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.

Bye bye Doctor Who Confidential

The recent news that Doctor Who Confidential is being dropped at the end of the current series has provoke tow quite contradictory reactions in me.

On the one hand the recent series of Confidential have been, to put it mildly, rather rubbish. It's been full of inconsequential fluff rather than a good behind the scenes look at the series. Extending the length to forty-five minutes didn't help.

On the other hand Confidential was the very show which convinced me to make the plunge and get digital television. (Yes there was once a time when digital television wasn't everywhere. In fact here in London we've barely started the digital switch-over.) I'd been thinking about it on and off for a while, but it was the prospect of bonus Doctor Who material that was the eventual tipping point in my decision to get my first digibox/decoder or whatever they're actually called. So it's a pity to see it go.

But then nothing lasts forever.

This does highlight one worrying thought. The number of Doctor Who spin-offs have been steadily diminishing - Totally Doctor Who, the Sarah-Jane Adventures and now Doctor Who Confidential all gone for one reason or another, whilst Torchwood's fate seems uncertain. This leaves just the series itself. The rationale for the various spin-offs was to build a "firewall" around the series, giving it greater support and protection. Now the series will be left to fend for itself.

Ever since the news in 2003 that Doctor Who was being revived, fans have wondered for a long time how long it will last. I'll be honest - I don't expect the current incarnation of the show to last twenty-six years. Everything comes to an end at some stage or another. But I don't know if the end of Confidential brings that end forward or not. The main series hasn't relied on it for some time now.

Of course as previous cancellations have shown, just because the series may come to an end doesn't mean that's it for ever. The show's format is such that given the right circumstances it can be revived many times and it has become a modern day icon of almost mythological proportions. I have no doubt we will see many future incarnations of the show itself.

Leading from outside the chamber

The announcement that Tom Harris is to seek the Scottish Labour leadership has led to calls for other Labour MPs to throw their hat into the ring. But it's also exposing a growing fact in our post devolution arrangements - there is more than one place to find political leadership.

Traditionally there has been a single source for a leader - the parliamentary chamber in question. It has been taken for granted that only a sitting MP/MSP/AM can contest the leadership and the loss of one's seat can be a near fatal setback for ambitions. But it's also led to the assumption that if someone leaves the chamber or politics altogether then they can't return and resume their ambitions.

That may have been a truism in times past, but we now live in an age where there are multiple parliaments and other positions. Is it really so wise to limit the choice of leader in a particular parliament merely to those who are currently members, and never consider talent that happens to be elsewhere?

And this goes beyond Westminster and the devolved parliaments. Why can't elected Mayors and council leaders be candidates for leadership? For that matter why not private citizens? Too often people complain about an insular political class - well here's a way that would allow people to dip in and out:

Allow anybody to contest the leadership of a party. If they're not an MP/MSP/AM etc... then they can either seek to enter the parliament in a by-election or await the next general election. A deputy can handle the parliamentary duties in the meantime and leave the leader with more time to tour the country. After all there's so much more to leading a political party than taking part in parliamentary questions.

This is not a novel idea by any means. Alex Salmond wasn't an MSP when he won the SNP leadership for the second time, and he didn't return to Holyrood for another three years. And outside the United Kingdom it's surprisingly common.

If Boris Johnson really has ambitions to be Prime Minister, he could do no worse than to watch the Liberal National Party in the Australian state of Queensland. Earlier this year the LNP picked as its new leader Campbell Newman, who is not an MP but rather the just stepped down elected Mayor of Brisbane, Australia's largest local authority. Newman is leading the LNP into the next election from outside the state parliament. If successful then Boris may want to pick up some tips.

Canada's tradition in this regard is far more advanced with both federal and provincial parties regularly picking leaders who are not sitting MPs, and it's common to find provincial leaders standing in federal leadership elections. Leaders who have not been sitting MPs when elected include Stephen Harper, Jean Chrétien and John Turner (all of whom were former MPs who had left parliament for industry but who then won their party leaderships), Jack Layton (who was a Toronto city councillor when elected to the NDP leadership), Brian Mulroney (a private businessman who had never held elected office before winning the Progressive Conservative leadership) and Robert Stanfield (who was Premier of Nova Scotia when elected to the federal Progressive Conservative leadership). There have even been Prime Ministers and state Premiers who have been appointed before being elected to the chamber - current Yukon premier Darrell Pasloski is not (yet) a member of the territorial assembly whilst British Colombia premier Christy Clark was sworn in in March despite not winning a seat in the legislature until May.

To the public at large it probably won't matter if a party's selected leader is an MP/MSP/AM or not. It certainly won't matter what precise title they hold. But it will be more problematic if a party is unclear about who their leader/"candidate for Prime/First Minister" is, leaving the media confused. Plaid Cymru found itself in this mess a few years ago before it changed its structures and what hasn't received much attention so far is that the post Tom Harris is standing for is technically only the leader of the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament, a point that will be far more than pedantic in rows with MPs and councillors.

The other issue is getting the political and media culture to accept leaders who are not on the parliamentary benches, but time and precedent will accomplish that. Rival parties may mock a leader's "absence" but once they have done it themselves that line of attack will diminish.

Of course despite all of the above, Tom Harris is wrong to seek the Scottish Labour leadership for one very good reason. He is clearly in the wrong party!

Online primaries - how not to do them

The primary election is a rare beast is this country. Even most of the selections the Conservatives brand as "open primaries" are actually closer to US style caucuses with a greater level of involvement required and thus smaller turnouts. The reason for this is obvious - it's near impossible to devise a mechanism whereby all eligible voters are able to choose a candidate for a party without incurring huge costs (the Conservatives did hold some postal ballots and send papers to all voters in a few constituencies but at great cost) or having no security controls to prevent the process from being fraudulently hijacked by the ineligible and/or other parties. Realistically a primary would require state support to work. But every so often a party throws such common sense to the wind.

UKIP are currently engaged in the process of selecting who should be their candidate for Mayor of London. I'll admit upfront that I don't find the actual contest itself to be the most exciting thing going. But one of the ways they're allocating votes is so ridiculously fraud prone that I'm amazed that it wasn't laughed out at first suggestion.

For UKIP have set up a website, UKIP's Mayor for London: Have Your Say, whereby anyone can vote on the six applicants for the candidacy. There are next to no controls on voting whatsoever - you simply select a candidate's box and click "Vote". There is no requirement or provision to:

• Give your name
• Give your address
• Confirm you are a voter in London
• Confirm you are not a partisan for another side/a mischief maker intent on ensuring UKIP is saddled with the most absurd candidate available.

Absolutely anybody anywhere on the planet can vote in this. And what's to stop multiple voting? The site seems to detect second vote attempts, but there's no shortage of technical people who know how to disguise a computer and/or IP address so that they could repeatedly vote to their heart's content.

At stake in all this are large blocks of "bonus votes" that will be counted at the UKIP conference when they make their final choice. So there is a serious potential for mischief making to distort the outcome.

Increasing public involvement in politics is a desirable and necessary aim. But to do so in such a way that the outcome is invariably tainted and discredited is not the way to go about it. Let's hope no serious party follows UKIP's disastrous decision.

By the way wouldn't it be hilarious if Winston "Six Parties" McKenzie won the nomination?