a splendid duck-billed platypus

Well, that's embarrassing - tomorrow is 9/11 in American terms. I guess I am just so unused to thinking in American dates that I looked at the date on 750 words this morning and thought oh, yesterday was That Day... oh well. What follows is still real, it's just a day early instead of a day late.
--
Hello. On 750 words, it's still 9/11. Or, in the more civilised parts of the world, 9th September. Ten years ago, I woke up on a Wednesday morning and thought about what had happened yesterday and the ghastly implications for the world, and knew I couldn't go into work. I called in sick. I went out to buy papers and looked at the flashy horror movie pics on the front pages and I couldn't go into work. I couldn't write. Fiction, I mean. For months afterward, I was lost in a worried whirl of depression and fear, seeing bad futures ahead of us everywhere.

The worst part was: I was right.

Within a month, missiles were falling on Kabul. On Yahoogroups, where fandom was at the time, American fans I'd known for years were relishing this in a bloodthirsty, vengeance-is-ours, stupidity which was, if I'd had the detachment to think about it at the time, own twin to my own sad and stupified misery. (I went back to work. I was still depressed. Reading the news did not help.)

Ten years later: Osama bin Laden has been assassinated by a team of American military hitmen, which is what I initially figured would probably happen to him once I knew the US wasn't serious about wanting him on trial. The illegal prison camp at Guantanamo Bay still exists. The US and the UK are still at war in Afghanistan, with uncounted dead every day: at least a million people are dead in Iraq: millions of refugees have fled their homes: MI6 took part in joint operations with CIA to kidnap and torture British citizens: the US made torture legal, repealed the right of habeas corpus, put extrajudicial prisoners on show trial using evidence gained by torture, approved the right of warrantless wiretapping on its own citizens, and elected two Presidents in a row who saw nothing particularly wrong with any of that: the UK passed a law making it legal to hand over prisoners to the US on nothing more but evidence of identity: outraged British citizens reacted to UK complicity with torture and extrajudicial imprisonment by blowing themselves up in the London Underground and killing dozens of people: and in response to a flowering of democratic rebellion against the tyrants supported by the Western powers against their own people, the US and UK attacked Libya, so there's now a brand new war in the Middle East for people to die in under Western missiles.

It's been a bad ten years.

In the course of those ten years the Internet bloomed and I found out more about US internal politics than I'd ever thought I would. I went on broadband. I joined livejournal. (Also greatestjournal, insanejournal, and journalfen.) I left yahoogroups. I found new fandoms M*A*S*H and House MD, and learned to write drabbles for M*A*S*H on an lj community devoted to nothing but. I wrote mad stories that were published on my journal as WiP without even being sure when they would be finished. I joined Twitter. Couchsurfing. Redbubble, after I was given a digital camera. I threw a huge party for my 40th and may throw an even bigger one for my 50th. I'm on so many social/information gathering sites that when I was asked to list them in a recent group I found I was having to think which I would mention. After 9th September and for years afterward I had a nervous twitch of checking the news every so often - sometimes several times an hour - in case new bad stuff had happened - that wore off, but I am thoroughly hooked on knowing stuff as soon as possible, and in as much detail as possible - I wrote a report to my boss on Huge LGBT Organisation's Leader stupidly proclaiming himself against same-sex marriage at the LibDem conference, barely hours after it had happened. Couldn't have happened if not for Twitter, but also couldn't have happened except that I was watching Twitter that night. I made friends online. I've been to two Worldcons.

Three of my cats died.

I met K. We've been together for just over a year. We found each other on the Internet. I would never have met her otherwise, and given how shy we both are in new social situations, even if we had met I would probably not have got to know her. In ten years time I want to still be with her, to have got our living-together situation sorted out, for my post twenty years after 9/11 to be written with K at my elbow, whether she's asleep, playing World of Warcraft, or watching me with that lovely appreciative glint in her eye and waiting for me to say "Okay, done writing now..."

Years ago, after Jean Charles de Menezes was killed by the Metropolitan Police, I had an endless series of arguments with a man I regarded as close to me as a brother. I still do, though we haven't spoken in years (we have exchanged short, tense emails) and part of that reason is that I say the argument was endless, but in fact it ended when he decided not to talk to me any more. He worked part-time as a volunteer police officer for the Met (when he was younger he had wanted to be a policeman) and he and I had completely opposite views on what had happened. I wanted any police officer who killed someone to know that if they did so they would stand trial in open court - no exceptions, no excuses. He had very much the internal police attitude: that police work hard, take risks, shouldn't be blamed when they get things wrong.

No one now disagrees, six years later, that the two policemen who killed de Menezes had not the slightest legal cause or justification to do so: they shot him because he wasn't white, because he came out of a building that had been mistakenly identified as hosting terrorist suspects, because he was wearing a coat that could in theory have concealed explosives, because he got onto a Tube train and only weeks earlier so had three suicide bombers. He wasn't challenged - they grabbed him, threw him to the floor of the train, dragged him out, and then shot him in the head, seven times.

Neither of the two gunmen who did this had to stand trial openly. We still don't know their names, or anything about them beyond their actions on 22nd July 2005 and that they lied their asses off trying to exculpate themselves. The on-board and platform CCTV footage mysteriously went missing. The Metropolitan Police Federation consistently backed the killers. The jury at the inquest reached an open verdict - they neither condemned the killing as unlawful, nor exculpated the killers. The Met paid compensation to de Menezes's family and paid their legal costs in exchange for the family agreeing to drop their legal challenge. No one in the chain of command responsible for the killing of de Menezes has suffered any penalty for his death. The Met were consistently, nastily critical of the IPCC investigating de Menezes's death, despite their acknowledging from the next day that de Menezes was a completely innocent victim. They called his death a tragedy, but never acknowledged it was a crime.

There have been other incidents not involving guns (Update: 333 people have died in police custody between 1998 and 2010, but not one police officer has been convicted of responsibility), but perhaps because we in the UK are used to the idea that police do not carry guns, that the gun squad police are supposed to be specially trained and specially responsible, the incidents such as Stephen Waldorf (shot by the police in 1983 - he survived) and Harry Stanley (shot dead in 1999, because he had a Glaswegian accent and was carrying a chair leg in a bag) and now, Mark Duggan. Duggan was 29, father of four, well-liked in the community of Tottenham where he lived. He was shot dead last Thursday. The police who killed him initially claimed there had been an exchange of fire. A gun was retrieved from the minicab in which he was shot, but it had been wrapped in a sock, and the only two bullets at the scene were both from police guns. Descriptions of Duggan's killing ("seven bullets to the head") which are false, suggest memories of de Menezes's killing.

Two days after the police killed Mark Duggan, his family, neighbours, and friends - a group of over a hundred people - went to stand outside the Tottenham police station, planning an hour of silent protest, expecting the senior police officer at the station to come outside and speak to them. After about four hours during which police with riot shields had been sent outside to stand guard, but not one police officer with authority to speak - to offer apology, regrets, commiserations, sympathy - a girl aged 16 challenged the police. The police claim she threw a stone. Other eyewitnesses say she had nothing but angry words, demanding answers.

The police hit her with their riot shields, knocking her to the ground, and hitting her again as she lay on the ground.

And then there was a riot.

Buildings have been burned. Windows smashed. Looting. The police are happy to tell us that dozens of police officers have been injured, and that hundreds of police are converging on the boroughs of Tottenham and Enfield to "maintain control". Beyond that, I don't know. I know what I can see on the news, I know what the official story is. I'm sure that people who see this as an opportunity to get some easy pickings converged on the boroughs on Sunday to get some more.

Tottenham borough is poor. There's high unemployment, low social mobility - people who live there don't have much and now they have even less. EMA used to be a hope for a way out via education: the current government took that away last year. Youth clubs used to provide disaffected young people with something to do other than gang up and cause trouble. The government have been cutting those kind of services hard and fast. And a man is dead, and I for one do not believe his family will ever even know the name of his killer, let alone see him stand trial for the crime in court, no matter what the IPCC says about "investigations".

Where are we going now? For all my issues with Alex Salmond and the SNP, the Scottish government have decided that the right response to the recession is to shield the ordinary people as far as possible from the cuts - but the Conservatives, with the support of the LibDems, and before them the Westminister Labourites, were sliding into the easy wealthy view that it was for people who had least to suffer most from the recession caused by the banking crisis - and the Tories and LibDems have consistently lied that it was Labour's public spending that caused the recession, not the banks failure.

What happens in a country where people can't trust the police not to kill them? Where the police can kill and expect to get away with it - both the crime and the cover-up? (Despite strong evidence that the killers of de Menezes lied in their evidence, they were never charged with obstructing justice.) What happens when the people down at the bottom of the heap see that they have no hope - none - of doing better than their parents did, no hope that their children will get on in life and do better than themselves? What happens when no one believes that the legal justice system is any use to them? (The government has also cut legal aid, ensuring that even someone with a valid case to make may not be able to access the courts unless they have money of their own.)

Riots happen.

If you live in the UK, please sign (Equal Marriage Rights regardless of gender or sexual orientation) this - and pass the word on....

The night before I had been compiling the email newsletter, and in the international bit there was an announcement that an international organisation was having its annual Event in Israel this year, and of course there were (justified) Issues about that, but the organisation had said quite frankly that the Israeli member organisation was the only one that had offered, what were they to do? But to be fair I had to include an example of the Issues and an explanation why, and I was googlesurfing on "Pinkwashing" (a lovely neologism for an ugly thing) and I found a blog I'd read before, A Gay Girl In Damascus, which had a pretty good explanation and a nice liftable paragraph explaining why this is a Bad Thing. So I put it into the newsletter, and the next day, as I clicked on the link to check it still worked before I sent it, I found out the author had been kidnapped.

Three armed men walked up to her in the street, about 6pm local time: her cousin was there and saw it happen, saw the blogger hit one of the men and heard her call to her cousin to go tell her father. She was shoved into a car and driven away and her family and her girlfriend and her friends - none of us round the world who read her blog - have any idea what happened to her. There are about ten thousand Disappeared in Syria. She's just one of them. The difference between her and them is that she has dual US/Syrian citizenship (born in Virginia, American mother, Syrian father - she blogs about her father sending two armed men away who were threatening to beat her up and rape her for what she had written about the Syrian regime) and because she famous in the blogosphere, she has all these people who are making sure her name is not forgotten. She's an Avaaz campaign, a Facebook page, a Twitter hashtag: she is no less worthy than the other ten thousand of all this concern, but it's true we do what we can for who's in front of us: I did a bakesale for a Syrian asylum seeker who was living in my neighbour's boxroom, not for the asylum seekers equally worthy whom I didn't know at all.

I want to believe she is still alive, that she hasn't been too badly harmed, that this story of the gay girl in Damascus, the lesbian blogger who recorded the Arab Spring, will have a happy ending, and not an ending of the disappeared. An ending which so many have already suffered.

(I note claims are being made that she doesn't "really" exist: similar claims were made about Salam Pax, Riverbend, and even Gin Marie.)

----

Other things that have been happening in my life:

Well, I just took a break and tried to think about them.

I am thinking about a job in Belgium. I am talking about it with K.

My eyelids itch. The optician sold me some drops which fix the itch, but you're not supposed to use them with lenses, and at lunchtime today my eyelids itched so much I had to take the lenses out. (I'd packed my good specs and a holder for the lenses, so it wasn't so bad I had to go home, but it was pretty bad.) This is allergy-related. Apparently the underside of my eyelids swells up into little knots and it dints my eyeball. It's itchily painful even knowing what it is and there's no real harm done.

I went to a meeting to discuss getting more women into Parliament. Into the Scottish parliament specifically, though we are not averse to getting more women into the UK parliament and into local government. As I noted to one of the women there after the meeting was over, even Margaret Thatcher had a single good point: she was in favour of keeping the 1967 abortion act, and used to declare "of course, it's a free vote"... and then walk into the No lobby with all these Tory MPs who didn't give a damn about abortion but would play Follow the Leader, following after her.

This is in my mind partly because America's Nadine Dorries, Sarah Palin, is coming to London on her way to the Sudan, and apparently wants to meet Margaret Thatcher, because it would do her political career no end of good if she were photographed with the right-wing American's dream date. Thatcher is demented and her aides decide who she meets and they've no intention of trotting her out for a photo op with Palin, and David Cameron won't want to mess what's left of his image as a cuddly Tory, so I guess that means Palin and Dorries can be photographed shaking hands and talking about how much they hate other women.

Listen, Andrew Lansley! in response to your exercise

The idea that the free market should govern health care is poisonous nonsense. The health of British citizens and residents is a precious resource. Everyone should get the healthcare they need, and the the NHS should focus on providing quality healthcare at need, not on setting health care providers to compete against each other. The idea that the NHS regulator Monitor’s primary duty to enforce competition between healthcare providers is one that only a Cabinet of millionaires (confident that however the Tories destroy the NHS, they will still be able to buy private healthcare at need) could love.

The government of the UK has a duty to provide a comprehensive health care service free at point of access. The Conservatives promoting the idea that there is no such duty are tearing away at sixty years of history. We all benefit from the NHS. We have all benefited from it for six decades. It is a duty that every government representative must be aware of, and that the Conservatives decry at their peril.

Allowing private companies to cherry-pick profitable healthcare services and make money out of our health needs would be disgusting. It would be selling off our health to the highest bidder. The government must set in place strong blocks against such profiteering.

Any new commissioning bodies must be transparent and accountable. They must be governed by boards with a full range of health care professionals and patients. Most GPs do not want to become administrators rather than doctors: the Lansley plans to have GPs become administrators is a waste of their time and our resources. GPs need to know they can request healthcare services at need for their patients, not worry about what they will cost and what the practice budget is if another expensive patient comes in.

The massive changes which have been proposed would rightly be trialled in small areas for several years with a clear plan to establish that they work. They will not be imposed on everyone from the top down without any trial period at all.

Yours sincerely,

[Yonmei]

You can email Andrew Lansley too!

Set my alarm for six am. Slept through it. Woke at 7am. Got out of the house and found the polling place I was supposed to leaflet sometime after 8 - I'd never been there before. Stood around till just after 10am, handing out leaflets - I had way more than I needed. At that point, really felt I needed to sit down and have coffee, so I got the bus back to a cafe I like, took a note of the time I could catch the bus back to the polling place, and ordered coffee and toast / scrambled eggs. Sat down with a sigh of relief, and rubbed my eyes - the right felt tired and itchy - and, oh bugger, the right lens had come out.

I wondered whether I could cope with my shift at the polling place without my right lens. It's my weaker eye, and I found I can read fine without it, looking round the cafe I was a bit more blurred but not badly so, and I sat and waited and drank coffee and then ate my eggs and toast and got up to leave the cafe... and realised as soon as I started walking, I needed both lenses. I can walk around quite safely without my glasses, but evidently I need the same vision for both eyes - the confusion was making me dizzy.

So I went home. I voted on my way home: Yes to AV, nice and simple: regional vote Green (also simple, though I spent longer looking down that long list of parties and slightly regretting I could not give a vote to Margo McDonald, whom I like) and finally the ballot I had known would give me trouble: I couldn't make up my mind to Malcolm Chisholm, whom I regard as one of the good guys (he's three times resigned from a ministerial post over a point of conscience) or Shirley-Anne Somerville, who's also worked hard and whose politics I like. I'm not a wholehearted Labour or SNP supporter, so in this instance it did come down to candidates - and in all honesty, Somerville had the additional boost that I like getting to vote for women. But. I stood there in the voting booth looking at the two names I had to choose between, and my final honest assessment was; I can only choose one, and I'm not in favour of independence, and if the SNP get a majority this time, they've said they'll have a referendum on independence. So Malcolm Chisholm/Labour got my vote.

Then I lay down on my bed for half an hour. Then I got up and did soup, which I'd meant to do before I went out (but of course I slept in...) and now I'm lying down again. I really should get up and go back to the polling station - I meant to get out for lunchtime voters, but I was so damn tired.... I still am, but I really do want to get out there while it's still not-raining. I have a brolly. Even if it's raining.

It was interesting standing there in the morning handing out flyers. Some wouldn't take them. One person asked me if I was allowed to (yes, so long as I wear a badge clearly identifying me as part of a campaign) and at least one person thought I was giving out ballots (weird) and several people asked me what the referendum was about, which I tried to explain reasonably briefly.

Okay. Need to pull myself together and get out again. Give that polling station another hour of my time anyway.

I stayed away from Twitter and IJ yesterday, in order to avoid getting into unnecessary flaming rows with friends who are going all goo-ey over the FRW. Last time something like this happened (the first Royal Wedding remake) I could just stop reading the papers for two days (and stay away from TV).

Yes, I am a flaming anti-Royalist.

As a result, I missed news that mattered much more to me: Joanna Russ died.

I read The Female Man for the first time when I was 17, and was almost afraid of how uncomfortable the anger made me. I have re-read it many times since, growing less uncomfortable with the anger as I grew older. I loved her wit: she wrote some of the funniest SF and feminist short stories I've read - I must use Abebooks to finally acquire a copy of the Zanzibar Cat.

Roz Kaveney noted on Twitter that while Russ had written some transphobic sentiments in The Female Man, she had, later, simply acknowledged she was wrong - that time and the education of meeting real people had taught her better.

I knew Russ wasn't well: I knew she hadn't been writing much in some time. I didn't know she was in a hospice. She'd written a story which referenced herself and her back pain and being able to take care of herself ("The Dirty Little Girl"). I never met her in life, though when visiting Arizona in 2004 I did play with the idea of going to Tucson and trying to score a double - meeting Barbara Kingsolver and Joanna Russ on the same day. (It was a playful idea rather than a serious plan: I knew Russ was ill even then, and unplanned visits by fans are notoriously spoiling of writing time: and besides, my experience with meeting Samuel R. Delany was that I would spend most of my time with my mouth slightly open with awe trying to think of something to say.)

In other news, on the eve of RW, the Metropolitan police arrested a pensioner couple and another participant in a planned street theatre event for Friday

In an online posting, the Government of the Dead group says the “Zombie Wedding” event was scheduled to begin with a wedding breakfast at 9.30am on 29 April in Soho Square, central London, before moving on for a “Zombie Fertility Rite” at the Eros statue in Piccadilly Square, and then on to Westminster Abbey where it says “heads will roll”.

Now I wonder what David Cameron, who claimed to be all for unplanned street parties, will have to say about the arrest of three people who were planning what amounted to an unplanned street party?

Video of their arrest (a friend keeps repeatedly asking to get their housekeys so that he can get in to feed their rabbit)

Irritatingly, one of my favourite feminist blogs was getting all overwhelmed about the lovely froofy dresses and the silly hats and indifferent or actively hostile to anyone bringing up anything else.

On the same day, Facebook ran a purge of activist's pages, deleting over fifty anti-cuts activist groups. The Guardian report quotes Facebook saying that people have got to use their real names when setting up profiles, anyone who doesn't will be purged (and anyone who does will risk arrest, of course - and worse, in some countries).

Someone called CharlotteV on Twitter tweeted about someone I'd never heard of, Tim Fallon, claiming he'd linked FPTP to slavery. (It turned out that she had typo'd Fallon for Farron, and that her claim was a typical Daily Mail exaggeration of a fair historical point.) I looked up Vere, who is currently working as Finance Director of the NoToAV campaign, and found she'd stood as the Conservative candidate for Brighton Pavilion - and lost. Not humiliatingly, but she came third - that's Caroline Lucas's constituency, England's only Green MP. (BBC)

The majority in that constituency was 2.4%. There were 7 parties with candidates standing and one independent candidate, but four of them only got 2.2% of the vote - in fact the Citizens for Undead Rights and Equality got more votes than the Independent candidate. Voters who chose the UK Independence Party (948 of them) might have chosen Conservative as their second preference if they had AV, and voters who chose the Socialist Labour Party (148 of them) might have chosen Labour (or possibly Green) as their second preference: and under AV, where voters knew they could have a second and a third preference, any of the four who came last in 2010 might have got more votes - even the person standing as Leo Atreides might have got more than 19 people voting for him if they knew they could then choose someone else ..... anyone else.

(You have to get at least 5% not to lose your deposit: I wonder how they'd count that under AV? 5% of first preferences would be fair. Leo Atreides was a Seriously Loony candidate, of course, though serious bloggers Were Not Amused. I generally approve of Seriously Loony candidates - since the electoral commission stopped announcing the number of spoiled ballots, it's the only way for a voter to indicate "I hate you ALL!" on a ballot. One clear advantage of AV: we hopefully would have more Seriously Loony candidates.)

In Brighton Pavilion, the lowest of four big parties with a respectable share of the vote was the LibDems, who would have been knocked out in the 5th round after Atreides, Undead Rights, Socialist Labour, & UKIP had gone. Their second preference votes, 7159 of them, would have been redistributed between Conservative, Green, and Labour, for the final two rounds of vote-counting.

So before the second preferences from the LibDem voters are counted, assuming first-preference voting is the same: 12,275 voted Conservative, plus (probably) second preference votes from 948 UKIP voters. 14,986 votes Labour, plus (probably) second preference votes from 148 Socialist Labour Party voters. 16,238 vote Green.

While some of the 7159+ LibDem voters might well have gone Conservative, in order to get through to the final round of voting, Charlotte Vere would have had to pick up at least 2711 LibDem second preference votes - more than a third - even if Labour got none. Which is unlikely in itself. Let us suppose, however, that every single LibDem voter in Brighton Pavilion voted either Green or Conservative as their second preference, and that Vere managed to pick up enough LibDem second preference votes that she beat out Labour's 14,986 first preference votes and was through to the last round. Does that help her win?

No. Because that means the 14,986 people who chose Labour as their first preference now get their second preference vote counted: and while a small fraction of them may genuinely have liked Charlotte Vere as a person and thought her worth supporting as an individual (it does happen!) - the vast majority of them, one can say quite safely, would have chosen Green, LibDem, Socialist Labour Party, or even UKIP or Zombie Equality in preference to Conservative. Which means the Greens, already ahead on first preferences (and probably also already benefiting from the second and third preferences of voters) achieve a clear lead and win the election, just as they did in 2010.

To win under First Past the Post, Charlotte Vere would only have had to gain 3965 votes: which is at least a semi-realistic goal. To win under AV, she would have had to be personable and respected enough to convince a significant majority of people who would normally vote either Labour or LibDem. I won't say it's impossible - many people do vote for the person rather than the party, though this especially applies when the person is an incumbent who's known to do good work for her constituency, or sometimes at a byelection when the former incumbent has managed to make themselves so notorious that their challenger is supported regardless of party.

----
Update: Just to clarify further why Conservatives have good reason to oppose any change to First Past The Post. Let's suppose Charlotte Vere worked very extra hard and did get 3970 more Conservative voters out on election day: so the results from 2010 would then be:

LibDem: 7159
Labour: 14,986
Green: 16,238
Conservative: 16,245

50% of the vote: 27000+.

Under First Past The Post, Charlotte Vere wins by a tiny margin - undoubtedly entailing recounts, checks of spoiled ballots, but nonetheless: if she gets the most votes, she goes to Parliament.

Under AV (ignoring for convenience the 4 minor parties and supposing that the second preference 7159 LibDem votes are pretty evenly distributed between the 3 major parties) the penultimate round looks like this:

Labour: 17,350
Green: 18,620
Conservative: 18,640

At that point, the Labour round is knocked out, and 14,986 more second preferences come into play, plus the 2000+ Lib Dem voters who have Labour as a second preference and something else as a third preference. Suppose the Labour second-preferences were evenly split between Green and Lib Dem: suppose half of the Lib Dems who had Labour as their second preference had failed to put a third preference or had picked Conservative as their third preference or Leo Atreides or Zombie Rights. But odds are:

Conservatives pick up maybe a few dozen third preference votes.
Green picks up several thousand second preference votes from Labour and probably at least a thousand third preference votes from those who originally chose LibDem.

Conservative: 19,579 (16,245 people who wanted Tory first of all: 2386 people who wanted Tory if they couldn't have LibDem: 948 people who wanted Tory if they couldn't have UKIP or Zombie Rights or Leo Atreides or... well, hell, even Labour in preference to Green.)

Green: 27,217 (16,238 people who wanted Green first of all: 7493 people who wanted Green if they couldn't have Labour: 2386 people who wanted Green if they couldn't have LibDem: 1100 people who wanted Green if they couldn't have LibDem or Labour...)

And that is why Charlotte Vere thinks AV is "unfair": it puts a crushing burden on Tory politicians as the only major right-wing party. They can pick up some voters from the second preferences of LibDems or even Greens, but they can't get the big advantage that any of the left-of-centre parties can get - that their voters would rather anything but keep the Tories out.

----

This is skewed for me as a Scot, because in Scotland, the LibDems have generally had to present themselves as a fairly left-wing of liberal party in order to compete with Labour, Scottish Green, and SNP - the Conservatives have long ago fallen to fourth place and are neither competition nor coalition material in the Scottish Parliament. But my impression is that until last year's debacle, the LibDems were presenting themselves UK-wide as a more comfy alternative to Labour - that any three-way battle for a constitutency between Labour, LibDems, and Conservatives, would generally mean that once either Labour or LibDems were knocked out in the penultimate round, the other party would benefit from their votes. This is also certainly what the Conservatives think, and is why they and their donors (the bankers who are more and more the owners of the Conservative Party) are fighting so hard for NoToAV.

From what I can perceive, an honest majority of NoToAV voters have simply seen from the well-funded Tory campaign that AV will be expensive (one NoToAV lie was that it would cost £250 million, which they break down as: £91M for the referendum, £130 million for fictional voting machines, £26M for educating voters, £3M just tacked on to sound bigger... so propaganda, outright invention, possible but patronising, and plain lie) or that AV is unfair. (The argument that it's not fair because the winner is the one who came first is particularly weird in a country as officially World-Cup obsessed as we regularly are: the winner in the World Cup, or any other football championship, is not the team that scores the most goals in the first round.)

Charlotte Vere herself keeps arguing that "some" second preferences won't be counted, which is true: in the Brighton Pavilion election, if you voted Conservative as your first choice and LibDem as your second preference, your second preference vote couldn't be counted because by the time the Conservatives are knocked out of the election, so are the LibDems. (I don't know if the electoral commission would then rule that AV counters could then count your third preference, supposing that was for a party still in the race: that would be fair.)

What's certain is that the parties that will benefit will be consistently those who manage to appeal to large numbers of voters who don't consistently vote according to strict party allegience. I'm one of those voters: while I've voted Labour more often than for any other party, I have also voted Green or Scottish Green, and I would - and do, when I have the option in local elections using STV - have SNP and LibDem and Scottish Socialists as second or third preferences. What I have never done, never wanted to do, is vote Conservative or for any of the other right-wing parties.

Change First Past The Post, and the face of UK politics will change. Not immediately, but surely. The large minority who loyally vote Tory won't change, and as the Tories have emphatically warned us, they may start proliferating more smaller right-wing parties. But the majority of people who vote in the UK have always tended to vote leftish/liberal - and the proliferation of parties and the need for big parties to have wider appeal will happen on our side of the fence, too. No one can really say they know what will happen in the long term: but in the short term, even over the next generation, Murdoch and Rothermere and the other Tory financiers have looked at their chances of keeping their party in government, and they don't like the odds.

When Charlotte Vere says on Twitter "I have a horrible suspicion that most people don't actually have more than one preference" I think this definitely speaks to her political experience as a loyal Conservative communicating with loyal Tory voters. But it's not true of those of us who are generally left-wing/liberal - we have a stack of preferences. Our problem in getting them into Parliament is that the only way of doing that is by trying to vote tactically - in past general elections, I remember people quite literally trading votes - offering to vote as a LibDem to unseat the incumbent Tory, if a LibDem in another constitutency would vote Labour to unseat the Tory there. What AV does is effectively institutionalise tactical voting: something Tories have generally been against because, blindfolded and futile though it was, voting tactically was a means of getting Tories out because a majority of voters were prepared to vote either LibDem or Labour.

What AV will do for smaller parties is not yet known. PR changed the face of Scottish politics most unexpectedly, in 2003, when people woke up to the fact that their second vote for a party could mean substantial Green and Socialist representation in Holyrood (and the 2007 debacle, which I still think is almost as shameful as Florida 2000, where the parties advantaged by the mistakes on the ballot papers simply declined to examine the evidence). But I think we would see more smaller parties risking election, getting their say, if for no other reason that so long as they got 5% of first preferences they wouldn't lose their deposit - and more people would be willing to cast a first preference vote for the Socialist Labour Party, which may be the party of their dreams and wishes, and then a second-preference vote for Green, which may be the party with a realistic chance of winning whose policies they're substantially in agreement with, and then a third-preference vote for Labour or LibDem (and perhaps a fourth-preference for LibDem or Labour) because at least that way they stand a chance of keeping the Tories out.

I don't think AV is a perfect system. But it's certainly substantially fairer than First Past the Post. It leaves opportunity open for future electoral reform (perhaps PR, such as we have in Scottish Parliament elections). And all the Tories seem to have to set against it is the unspeakable truth that, under AV, they would have to make a much better attempt to appeal to voters who aren't one-party allegience, I-always-vote-Tory people. Charlotte Vere may look at Brighton Pavilion and think: under First Past the Post I could win, if I got just a bit higher turnout of Conservative voters, if LibDem voters stayed home in disgust, if Conservative Party policy went a bit Greener... but under AV she doesn't stand a chance. And that, I think, is the root motivation of her constant tweets of the unfairness of AV: voters, given the ability to express a second preference, will mostly not be using their second or third preference for the Tories.



I am endeavouring still to get votes for chocolate in my online Green & Black election, by the way. Vote! (And, if you're UK-eligible, vote on 5th May of course.)

I read a blogpost from November 2006 about the McMansions being built for middle-class Americans, and this moved me to go look for stuff about foreclosures in that state, and found a couple of items in Business Insider: June 2009, and April 2011. If I were Jonah, I would be gleeful, I suppose: the Ninevites didn't listen.

On 5th May I have three votes. One of them is my constituency vote, and I'm torn whether I vote for a female SNP MSP or a male Labour MSP. Both have good points and bad. I'm not keen on either party. One of them is my list vote, and here it's simpler: I'm going to vote Green. I like the Scottish Green party. The third is the referendum vote: and that's simplest of all. I'm going to vote Yes.

Reasons for doing so are multiple. There is the simplistic and tribal: the Tory party and their funders want a No victory, and I'd rather bleed out of my eyeballs than vote Tory.

The Tories want a No victory because they rightly calculate that a Yes victory will put an end to their centuries of dominance in government - on a minority of the vote. That's a good reason for voting Yes in itself, since I think they're right.

While AV isn't perfect, a No vote is a vote for the status quo, and a victory for the status quo (especially as England is likely to have a low turnout, and people who don't show up for referendums are assumed to be voting with their feet for the status quo) puts an end to electoral reform in Westminster elections for a generation.

The No to AV campaign has been thoroughly dishonest and patronising. Everyone campaigns with their own slant, obviously, but No to AV has come out with utter falsehoods, like the repeated claim that Australia (the largest country to use AV) is thinking about changing it for FPTP. Patronising: repeatedly, steadily, the Conservatives have told people that AV is too complicated for them to understand. I suppose it is unfair to argue that they deserve to lose for being so bloody patronising, but it would certainly be extraordinarily satisfying for them to do so. (AV is the system the Conservatives used to choose their leader at the last leadership election: if David Cameron's arguments against AV are to be taken seriously, he thinks David Davis ought to be leader of the Tories, not him. )

I've read just one sustained, intelligent, and honest argument for First Past The Post in the entire campaign so far - not from a politician but from a friend. (I disagreed with her, but it was a good positive argument.) The NoToAV campaign, and most of the supporters, are arguing not for the superior qualities of First Past The Post versus Alternative Vote (most of them appear genuinely to have no idea what they are, but to repeat muddled falsehoods about AV from the official campaign) but attacking people who support AV (racist comments about Papua New Guinea, anti-LibDem remarks about Nick Clegg) and making stuff up about how AV works.

I've been trying to collect votes for Green & Black chocolate bars in a mini-election. I've got nine, which is not really enough, and I'm still hoping for a few more as we count down to 5th May. (vote?) Admittedly my friends are all rather smart people. But no one's come back with "How does this work?" or "But if I choose more than one chocolate, that means you'll be counting my vote more than once!" So I'm thinking these are not natural misunderstandings, but deliberate confusions invented by the Tories.

I'm just depressed that the YesToAV campaign has done no better.

I have been writing posts for my journal and not posting them for a couple of days, because they seem too weak weird and wambling. Because I write them too late at night. Because they give too much away and I am too tired to edit them and then it's the next morning and I have to go to work.



But today I am on holiday, and will be on holiday for 11 days. So at least I can manage to post something every day.

( wamblings )

I'm going to vote Yes to AV because a No is going to be read (by Labour as by Conservative) as a vote in support of First Past the Post, which is not a system I support. I find it irritating that a win on AV will mean I vote three different ways depending which election I'm voting in, but I do that anyway with FPtP.

But I am interested to know how an AV election would work if you had no parties - no obvious front-runner candidates. So, following the tradition of electoral systems explained using confectionary, a Green & Black election for your favourite chocolate bar: how would you vote if the winner was going to be your only chocolate for up to five years?

Almond
Butterscotch
Caramel
Cherry
Creamy Milk
Dark 70%
Dark 85%
Espresso
Ginger
Hazelnut & Currant
Maya Gold
Milk
Mint
Raisin & Hazelnut
White

You must list in order of preference - you can't choose two chocolates as equal first. You can have as many preferences as you like. If you don't like a chocolate at all, don't vote for it at all - don't put it anywhere on your list of preferences.

All comments will be screened. Anonymous voting is allowed (and I'd love it if you linked this post - the more votes the better) but if I get more than one vote from the same IP address I'll delete all but the first.

( Frequently used words: abortion after around been bus didn't doing eight either feel fifteen five foot get go got half having he her home i've ibuprofin just least me military minutes my past people pool pregnant she soldier soldiers still took two walked water where work )

I chopped up the celeriac root I bought at the market, with a couple of parsnips and four small onions and four smallish potatoes from the organic box, and put them all into my slow cooker with a couple of tiny dried chillies crumbled and a mushroom stock cube. Eight and a half hours on low should be done: I'll mash it with chopped mushrooms and grated cheese and bake it.

Yesterday I made beery vegetable soup with K: potatoes and parsnips and carrots and onions and the stem of a broccoli, chopped up and cooked in oil and then a strong beer (that we figured we wouldn't like drinking because it was one of the two I'd bought that had been aged in whisky casks: the one we tried to drink, we ended up pouring away) and I put the broccoli florets in the counter-top oven and cooked them top/bottom for 10 minutes and then broiled the cheese on top for 10 minutes. Soup in bowls, broccoli on soup.

"I do eat better when you're around," K said, rather wistfully.

I spent Sunday afternoon to Monday with her: about 24 hours. Stepdog sat on top of me twice, and generally acted like he was pleased to see me and I shouldn't go away again. Even though I yelled at him to get OFF the bed. (He knows damn well he is Not Allowed to sleep on the bed when I'm in it, but he pushes the boundaries with how soon he's allowed to jump up on the bed once I'm out of it, not to mention whether he's allowed to take a nap before I get into bed.)

Now I need to go out and head to a bookshop that will sell me a book by Krugman that I need to have read three chapters of before my economics class tonight. K is via her eBay account (since she is way more experienced at buying electronics stuff on eBay than I) at the moment engaged in getting me a lovely new charger for my laptop. This may not fix the problem altogether, but at a tenner, it seems worth a try - my current charger definitely appears to be faulty. Am hoping that we can get this to me by Thursday, so I can take my laptop with me to Redemption on Friday with a joyous and a cheerful heart and keep going on 750words.

We had That Conversation about how virtually everything I've been paid to write has been published under a corporate name and virtually everything published under my name has been done for free. (I have That Conversation quite often, with people who see how often and how much I write and yet am not, by writerly standards, A Published Author.)

I rang Blackwells, and the nice lady (her voice was definitely that of a Nice Lady) said she would go check to be sure they did have copies and call me back. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman - we were reading The Enigma of Capital by David Harvey, in which he (incidentally) predicted the student uprisings at the end of 2010, ongoing. That got finished at a meeting I wasn't at because of my foot, so I read the last chapter by myself. (She has called me back. They do have a copy. It will be left for me at the order collections department on the 1st floor. Oh well, I guess I can ask for it at the sales desk on the ground floor. There is no lift, unless they've had one put in suddenly.)

Polly Toynebee notes in the Guardian that if we let David Cameron sell off the NHS it is gone forever: NHS turmoil is just the start of Tory ideology run wild.

I took a couple of ibuprofin on Sunday about 1pm, and then took no painkillers at all (but a glass of wine at an event sort-of work-related) till 8am this morning (another two ibuprofin). That's the longest stretch I've done totally without painkillers since, well, 8th January. I was aching all over by the time I went to bed, indescribably weary, Monday night (I'd also done a wash and hung up my clothes and taken my sourdough starter out for an airing). But I feel OK now. The thing is, I'm really all mended: I just need to keep exercising. And for that I need painkillers. But I want to quit taking the painkillers. Not because I have a love for pain or aching but just because the lessening in pain without painkillers tells me that my body is healing - whereas just taking the painkillers and not feeling the pain tells me nothing.

My parents came round for dinner tonight. First time I've seen them since early January, whenever it was K and I went round for lunch.

They entirely omitted to ask after K, but I'm fairly sure it's not because they've twigged but because, seeing me, they fell into usual patterns of speech, which for my mum, means telling me about the place where she volunteers and how badly managed it all is: and which does not include asking after any of my friends.

Can you describe me in three words? (You can link it up to Facebook, but I wish you wouldn't. Facebook is on my big Do Not Want list right now, except for getting to chat with melancharisbron.)

Latest government approval is at minus 25 (Approve 30%, Disapprove 55%). David Cameron is aligned wth "nutters, anti-Semites, people who deny climate change exists and homophobes", said Nick Clegg. Of course that was before Clegg became a Tory, when he was trying to present the LibDems as an alternative to the Conservatives not as a clone. But he was right: the MEP group the Tories founded in the European Parliament is the worst right-wing elements in the EU. Guardian, today.

So there's that. Also, the bones in my foot that broke have healed, and I should now be eating painkillers and just walking on both feet, even though it's going to hurt. Which reminds me, painkillers, also hot water bottles, also bed.

There's a story under the cut about Americans dying because the corporations who run their country have decided it is economically unnecessary that they should have healthcare when making them pay for health insurance, then denying them treatment (plus scoring more money from high co-pays) is so much more profitable.

The National Health Service was founded after WWII, by a Labour government who had to run a country with infrastructure torn apart by war: so many people killed (for US comprehension: more people died in the Blitz, about 14 months of WWII, than US soldiers were killed in Vietnam over 15 years): a massive debt: a massive deficit.

Faced with that situation, the UK government saw only one thing to do, and they did it: they spent. They raised taxes on the rich, they spent massively on infrastructure, on welfare, on services, on education. They created a ground-breaking concept: a nation that provided healthcare free at point of access, to anyone in need.

If the current numpties in government, with their bleating about the deficit and the debt means they just have to cut services and cut spending and sell off forests and the NHS has got to be privatised and we can't afford to educate the next generation, had been in power after WWII: we'd be in the crap today. My dad would be dead. My mum would probably be immobile in whatever nursing home we could afford, because they'd have lost their home paying my dad's medical bills. I'd be panicking, right now, about what my broken foot will cost me in medical bills.

The way out of a recession isn't to cut back on public spending. The Tories and the Lib Dems are lying about that. (George Osborne may not be lying: I can believe he's just that ignorant.) Labour, I do believe, know better, but they've bitten into the Big Narrative, the belief that they can't speak the truth and be believed: so they witter a bit about how they'd cut less, they'd "reduce the deficit" with their cuts more slowly. Silly talk: you do not reduce a deficit by cutting spending, you reduce a deficit by growing the economy which means increasing spending. This is something everyone with any basic education in economics knows, and something anyone who's ever paid any attention to a national economy knows. (George Osborne has no education in economics, and I can believe he's never paid attention to any economy but the one that hosts his trust fund so he doesn't have to pay UK taxes.)

The US has been cutting back on public spending, and cutting taxes on the rich, since Reagan's time: and as a direct result many people in the US live in what amounts to a Third World country with better supermarkets. They work until they die, and they'll never see a long retirement or enjoy what they have of it: they exist, in the corporate eye of the US government, to make money for their betters, and when they can't work any more, why spend anything on their healthcare?

That's the direction Cameron and Osborne and his fellow Tories want to take the UK in. That's the direction the Lib Dems have agreed to walk in, hand-in-hand with their leading partner. That's what the Tory funders, the banks, want to see: a country where we exist merely to provide our work.

And their rationale for it is founded on two lies that Labour won't challenge: that the recession is caused by Labour government overspend, and the deficit will be reduced if the Tories shrink the economy by throwing people out of work and cutting public services.

On 19th February - 4 days after Bob Diamond and other bankers get their millions in bonuses (our money - we gave them billions) there's going to be a UK Uncut day of action against the banks. It's also the day I should be able to take my cast off and walk.

To the nearest branch of Barclays, perhaps, to ask Bob Diamond where my thank-you card is. I gave him £31K, apparently - more money than I earn in a year - so he owes me a little thank you for his £9M bonus next Tuesday.

( American healthcare tops the rankings in only one thing: cost )

On Twitter, an American observer, James Salsman, asks: Please explain to this Yank why LibDems are still in coalition. What could possibly be in it for them? Doesn't electorial math & polling suggest they're going to lose big next election by selling out like that?

To which I answered (on Twitlonger)

The LibDem MPs aren't just going to leave the coalition for a number of reasons: for the 17 LibDem MPs who are Ministers, they're in power for the first time in their political careers, with all the trimmings - even bigger salary than as plain MP, car with chauffeur, certainty of well-paid company directorships on leaving office. All of which they would lose, if they left their party or even voted against the coalition. For the backbench MPs, they can vote against the coalition to a certain extent (though the coalition Whips clearly know what they're doing in keeping backbench rebels in line, since they got the exact minimum they needed to pass the tuition fee vote). But for the LibDem MPs to formally leave the coalition, they would have to resign from the Party.

This is both emotionally difficult for an MP to do, and is frequently political suicide for the MP that does it, unless they have such strong links to their constitutency that they will win an election running as an Independent candidate against the party candidates. As backbench MPs, they can always try to keep up a pattern of sufficient rebellion against ConDem policies that they will hope to survive the mass loss of LibDem seats in the next General Election: or they can hope that Nick Clegg is right, that things will get better and the LibDems won't be quite wiped out: and even if Clegg is wrong and they lose, they will still be Party members with a right to the support and whatever jobs or placements the LibDems can offer. It may be good, it may be bad, but it would be predictable. Whereas if they left the party and forced the LibDems out of government, they would be stepping into an unknown unpredictable future, their only certainty a vile contumely from the right-wing media for forcing the Tories to govern as a minority party - and the strong possibility of an early General Election which none but the Tory party can afford to fight right now.

I don't know how LibDem leadership elections work, whether the ordinary membership can call one at any time, but at this stage mass grassroots rebellion by ordinary LibDem members against Nick Clegg as the leader is probably the only way in which LibDem MPs can leave the coalition, remain LibDem MPs, and avoid personal contumely from the Tory press - though the party will get verbally beaten up if such a rebellion were to succeed.

And there's still the problem that as no one but the Tories can afford another General Election campaign, if they were to leave the coalition, the LibDem MPs would still have to vote in support of Tory policy - or run the risk of another General Election which would leave the party broke.

I want to nominate Fitwatch for a Big Society Award.

This is amusing in all sorts of ways, especially if enough people nominate Fitwatch that it becomes more than just an Internet joke.

What does the group, organisation or individual do? Please provide a brief description of the groups, organisations, individuals work and activities (550 characters)

"Fitwatch protects the British right to public protest without intimidation or harassment. In recent years Forward Intelligence Teams have been used by British police forces in an attempt to disrupt and deter public protests. Fitwatch protects the public and the right of public protest by researching and publishing information about FIT and other intelligence gathering carried out by the police and other agencies against the general public, and by supporting peaceful direct action against such intelligence gathering."

In this section, please explain how your nominee(s) exemplifies the Big Society vision. We are looking for nominations that exemplify one or more of the three main aims of the Big Society.
Please answer each of the following questions in up to 2,200 each characters, showing what achievements make the nominee(s) stand out from others.
Which of the three aims of the Big Society does this individual, group or organisation demonstrate and how?

These are:
- Empowering communities - helping and enabling local people to have a say in how decisions are made in their area.

YES: Fitwatch empowers local communities and helps local people have a say in how decisions are made by supporting their legal right to public protest against decisions the local community do not support. No one should be treated as a criminal or a criminal suspect by the police because they disagree with decisions made by any level of government and they are prepared to stand up in public and say so.

- Opening up public services - Public sector organisations and individuals demonstrating innovative ways of delivering public services and/or charities, social enterprises, private companies showing new ways of delivering public services.

YES: Fitwatch makes the point that the police should provide a public service: it is their job to help us protest, not to treat us as criminals for protesting. Fitwatch is a third sector voluntary organisation that shows a new way of delivering a public service.

- Promoting social action - encouraging people to be more involved in their communities and to volunteer and give money.

YES: Fitwatch promotes social action by protesting against police work which discourages people from becoming more involved in their communities.

(I may skip the middle answer, as Fitwatch is neither a public sector or a private sector organisation, to expand on the third - how Fitwatch promotes social action.)

The next step:

Supporting evidence: Please obtain names and contact details of up to two independent people who would endorse this nomination (a minimum of one person is required)

Would you be willing to endorse this nomination? If so, please leave your real name and valid contact details in a comment (all comments screened, and obviously I won't unscreen any that include contact details).

You need to be a British citizen or a legal British resident to endorse, I'm assuming: seems logical.

I'm not giving any more details about Fitwatch because I'm not just asking for the sake of asking: if you know about Fitwatch & want to endorse, please do.

I tweeted when I heard about it:

Royal Wedding 1981 - major cost overrun, project abandoned 1996. Now the Windsors want to do a remake for 2011, different actors, same plot?

The thing that actually made me LOL (literally: I startled my co-worker, and he didn't find it as funny as I did):

Several of the fawningly-obsequious news stories about the remake mention that Prince William gave Kate Middleton his mother's engagement ring.

Now, I get that, well, she's his mum. And she's dead. And bearing that in mind as a strictly family thing, him wanting her to have it is a sweet gesture.

To the entire rest of the world?

Charles picked out Diana Spencer from the available herd of appropriately-ancestor'd young women as one who was "suitable" (young, virginal, and without career ambitions), and got married to her grimly to produce an heir and spare. The marriage was a wreck, the couple stayed together for 15 years almost certainly because of family pressure and social expectations: and her death in a drunk-driving accident a year or so later was such a clear public relief to the Royal Family business that many people promptly assumed they must be responsible for it - most forgiveably, Mohamed Al-Fayed. (Just for the sake of clarity: like the WTC attack was the best thing that could have happened to the Bush-Cheney presidency doesn't mean they did it, no, I don't believe the car crash was caused by anything but a drunk driver running the speed limits and his passengers not wearing seat belts.) Her engagement ring from 30 years ago is not a romantic trophy, it's not something to sigh sweetly over: it's a memento of a disaster.

It's a sick joke.

(I've quite liked Diana Spencer Windsor as much as you can like a celebrity really ever since her AIDS charity work - it was notable that after she got herself photographed shaking hands with people with AIDS, the media crap about how JUST TOUCHING someone with AIDS could get you infected, just withered away. That was a genuinely useful thing for someone with the Royal Family aura to do, and she did it. The mountain of crap that piled up after her death about how lovely a wonderful person she was, though...)

And now we shall go through the whole crap crap crap crap crap crap royal wedding crap crap crap crap crap AGAIN.

Phil Woolas is the Labour MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth and has been so since 1997. In past elections he won handily with about 40% of the vote. His voting record is that of a party-loyal MP. He fiddled his expenses, though it was one of those amusing/embarrassing claims (he slipped some small items through in "food receipts" which ordinarily evidently weren't checked item by item) rather than the spluttering WTF? WTF? of MPs who simply made use of their expenses forms to claim another salary. (Woolas comes across badly mainly because instead of apologising for a slip and paying back the fairly trivial sums, he got mad at the people who had exposed his and other MPs who were fiddling the system.)

In the general election last May, Woolas won by just over a hundred votes more than his LibDem opponent, Elwyn Watkins. During the campaign, Woolas had a leaflet produced: Will you stand by Phil? which is a clear incitement to racial hatred: he claims that the Lib Dems want to punish him for being "strong on immigration" (Woolas was Immigration Minister from October 2008, and voted solidly for all of Labour's anti-asylum policies) and there's a background picture of stereotype-Muslims waving stereotype placards threatening beheadings. Phil Woolas claimed that Elwyn Watkins had "wooed" Islamic extremists and failed to condemn attacks by radical groups.

I picked up an election leaflet once when I was very small, and, confused by what it was saying about a man whom I'd heard very different things from my parents, asked my dad whether there weren't rules about telling lies. My dad told me that technically there were - you are not allowed to tell an outright lie about your opponent. But, he said, in political campaigning, it is widely regarded as normal to speak the truth in misleading ways - and certainly to find the worst possible aspect of your opponent and make that the thing everyone thinks of. Sometimes this amounts to lying, but so long as you can present a reasonable case that you believe it to be true, it's allowed. (This would have been sometime in the 1970s: my dad may even have mentioned Richard Hazleton (though I doubt he would have done so by name) as the last person who, in 1911, had the election result overturned by courts because of "corrupt practices".)

Phil Woolas said things about Elwyn Watkins in approved election material (there is no question of foisting the material off on to his agent) that, the court established, Woolas knew were untrue when he said them: his motivation was quite evidently to stir up racial hatred among white voters to try to get them out to the polls for him, because he knew that the margin of victory between him and Watkins was going to be very close. (from e-mails between Wooolas's team "If we don't get the white folk angry he [Woolas]'s gone.") Besides various statements about Watkins and "Asians" intended to make white voters mad, Woolas also claimed that Watkins had grossly overspent his allowed electoral expenses (claiming that Watkins was funnelling money from a rich foreign donor) and that Watkins had failed to move to the constituency.

It is not illegal to try to stir up bigotry in order to win a British election. I have to say this: I wish it was illegal. It might often be difficult to prove, but it's never been illegal. candidates are allowed to publish material which essentially says "My opponent is Irish/black/gay/female, and I am English/white/straight/male; vote for me" It wouldn't even have been illegal for Woolas to try to spin his record as Immigration Minister versus an opponent's more liberal record on asylum seekers and immigration, to claim that he was much more racist and bigoted than his opponent and people should vote for him accordingly.

What was illegal was telling outright lies. The court determined that not only had Woolas told lies, the narrowness of the election and the distribution of the lies - indicated strongly that his lies had won him the election: the May results were overturned and a by-election will be run ... ordinarily, just three weeks after the court decision.

Except that Woolas now wants to appeal and the Speaker of the House, John Bercow, is delaying the date of the by-election. Several MPs are claiming that Woolas did nothing out of the ordinary and this is shutting down the "robust debate" that an election needs. (Like the rabid cross-party defense of the expenses claims, this suggests strongly that the MPs in question do not want their electoral strategies looked at too closely.)

Obviously losing one Labour MP (and possibly gaining one LibDem MP to join the ConDem coalition) is not good. But Woolas's political strategy was both vile and illegal: he doesn't deserve to keep his seat, and the best thing he could do if he cared for his party would be to walk away promptly and let another Labour candidate fight the election. Should he feel upset at being bullied by the Labour Party, let's hope the National Anti-Bullying Helpline would treat him better than he deserves.

The silliest argument is "Judges shouldn't be allowed to determine elections!" which I have seen more than once. No judge is determining the result of the future by-election. A judge has simply ruled that how Phil Woolas won his election in May was illegal: that result isn't allowed to stand. Beyond paying the court costs (extensive, especially when you're not on an MP's salary) Phil Woolas isn't penalised: he is free to present himself as a candidate for election in Oldham East and Saddleworth, and if enough of his constituents feel he was hard-done-by and turn out to vote for him, in a few weeks he'll be an MP again. And if not... well, that too is the will of the electorate.

This is something everybody knows: We have a Tory government in Westminster, with a handful of LibDems in ministerial positions. The leader of the LibDems, Nick Clegg, has the power only to withdraw his party's MPs from government, losing the Deputy Prime Minister salary, privileges, and all Ministerial cars: thus forcing the Tories to rule as a minority government, or to have an early General Election. We have a Scottish National Party (SNP) in government in Holyrood, which avoids ruling as a minority government only because they got the two Green MSPs on board. Both of these governments are referred to as "coalitions", though really we need another word for them, since in both instances the smaller party is too small to have much power beyond the nuclear option.) The next Scottish Parliament elections are in May: the Tory government decided, without consulting Holyrood, that the UK-wide referendum on changing the voting system ought to be held the same day.

This is something David Dimbleby, who comperes Question Time, apparently doesn't know: the Scottish Government has no power to change the dates of the Scottish elections, they're fixed by the Scotland Act.

This is something apparently David Cameron, George Osborne, and Nick Clegg, millionaires all (in fact, you have to look hard to find a non-millionaire in that cabinet of all the rich men) didn't know: when you cut government departments by 40% you throw large numbers of people out of work and ensure that the remainder are struggling to do the rest of the work. When you declare that people with lifelong disabilities will from now on receive help only for a year, when you decide that people who rent from private landlords in cities like London or Edinburgh shouldn't get that level of housing benefit (and not at all if they're under 35) you ensure predictable wide-scale homelessness of a brutal kind that even right-wing newspapers will notice and criticise. These rich kids playing with our government have the power to hurt us all, and the recent Budget says they will. Among the other things they cut was the block grant Scotland gets.

This is something nobody knows: What will happen now?

The SNP government at Holyrood will announce their spending review at the end of November. Everyone knows Alex Salmond will do whatever he thinks will get his party re-elected to government in May: nobody knows what that will be. (He has the power to raise or lower taxes in Scotland to a limited extent: he could shield Scotland from the worst brutality of the Tory cuts. If he wanted to.)

This is something nobody knows: once the spending review is out, who will be out of work by the end of the year, who out of work by the end of March next year, who part-time? A very largwe proportion of the Scottish working population have public service or third sector jobs. Throw too many people out of work, the economy tanks: Scots in private sector jobs lose too.

This is something nobody knows: will the next election be a straight-up Labour - SNP fight? All of us old enough to remember the 1980s will never vote Tory again after the mess a Tory government made of Scottish industry. (The Tories were routinely the least popular party of the Big Four in the Scottish Parliament: the LibDems went down to share bottom place with them when Nick Clegg went over to the dark side.) The Scottish Socialist Party has sadly gone a tad dark when Tommy Sheridan turned out to be a scumsucking Glasgow lad as well as a consumnately fine orator: but the Green Party might well do nicely out of former LibDems walking away from Nick Clegg dropping Thatcher's mantle around David Cameron's shoulders.

This is something nobody knows: will the SNP win the next election, or be able to form an SNP-Green government again? If they do, Alex Salmond's promised us a referendum on Scottish independence.

This is something nobody knows: If the Tory Government in Westminister is biting Scotland in the arse again, will Scots vote for independence just to get rid of the Tory bastards? Some Scots always will vote for independence: some Scots prefer devolution, maybe even greater powers for our own Parliament: some Scots likely would vote against a Scottish Parliament, even now. Framing the referendum will be something the Scottish Parliament will do: how will MSPs decide to ask us the question? MSPs against independence will want three or more options, because:

This is something nobody knows: if Scots vote for independence, what conditions will the Westminister government set on the deal? The clearest answer would be if a solid majority of those who vote want independence, enough that it's 51% of the electorate (counting those who didn't vote as voting with their feet for the status quo). That was the answer that got us the Scottish Parliament with tax-raising powers. But there are any number of fuzzy answers possible, of which the most confusing would be a majority of those who voted being a minority of the electorate: in fairness, if you didn't bother to vote, do you have a right to a say?

This is something nobody knows: If Scotland did become an independent country, leaving the United Kingdom as England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and a collection of islands that came in via the Angevin Empire, how will this work? Scotland has been part of the United Kingdom since 1603: the Parliaments were united in 1707: even with the Scottish Parliament's opening in 1999 that still leaves important powers and funds with the Westminister government. Currency, businesses, families, healthcare, Olympic sport and foreign trade and wars have all been done on the basis that the UK is one nation. How shall we split that?

This is something I don't know. I don't think independence is the right move. I don't trust Alex Salmond: he's a slimy slippery bastard who'd do anything to get elected. But if Scotland becomes independent, I want to be a Scot.

( This is the picture that's worth a thousand words. )