Draft Gordon Brown

With a Scottish independence referendum on the horizon, unionists are looking for a heavyweight figure to lead their cause, who can take on the separatist arguments and who can win there.

Now who's the last person to beat Alex Salmond in Scotland?

Gordon Brown may not be from my party. There is a lot of his political legacy I detest. But he is undeniably the biggest figure from Scotland to stride the political stage in recent decades. He is recognised globally and stands head and shoulders above the likes of... erm... whoever the current leader of Scottish Labour is.

So can we persuade him? Can we draft Gordon Brown to save the Union?

Referendum questions

A referendum is the will of the electorate. But just which electorate and how many of them?

Whether people like it or not, referendums are an established part of the way things are done in this country. It's been nearly a century since the first legislation was passed establishing them (the Temperance (Scotland) Act 1913 which allowed for local referendums on prohibition in Scotland) and they've become ever more common in recent years.

But less clearly established are the basics for referendums like who gets to vote, the precise requirements for a change to take effect and who selects the options available & writes the question. In the run-up to just about every referendum I can remember there have been rows over at least one of these. This ad hoc approach is not terribly constructive and it may only get worse with a referendum on Scottish independence that brings the prospect of a fourth mess, determining which legislature has the power to run the vote.

Determining who gets to vote is a mess to start with. We have several different electorates in this country, mainly because of the different voting rights of ex pats, EU citizens, members of the House of Lords and so forth. The result is some people can vote in some elections and not others. So which ones should get to vote in a referendum when it isn't obvious which tier of government it affects? And there's a further problem that ex pats within the rest of the United Kingdom don't get to vote at their former homes, whereas ex pats within the rest of the world do. Would it be fair if there was a referendum in Northern Ireland and a Belfast man who'd moved to Dundee didn't get a vote but one who'd moved to Dublin did? And then there's the issue about whether the voting age should be lowered for individual votes - which was already tried in an unsuccessful amendment to the AV referendum and which may be tried again for the Scotland vote. Will the young get the vote only when they might be expected to vote the right way?

Threshold requirements are another mess. Practice around the world varies quite widely - some jurisdictions require only a simple majority for change to be enacted, but others have all manner of additional requirements - minimum turnouts, minimum proportions of the total electorate, majorities in a minimum number of constituencies, supermajorities (60% or 67% are both quite common) and more. All of these are in place because of a belief that a change brought about by a referendum will be long lasting and should be resistant to a minor swing in public opinion undermining it. But these thresholds are normally predetermined in advance. Since most referendums in the UK have been called by those wanting to make a change by popular backing, unsurprisingly there's been a reluctance to add conditions that might make a change victory less likely. We've probably now reached the stage where it's too late to introduce such thresholds. That may seem democratic but it must be worrying that some referendums, particularly those creating elected mayors, have had very low turnouts - the lowest I'm aware of was 10% in Sunderland. There is a point where the result stops being the will of the people and becomes the will of the too few.

What about who gets to select the available options and write the question? We've already seen the opening shots in this debate this week. It's a difficult one with no obvious answer and for that matter the UK precedents aren't so great. We've only had two comparable referendums, one on which country Northern Ireland should be in, the other on whether the UK should stay in Europe. Here are the exact questions:

Northern Ireland referendum 1973:

• Do you want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom?
• Do you want Northern Ireland to be joined with the Republic of Ireland, outside the United Kingdom?

European Community referendum 1975:

• Do you think the UK should stay in the European Community (Common Market)?

Both are simple and to the point. There's no reference in the former to precisely how Northern Ireland should be governed, regardless of which country it is in, whilst the latter similarly makes no reference to the revised terms of membership negotiated by the Labour government of the day. Nor were there multiple options to decide between, and thus no rows about which system to decide between the options.

But it could be more complicated. One case from elsewhere that is often brought up in relation to Scottish independence is the 1995 Quebec referendum. This asked the voters of Quebec the following question:

• Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?

And if you think that's complicated, the 1980 referendum question was even longer:

• The Government of Quebec has made public its proposal to negotiate a new agreement with the rest of Canada, based on the equality of nations; this agreement would enable Quebec to acquire the exclusive power to make its laws, levy its taxes and establish relations abroad - in other words, sovereignty - and at the same time to maintain with Canada an economic association including a common currency; any change in political status resulting from these negotiations will only be implemented with popular approval through another referendum; on these terms, do you give the Government of Quebec the mandate to negotiate the proposed agreement between Quebec and Canada?

(And considering the ballot paper was bilingual that's a monstrous piece of paper.)

Now a quick reading of the 1995 referendum question suggests a Yes vote would mean there was a mandate to negotiate a different relationship and that no lasting change would take place as an immediate consequence of a Yes vote. After all that was the position in 1980 (and the earlier referendum question explicitly stated it). However the 1995 referendum was somewhat different. This became an issue in the referendum itself, with disputes about just what a Yes vote would mean.

One major consequence of the referendum was the federal parliament passing the Clarity Act which basically gave the federal House of Commons the power to decide if a future referendum question was "clear" or not, to determine the threshold for change, and effectively to veto a referendum vote if it was deemed to have not complied. The Quebec National Assembly passed counter legislation asserting a simple majority is sufficient and that no other parliament or government can impose constraints on Quebec. That particular legislation has the snappy title of An Act respecting the exercise of the fundamental rights and prerogatives of the Québec people and the Québec State. To date the supremacy of these pieces of legislation has not been tested in the courts.

Now the Scotland situation has not reached the levels of Quebec but if the current rows between London and Edinburgh aren't resolve soon then we could face a similar mess but I really hope it doesn't descend to a Quebec style mess of disputed questions, Clarity Acts and sovereignty assertion acts, complete with lots and lots of lawyers rowing for all eternity.

However in the long run something needs to be done to take the sting out of these questions. Ideally there needs to be a broad consensus across the board, and perhaps a standing committee to determine the options & questions, so that when a referendum is announced there will be no uncertainty about any of the factors, let alone a dispute about them. Until then each referendum will bring many more questions than just the one on the ballot paper.

"Mummy, what does 'santorum surging' mean?"

So far the US Presidential election is just dull.

Compared to recent contests this one just hasn't caught fire. On the Democrat side the euphoria from when Obama was first elected has now died down as even his most ardent supporters realise he can't walk on water and isn't going to deliver endless change they can believe in. But he's basically unopposed for his party's nomination. (Yes pedants I know there's probably a few non-entities who've managed to get their name onto the odd primary ballot paper but that won't make a difference.) The last incumbent President in such a position who went on to lose re-election was Herbert Hoover back in 1932. That should give Obama comfort until he remembers that Hoover fell in harsh economic times - and no Obama can't simply magic away the world's economic problems. We're not in Doctor Who!

On the Republican side we have the return of Mitt Romney and the succession of "stop Romney" candidates, and all it's done is reinforce perceptions of the Republican Party as full of nutters. Now just because I'm a British Conservative doesn't mean I should automatically cheer on anyone from one of our "sister" parties around the world - you don't see many Conservatives cheering on Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel at the moment despite their parties being founder members of the IDU. The nuttier wings of the Republican Party are not ones that should be copied here. But they can at least make things exciting - and at the moment that hasn't happened. Instead it's one long dull fest.

Of course there is the occasional moment of humour, especially with Rick Santorum. For there is a not very nice meaning for "santorum" and if he pulls off an early primary win a lot of people will be searching for more information on him.

So why are journalists so keen to write that "Santorum is surging"?

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everybody!

Flashback: Dreadwind's Xmas!

Another blast from the past, this time a reminder of a particularly madcap issue of one of my childhood comics, the British version of Transformers which combined reprints of stories from its American counterpart with newly originated tales of the toys. Issue #302 came out just before Christmas 1990 and contained the year's seasonal tale, Dreadwind's Xmas. (Thanks to Blimey! It's another blog about comics! for recently publishing scans of the story at Christmas Comics: TRANSFORMERS (1990).)

Christmas stories are something of a tradition in British comics, even action adventure ones such as Transformers. They would tell a (usually) one-off tale with some festive whimsy as an interlude from the ongoing saga.

The problem is that this was often heavily at odds with the genre and tone of particular titles, and as a result many of these were at best forgettable, at worst they were so dire they lingered in the memory rather longer than they should have.

Transformers was a tale about two warring factions of an alien robotic race, with some humans caught up in their war as well. Such a scenario does not easily lend itself to the Christmas spirit and the results were messy. There was one where a super powered human was about to destroy an Autobot (one if the good guys) when suddenly midnight struck and she had an immediate change of heart. Or another when one of the meanest Decepticons (the bad guys) was depressed and homesick, so a kid decided to try and explain the meaning of Christmas to him, without much success until suddenly a wave of enlightenment came out of the blue. Then there was the Autobots' leader Optimus Prime trying to decide how to use a small piece of life bringing energy until he discovered environmentalism (well it was 1989).

But perhaps the weirdest was 1990's offering, the short text story Dreadwind's Xmas! The story was related to the-then change of letterspage answerer.

For most of the run the comic's letterspage was supposedly answered by one of the Transformers themselves. It made for a more interesting experience as the character gave more personalised responses, including their own opinion about events and characters and the failings of the humans working on the comic (called "stubbies"). It was fun, but every few years there was a change of character to a newer toy. One such change came in issue #300 when the Decepticon Dreadwind was replaced by the Autobot Blaster. However the introductory page told us Dreadwind was resisting and had barricaded himself in his office. And so we came to Dreadwind's Xmas!

The story tells of how on Christmas night "Ebeneezer Dreadwind" is visited by three spirits who confront him about his bitterness and occupation. Eventually Dreadwind cries and gives in, leaving Earth... to plan his revenge on the spirits.

A neighbouring column put it best: "What the Dickens?"

Even by the standards of comic Christmas issues this one was especially bizarre. It's unsurprising that the tradition was abandoned after this even though the comic lasted just over another year.

By issue #302 it's hard to dispute that Transformers was rather past its prime (no pun intended), with the British originated strips having first lost colour then disappearing altogether in favour of reprints of old British stories. (Hence the Christmas story this year being a brief text affair rather than an actual strip as in previous years.) But in the wider world of comics a licensed title based on a toyline that lasts even four years is quite an achievement, let alone the seven plus that Transformers eventually clocked up. And even in its last years the comic was still a joy to read.

(This longevity brought its own problems. The conventional wisdom in British comics is that the readership almost completely turns over every few years. Hence many long running titles resort to repetitive plots and reprints. But when a title has a cult following - and even during Transformers's run this following was already manifesting itself - the proportion of readers who've already seen the material is very high and can be easily alienated and so attempts to economise had a steady corrosive effect. But even this didn't end things - rather it was the American title going under and cutting off the supply of new-to-the-UK material that killed Transformers altogether.)

The toyline is still going all these years later and still has a lot of tie-in fiction, from blockbuster movies to fan convention comics. Amazingly the British comic's legacy is strong with many characterisations and themes (including its version of the origin of the Transformers) still follow its lead. Not a bad legacy for a weekly comic that wasn't even published in the toyline's countries of origin.

Transformers has also left a surprising legacy in the wider world, one that not many people will realise it started. For in issue #160 (information at Transformers Wiki: Salvage!) saw a guest appearance by a prominent British businessman who would go on to make many other guest appearances in all manner of fiction. Yes Transformers is responsible for starting Richard Branson's quest to get a cameo in just about everything!

Images from the Past: Thirty years ago...

Exactly thirty years ago today Blake's 7 ended.

And I don't mean the last episode went out and it didn't come back, like many a show. No it truly ended.

I've shown this clip once before, but it's so striking here again is what went out just after 8pm on that day in 1981:

Can you imagine the BBC today showing something so bloody and bleak not just at any 8pm but just four days before Christmas?

The Last Dictator Standing

There's a brilliant advert put out by Nando's, starring a man who has lost another friend this year and reflecting. Here's the full version:
Sadly threats of violence against Nando's's Zimbabwean staff have resulted in the advert being withdrawn. But time is running out for Mugabe.

Be careful what you promise!

Remember those fun adverts for Scotch videotapes with the living skeleton? Thanks to YouTube we can see them again. Here's the one I remember the most:
And here's another one predicting the flatscreen TV quite well, although making a rather rash promise...
"Every recording as good as the first or we'll give you a new tape."

Does anyone want to put that to the test and invoke the lifetime guarantee? After all the advert is pretty explicit that Scotch tapes should still be working as good as new after all this time... And there are still people who use their VCRs for recording because it's "good enough" for the task at hand.

Scotch was a trading name used by 3M Select. Their UK website no longer sells videotapes but they did promise to guarantee the tapes for life... Or will they give you your money back?

Alternatively if you used your Scotch tapes to preserve video recordings for posterity and still have some (I think I still have a 1993 recording of a Doctor Who story on a Scotch tape somewhere) then they made promises about those too:
And for some bonus points I noticed that one of the tapes advertised is Betamax (and the second advert has a third cassette but I don't recognise it at all). Does anyone still have both tape and player to test the limits of the guarantee?

The Additional Member System - New Zealand's experience

Yesterday New Zealand had an election. In itself it wasn't too dramatic - the main governing party slightly advanced, the opposition fell back rather more and there was some shuffling round amongst the smaller parties. The most prominent story is the return to parliament of the populist New Zealand First. But of other interest is that New Zealand also held a referendum on its voting system and opted to retain its current Additional Member System (known as Mixed Member Proportional over there, but I'll translate the terminology for a British audience).

Now here in the UK changing the voting system was dealt a huge blow at the AV referendum in May and many, myself included, are willing to take the losing campaign's cries of "this is the only chance to change the system" at face value. However in politics few proposals ever truly die and circumstances can change, bringing once seemingly dead issues back to the table. (The New Zealand referendum came 18 years after two previous ones that adopted the system, and six elections in the meantime. Historically this is slow for New Zealand which until 1989 had referendums on prohibition alongside every election.) And despite the referendum we still have other voting systems in use - the Additional Member System is used for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and London Assembly; the Single Transferable Vote is used for the Northern Ireland Assembly and local government in Northern Ireland and Scotland; party lists are used for elections to the European Parliament (apart from Northern Ireland which still uses STV); and the Supplementary Vote is used for directly elected Mayors and will also be used for Police Commissioners. So one way or another the voting system question hasn't gone away completely.

New Zealand's implementation of the AMS system is relatively straight forward. There are seventy constituencies ("electorates") which each elect a single member of parliament by First Past The Post. Then there is a top-up list vote, operating on a New Zealand-wide basis, which elects a further 50 members. Crucially the 70 constituency members are factored into the overall proportionality. There are, however, some additional key details:

• There are separate constituencies for Māori voters. When registering voters can choose to go either on the main ("general") electoral register or on the separate Māori register (but cannot appear on both). The seven Māori constituencies are organised on a geographic basis, overlapping the sixty three general constituencies. All voters vote for the same list.
• In order to qualify for list seats, a party has to get either at least 5% of the list vote or win at least one constituency. (The German implementation includes a further qualification that parties that represent specific minorities - e.g. the South Schleswig Voter Federation representing ethnic Danes in Schleswig-Holstein - are exempt from the threshold requirements. Such a rule was considered for New Zealand but the final implementation opted instead for keeping the separate Māori constituencies.)
• Proportionality is calculated only amongst list votes for parties that qualify for list seats. Thus if 10% of the vote goes to parties that don't qualify, the 120 seats are apportioned on the basis of 90% of the votes.
• If a party wins more constituency seats than its list vote entitles it to then there is an "overhang". This is partially corrected by automatically creating additional list seats equal to the number of overhang constituencies. For example in 2008 the Māori Party won five constituencies but a list entitlement of only three, so two extra list seats were created.

(The British uses of AMS have all voters on a single "general" register and maintains the 5% rule, which in London has caught out variously the Christian People's Alliance, RESPECT and the BNP in some elections. In Scotland and Wales the use of separate AMS regions means there are fewer seats available overall. Also AMS here uses a different mechanism for allocating the list seats though in practice to much the same effect. There is no mechanism to counter an overhang.)

AMS can throw up a number of anomalies and confusions because of this - for those interested in the more technical details have a read of Antony Green's Election Blog: The MMP Sealed Section: How the Intricacies of MMP Could Prevent a National Majority which is written for an audience with no direct experience of the system. By far the most interesting, and potentially controversial for any British consideration, are the rules on qualifying for list seats and the potential for gaming the system.

Preliminary results for 2011 suggest that this isn't an issue - every party that has won list seats is over the 5% threshold and every party below it with seats has only constituency seats. But in 2008 New Zealand First won 95,356 list votes and no seats whilst ACT New Zealand (a free market, free people, small government party) won 85,496 and was entitled to five seats overall. Were the UK to have a referendum on AMS I wouldn't be surprised if this occurrence got fished out at some stage. The difference was that ACT had successfully targeted the Epsom constituency, albeit with help from the Nationals, whereas New Zealand First won no constituencies at all. These things are swings and roundabouts - New Zealand First had itself relied on constituency success in 1999 when leader Winston Peters narrowly retained Tauranga by just 63 votes but by 2005 they lost there and were at the mercy of the list.

(Other parties who've qualified for list seats this way include: the Progressive Party in 2002, United Future in 2005 and ACT also in 2005. However it was rare in any of these elections for such parties to be outpolled by others who ended up with no seats.)

And the result partially reflected a gaming of the system by the larger National Party - they gave a discrete message to their list voters in Epsom to give their constituency vote to ACT so that the latter would qualify for list seats and boost the chances of a National government with ACT support. The constituency and list votes are cast on the same ballot paper and the detailed count includes the precise combinations - in 2008 nationally 86.3% of National Party list voters also voted National for the constituency vote, but in Epsom this figure was just 26.2%, with 69.9% of National list voters voting ACT in the constituency. (Antony Green's Election Blog: 2011 New Zealand Election: How MMP Works) Other stats from that breakdown show a lot of Green list voters vote for other parties for constituencies and indeed there are some signs of Labour and Green list voters in Epsom trying to counteract the National/ACT effect by voting for the National constituency candidate. It is a bizarre situation when a party's opponents are keener for it to win a particular contest than the party is itself!

In the past I've blogged about possible ways to game AMS - How the London Assembly could have been so different details how "decoy lists" would have worked in London in 2008. New Zealand's overhang correction mechanism could throw up interesting effects - either many more list seats would be created to counter the effect of lots of constituencies being won by parties with next to no list votes (something similar happens in some German lander parliaments, resulting in wild fluctuations of the number of politicians) or the seats might be completely disregarded in the list calculations. But a system where small parties can survive or die depending not directly on the votes but on whether they can get tactical help from big parties will not be to everyone's taste, especially if the small parties are felt to wield disproportionate influence in government.

Is AMS a "simple" system for the lay voter to understand? Well that's very hard to measure as one person's simplicity is another's convolution. But some factors are there - on the one hand AMS lacks the surpluses and fractions of STV and it never sees the most popular constituency candidates (as measured by who gets the most votes) denied victory. However details like overhangs and multiple thresholds can be complicated to explain and would expand an official summary beyond conciseness. Furthermore the prospect of a party winning more than 50% of seats with less than 50% of votes is a real one under AMS - it happened in Scotland this year due to factors such as the use of multiple regions but also because of "wasted votes" for parties that secured no seats - and again this sort of detail that works counter to expectations can confuse. Now all systems have their anomalies but given the tendency of PR campaigners to make so much of victories on less than 50% of the vote, if the alternative is shown to not live up to their own standards then it's natural to be sceptical.

Could AMS win a future referendum on voting systems? That's very hard to say as much of it would come down to a variety of factors including events in advance, how well campaigners prepared the ground before the announcement of a vote, the effectiveness of the campaigns themselves and so forth. I do hope that in any such referendum better arguments would be put forward than "vote yes for utopian politics" or "vote no 'cos the Germans use it".

However for the moment such a referendum seems a long way off. But time will tell...

Posted elsewhere

Just a quick note about a post I have up on the Mars Hill blog: The Coalition after 18 months - from the right.