we expect the ordinary voter to know these facts when they are of no significance or interest to them in their daily lives? Indeed, those people can respond with a different set of facts that are just as important (to the individual voter) that we wouldn't reasonably expect the political elite to know - vital information like when the school parents evening is, how much money is there to pay for Christmas or buy a family holiday and where the local farmer plans to build a new barn.

Now the voters know there's a link between the everyday things that fill their lives - work, family, friends, the neighbourhood - and those grand questions debated on the Sunday morning politics shows they don't watch. But they struggle to see that link. They see little connection between the electing of politicians and the bins getting emptied or there being a village school.

However, this is better than the reverse situation - the typical politician or pundit makes no effort to connect the grand and sweeping debate about the economy, immigration and the welfare state to the specific concerns of those ordinary voters. We pretend to understand the link, to see the connection between the decisions the DWP, Home Office or Treasury make and the everyday lives of the people. But in truth there is no link, we are constantly shocked by the sub-optimal (I'm being kind here) outcomes of the decisions taken under our political system, yet fail to realise that it is our technocratic preference for 'evidence-based' politics that creates this problem.

Since we are talking about politics rather than ideological choices, I'll put to one side Sam's suggestion "... that less cognitively-demanding ways of making decisions, like markets, may be even more valuable than we realise", and talk instead about Tip O'Neill's dictum - all politics is local. This means that, if we want to make politics more comprehensible, we need to frame the discussion at the level of people's interests - at the local level. To be parochial, the precise numbers or type of immigrants matters little to people in Cullingworth but the fact of immigration does. And people want to debate the issue on the basis of how it affects them not in the manner of pundits on Newsnight bashing each other over the head with competing statistics.

The solution to our dilemma about information, if not to immigration, is to make more of our politics local, to devolve more decision-making down to the local level and to conduct debate and discussions about political issues within that local context. Tip O'Neill was a Boston Democrat in a state dominated by the Democrats but he knew that, not only was politics contested within his party at the local level, but there was always the possibility of a Republican winning if those locals thought he was the better man. And for all that O'Neill was a national figure, he still returned to the place that elected him - what happened there, what was said to him there, how his voters behaved informed his politics.

Tim Worstall has touched on this issue a few times in talking about Denmark:

We'd want their taxation system as well: the national income tax is 3.76% and the top national rate is 15%. True, total income taxes are high but the rest is levied by the commune, a political unit as small as 10,000 people. At that scale, taxation is subject to the Bjorn's Beer Effect. If you know that it's Bjorn who levies your taxes, Bjorn who spends your taxes and also know where Bjorn has his Friday night beer, then he's going to spend your money wisely. Otherwise he can't go out for a beer on Friday, can he?

And I would add that people talk to Bjorn - not about those grand matters beloved of our ideological punditry but about the wall that's falling down, how granny didn't get seen by the doctor quickly enough and about the smell from the chicken factory. Moreover, the people talking to Bjorn know he can do something to fix their problem. Here in Cullingworth, while I can sort some stuff out for folk, much of what bugs them is decided a long way away by people they don't know who more-or-less speak a different language. And those decisions taken a long way away mean I can speed up granny's appointment or stop the smell from the chicken factory.

If we want a more comprehensible politics we need to get the decision-making (and the money) down to that local level where people really can influence how those decisions are made. This isn't about educating stupid voters or bashing our foreheads at their utter idiocy - the default reaction of our punditry - but about a politics that matters to the voter by actually touching on the reality of their lives. But I guess the pull of those Sunday morning politics shows will win - politics will carry on being incomprehensible, still be irrelevant to the lives of the typical voter. For all the talk of localism and devolution, politics will remain something played with by fine folk a long way away from the voter and those fine folk will continue to think the voter stupid because he doesn't know some statistics or gets a fact wrong.

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Why I've voted Conservative today and so should you.

I'm guessing that won't come as a surprise to anyone given what you all know about me! But there's a story.

If you'd have asked me a while back about the European Parliament elections, I'd have whispered (in a strictly deniable way, of course) that like a lot of Conservatives there was a pretty high chance of me voting for Ukip. Simply because we wanted to make the point that the EU - and especially its purposeless and expensive 'parliament' - isn't in Britain's interests.

However, in the course of the campaign I've come to realise a few things - and these are the reasons why you should vote Conservative today.

1. Whatever we think of the parliament and its purpose, there's a job to do in Brussels (and peripatetically Strasbourg). There are constituents to represent, cases to argue that affect real people and their real lives. I saw this first hand with the attempt by a Labour MEP to ram through a de facto ban on e-cigs. And it was Conservative (and some Lib Dem) MEPs that took up the vapers' cause with some success.

2. The case for leaving isn't about Bulgarian chicken slaughterers or Romanian cleaners. Nor is it about border controls, Muslims or the shape of bananas. We need to leave because the revolutionary idea of European co-operation has evaporated and, as Kafka said, "left behind the slime of a new bureaucracy". However, people who support our continued membership are not traitors corruptly taking the Commission's silver to prosecute their personal interests - they're just folk with a different (and I think wrong) view on the European Union

3. It is a fact that, if you want out, the only game in town is to vote Conservative. No other party with a prospect of government proposes an 'In/Out' referendum. I know the Greens and Ukip offer such a choice but the truth is that neither party - and Nigel Farage acknowledges this - will be in government this side of hell freezing over.

I know lots of you want to have a kick at the government, to make the point about power to people in Westminster. And I guess if you do so not much harm will have been done. However you will have elected people who want the Europe debate to be about how "Britain is full up", who want to make people coming here for work unwelcome and who will make cheap capital (and as we found with Geoffrey Bloom, cheap laughs) from attacking gay rights and women working.

So I urge you to make two positive crosses  - a vote for Conservatives in the European Parliament and a vote for a Conservative to represent you on Bradford Council.

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