Safety Lights Are For Dudes

Look, you know and I know that I want you all to go out and vote Lib Dem, despite (or maybe even because of) any misgivings you might have. But I also know some of you don't want to do that. I equally know that there are a lot of you who are of the "You're all a bunch of bastards; I wouldn't trust any of you; a pox on all your houses" stripe, and that sometimes people who think that way don't vote.

If you're of that mindset, please please please go and spoil your ballot. I have two major reasons for saying this:

1. If you don't vote at all, politicians call it voter apathy. They think you're lazy, that you can't be arsed, and that you don't care, and that they can therefore shaft you as hard as they like and you won't do anything about it. Spoilt ballots are counted. Show your dissatisfaction with the system.


2. As a politician I regularly attend election verifications and counts. One of the best bits is when you get to see all the spoilt ballots. You see, the thing about a spoilt ballot is that all the candidates/agents in attendance have to agree whether or not it's a spoilt ballot - that no clear voting intention can be discerned from the paper. So if you write something on it, everyone from all the parties will see it. Labour and Tories tend to tut about such things, but as a Liberal I am fully in favour of voters expressing themselves however they choose, and also at the end of a long night some entertainment is always welcome.

So how do you go about spoiling your ballot?

• It's important that no clear voting intention can be discerned. One way to achieve this is to put something in every box on the paper. A little drawing of some kind, perhaps, or make the ballot into an acrostic if there's enough boxes.


• Draw another name and box on the bottom of the paper and vote for RON or "none of the above" or even "leave position vacant". In police and crime commissioner elections it has become traditional to vote for Officer Crabtree, Judge Dredd, or Commissioner Gordon.


• If you have a postal vote you can tear it up; this doesn't work in ballot boxes on the day, though


• Be creative! We get lots with variants of "You're all wankers" or little penises drawn in all the tickyboxes. Do something more fun.

You've still got almost 4 hours, if you've not been to a polling station already, to go and vote. It's not a lot of effort, and even if you spoil your ballot you'll still be making a valuable contribution, if only to the entertainment of tired politicians at the end of polling day. So please do.

I am writing this as I listen to John Humphries pretend to interrogate the prime minister. Humphries asks questions in an aggressive way, he talks over Cameron, he words things provocatively... but he still lets Cameron avoid giving a single proper answer. Cameron is at this very second saying how he needs to address the big questions and not duck them while ducking Humphries' questions. It's show business for Cameron, because he gets to tell everyone he's submitted himself to a grueling Humphries interrogation; but it's also show business for Humphries because he gets to appear to be the fearless interviewer, speaking truth to power. It's all bollocks. Both Cameron and Humphries are dancing a choreographed dance around pre-determined limits, and neither of them strays for a nanosecond from the formal pattern.

David Cameron and George Osborne have both visited Calderdale more than once in this campaign. Nobody knew they were coming before they came except for the press and a select few in their own party and a few council officers. Each event was carefully stage managed. No ordinary people were to be allowed anywhere near. No inconvenient questions were to be asked. And it's not just the tories - Labour and my own party are as bad. Every top rank politician lives in abject terror of a Gillian Duffy Moment, so they allow the party machines to collude with the press in the Battle Bus culture in which pre-selected journos go to stage-managed photo calls in which only the most photogenic and meek ordinary people are even allowed into the building.

This isn't how politics should be. For a very few politicians it's not how it IS - people like Tessa Munt and David Ward haven't gone very far down this rabbit hole. But since being in government our leadership and leading figures have swallowed that this way of behaving is the way to do it - certainly it applied when Vince Cable came to Halifax. It's all so fake, and people can see it's fake, but when they tell politicians they detest the fakery politicians just stage-manage things all the harder.

And this, by the way, is yet another reason why Nicola Sturgeon is doing well this election - she has let the great unwashed come near, unlike any of the Westminster leaders.

Frankly, I don't care what either of the Labservative parties do because they are both as bad as each other, but I really really wish my party would stop doing this shit. And I swear to you, gentle reader, that I will do everything I can within the party to stop it happening.

If we can't have discussions with any ordinary member of the public, we don't deserve political success, and if a Gillian Duffy Moment happens, if we can't deal with THAT we don't deserve political success either. A politician who has to be insulated from people who disagree with him unless they are carefully stage managed is no politician at all.

Sky news have been busy bunnies in the leadup to the election, creating these horrific lovely videos of the political leaders. If you haven't seen them, they're embedded below





What I want to know is, which of these do you think is most excruciatingly, buttock-clenchingly awful? I mean yes, there's some skill involved in clip selection and editing and whatnot, but honestly...

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* I'm allowed to ask that question cos I haven't had mine.

1, the moderator totally needs a mike-cutting button for each participant. Cameron & Farage in particular kept shouting over her, and I thought it was incredibly rude.

2, the polls of who won are going to be stuffed with party partisanship. Much more interesting to me are the polls of who people thought did worst, because with 6 enemies to choose from the partisans are going to be more honest. The other interesting - and sobering - stats were the questions most Google during the debate.

3, ITV want to be quite careful about political balance given the relative amount of talking each participant did - although, of course, Cameron's repeated shouting over the moderator adds to his higher total. Honestly, loads of tories were tweeting he looked like he was in charge. I just thought he looked like a boorish prick. But then boorish pricks often do get to be in charge, don't they?

4, For me, on performance rather than policy, Sturgeon won by a mile. But I think Clegg edged second.

I'm still undecided. I really want to have a candidate with the best bits of all three.

Taking them in alphabetical order:

Sal Brinton is an extremely capable and experienced campaigner. She's au fait with the LGBT+ stuff and lots of the other internal party groupings, which is a big thing for me. She's got contacts - actually not just contacts, friends - at the highest levels of the party. The main criticism I hear from other people of her is that she might not be physically capable of the job, which I think is ableist - I think we should let Sal judge for herself whether she's physically capable, and she clearly thinks she is or she wouldn't be standing.

My two major problems with Sal are:
1, She's another parliamentarian, but more than that, she is very much the establishment's choice, and she trumpets in her leaflet how much of the establishment want her in there. The president is meant to present the voice of the members to the establishment, not the voice of the establishment to the members.
2, Her religion bleeds into her politics too much for my taste, especially in matters of education policy, and I worry that it would inform her in matters more directly under the purview of the president.

Daisy Cooper is absolutely brimming with fantastic ideas about modernising party institutions - not all of which I agree with, but most of which I do - and has the energy of a Farron. She has shown herself very capable of learning fast and adapting faster, and she has immense amounts of experience both within the party and outside - those who say she hasn't are looking merely at her age and not her CV, which is incredibly impressive; and ageism is as bad as ableism in my view.

My two major worries with Daisy :
1, She still has a day job and doesn't have financial independence. The party presidency costs the incumbent a bloody fortune. You get £5,000 a year expenses and no salary for doing it. I have heard from one of the candidates that she has spent more than that already just on travelling round the country to campaign for the presidency...
2, She doesn't have as many high level contacts in the party or the the media as the other two.

Liz Lynne has the financial independence and the broadcast media contacts, across all the channels of TV and radio. She also has one of those voices that makes me want to straighten my posture and salute, so brimming with authority is it. She has a reputation for competence and she also has time: where Daisy has a day job and Sal has the Lords, Liz can devote all her time to the presidency.

My two issues with Liz:
1, I have heard from more than one source that she can be difficult to work with. Also, while the president needs to have authority, I think it needs to be soft power as Lady Mark says, and while Liz has the politician's skill of immediately identifying which person in a room is important and talking to them, that's not necessarily a good thing in a person who has to represent the members to the leadership - the members who need representing the most are the ones who DON'T radiate "I'm important", and those people will get upset with a president who scoots past them to talk to their chair (or whomever). These two things both add up to putting noses out of joint, and while I am very talented at putting noses out of joint myself (and suspect, in fact, that I am doing it with this very post) it's not something I look for in a president.
2, The Rochdale thing. While I give absolutely no credence whatsoever to snide insinuations that Liz had something to do with the alleged crimes of Cyril Smith, or the alleged covering up of them, the print media are going to crucify her with it if she doesn't follow their agenda, and she won't follow their agenda, because she's not the type to kowtow to media barons (again, like me). It's not fair, it's not right, but it's what the print media are like.

Conclusions

I'd like a president with Liz's time, broadcast media contacts and experience, and voice; Sal's high-level contacts within the party and SAOs, and level of respect among the leadership; and Daisy's enthusiasm, ideas, and energy.

If I was going to vote for the one whose personality reminds me most of myself, it'd be Liz, hands down, no contest.
If I was going to vote for the one who I think will engage best with the wider membership, it'd be Daisy.
If I was going to vote for the one who will deal best with the internal structures of the party, or I was using "has worked on Doctor Who" as a tie-breaker Sal would get my first preference.

I still genuinely do not know what to do.

Somewhat like "hard-working families" I am starting to have an instinctive "ugh" reaction to the use of this phrase. "Where we work we win" implies that all one had to do is deliver more leaflets, make more phone calls, knock on more doors, and the election is in the bag. While those things certainly help, other things are necessary too. It also implies that all those people who DIDN'T win on Thursday only have themselves to blame for not working hard enough; while this is undoubtedly true in some cases it's a horrific insult in others. So yeah, if I never see that phrase issuing from head office again I won't mourn.

Other things:

1, if you want to get rid of the leader, there are several methods outlined in the party constitution. Anonymous willy-waving is not one of them. I suspect that all LibDems4Change have achieved is to annoy people who might have been on their side had they been approached reasonably, and made it less likely Clegg will go.

2, Calderdale council has a fantastic new councillor in Marilyn Greenwood, but it will be massively the poorer for the loss of several of the other councillors/candidates we had standing. However, you have to deal with things as they are, not how you would wish they might be.

3, Election counts are, for the most part, like the Christmas day football match in the trenches; whatever Flag we are there under most of us are capable of civility. I spent a lot of Friday having pleasant friendly chat with people from all parties and none. But there's always one, isn't there? I'm not going to name names but I was very amused by one particular person's hamfisted attempts to patronise me, and his purple face of rage when he didn't win the seat he felt entitled to ALMOST made the rest of the pain worthwhile.

4, When life gives you lemons, bugger lemonade, slice them up and put them in a gin and tonic. And then have another gin and tonic. And then another. But before you do all that, make sure you have someone lovely there who will fry you pig-based things and give you hugs the morning after. Those people are worth more than any electoral news.

... the lovely Alisdair Calder McGregor.

(You can find him on Twitter, linked in, blog, LDV articles, G+)



You'd vote for that, amirite? I totally would :)

Hustings was a lot of fun last night. Questions to candidates were very broad ranging (some of them longer winded than others LOL) and the turnout was not bad, to say what horrible cold miserable Halifaxness we had to endure to get to it.

On the evidence of last night, Alisdair is going to make a bloody awesome candidate. Pretty much everything he said in answers to questions was clear and succint. No rambling off on tangents. Lots of useful political points. And peppered with big meaty doses of Liberalism. Definitely a parliamentary candidate I can get behind. Which is handy, really, because he's already started dishing out orders to me...

I'm not going to make a secret of the fact that I wanted Alisdair to win this from the beginning - it'd be hard to with my imprint on the bottom of all of his literature - but I do want to say that had Janet won we'd still have a great candidate. So commiserations to Janet.

And forward to 2015. I guess there's going to be a lot more leaflet designing for ME.

I am utterly sick of people attempting to read in the entrails of the local election results what might happen in the general election in 2015. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of why such efforts are fruitless bullshit:

1. People vote differently in local and general elections. Recognising that the local council has very little power any more, people take council elections far less seriously. This means that turnout is derisory and the result is thus distorted by the people who DO turnout being either seriously committed to one party or another, or wanting to "send a message" by spoiling their ballot or voting for a party they know cannot win.


2. Local elections were not held in every parliamentary constituency. This means that any extrapolation to a national result is "projection" - i.e. guesswork


3. Time will pass between now and a general election. Political change tends to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but sometimes there IS a revolutionary change, and none of us knows what will happen in the next two years. The old adage that a week is a long time in politics still holds true in many cases.


4. Data which applies to our electoral system is incomplete, verging on non-existent. The only polling data we have which is reliable at constituency level is from previous general elections. No polling company holds/collects data at constituency level, and most of them hold/collect data at a national level. This is USELESS for predicting the results of a general election under the first past the post electoral system, where every single constituency has its own idiosyncracies. We will never get a British Nate Silver or change the woeful quality of political analysis in the media unless this changes.


5. The pundits in the media are crap. Relying on the proclamations of media pundits is an exercise in futility when none of them even acknowledge that they are guessing from incomplete data.

I'm sure there are other reasons that could be added to this list, but you get the idea. Basically, if anyone tells you that they can predict what will happen in May 2015 after this week's local election results, your bullshit detector should be pinging off the top of the scale.

I've seen a huge number of theories on this, but given some politicians' disdain for actually doing research and finding things out, I suspect we'll never have a definitive answer. After all, it's much easier to pontificate from assumptions than do research... With that caveat in mind, I'd like to take a look at some of the theories.

1, Nobody votes in winter elections

Turnout in winter elections does tend to be depressed by 5 or 6 percent. This may be a factor, but it's clearly not the full explanation when in some places turnout didn't even hit 10 percent.

2, There was a lack of information about the elections

There was no freepost mailshot. The London-based national media were totally apathetic about reporting that the elections were happening (unlike the bloody London mayor, which the rest of us had to suffer ad nauseam). The government didn't push the elections either. The Choose My PCC website was abysmal, and the helpline was worse than useless. This all gave the electorate the impression that nobody could be bothered. Again, I think this was a factor, but not the full explanation.

3, There was a lack of meaningful choice

Even if you get over the hurdles of lack of information, you discover that most of the candidates were standing on identical platforms. More bobbies on the beat, less anti-social behaviour, etc. Unless you have strong ideological political convictions (which is not very many people these days) from which you could extrapolate the values of the candidate (because very few made overtly political statements) how the hell were you meant to choose between them? And if there's no meaningful choice, people won't bother to vote - I personally think this is a large part of the decline in turnouts in other elections too.

4, People object to the idea of a politician running the police

This may be true, although it shows ill-informedness about how the police were run before. Again, I think the media must take some share of the blame for this. Pretty much all of the reports I have seen have described the PCCs as replacing the Police Authority - which is something of a misconception - and have not described how the existing police authorities were comprised of local councillors anyway so were already politicised. The only thing that has really changed here is the name of the police authority - they are now police and crime panels - and the fact that the chair of the authority has been renamed commissioner and is now directly elected rather than indirectly.

5, People who object to the idea of elected police commissioners had no way to register their disdain other than to stay away

Although there have been a larger number of spoilt ballots this time, people are still unaware of the power of a spoilt ballot, and so tried to send a message by not voting. Unfortunately, we all know that politicians and the media will paint this as "voter apathy" and people "not bothering". This will increase feelings of disenfranchisement and frustration among the electorate. At some point this is going to boil over, but clearly this election wasn't it.

If you DO object to the very idea of elected police and crime commissioners, by the way, I recommend either signing Unlock Democracy's open letter to Theresa May or signing the epetition here, or both.

6, People are just generally pissed off with politicians, political media, and elections

I, personally, think this is the nub of it. And because people are just generally pissed off with politicians, political media, and elections this feeds into the perception that there is a lack of meaningful choice - if all politicians are the same and they are all venal scumsucking money-grubbing bastards, why bother to try to choose between them? It won't make any difference.

The causes of this are many and complex, but a large part of it is the electoral system which forces there two be two big broad church parties of disparate people BEFORE an election rather than coalitions forming after; a large part of it is the media who love to take politicians down and misrepresent them for sensationalist reasons; some of it is a lack of education on politics and its processes; and some of it is the dishonesty of politicians in not admitting that actually, there is very little difference between any of the main parties precisely due to the above effects.

There needs to be a sea change in politics in this country. People like Loz Kaye and even the idiot Farage are doing their best to bring that about peacefully, but powerful forces are ranged against them. The Labour and Conservative parties really don't want to see it happen because it will mean the end of their century-old strangehold on power, which is why all of the opprobrium for unpopular government decisions has been aimed by them at the Lib Dems. The dead tree media don't want to see it happen because pluralist politics is far harder to report than red/blue blue/red spats, which is why all of the opprobrium for unpopular government decisions has been aimed by THEM at the Lib Dems.

But I think it's going to happen. Whether or not it happens peacefully depends on exactly how hard the establishment resists, but we've already seen riots, record low turnout in elections, and we're seeing the demonisation and othering of everyone from the disabled to those who dare to voice dissent on twitter. It takes a lot to make British people rouse from their "mustn't grumble" natural state and revolt, but we're seeing signs of it happening. Our political class (myself included) needs to pay attention to this and do something about it, before the entire edifice gets burned.

Has taken me a good four hours this evening. I very carefully ordered every candidate in all the elections, using my own personal criteria.

I'm not going to give you the full running order, but for the big three, my top choices were
- FE: Caron Lindsay
- FPC: Richard Flowers
- FCC: Zoe O'Connell

My method, if anyone cares, was to group candidates into lettered groups, and then rank them within the group. Candidates who didn't answer my/Andy's questions were ranked n for neutral, and then within n by what I know about them. Candidates whose answers I really liked got put in group a; those I quite liked in b or c; those I thought were ok in d to f. Candidates whose answers I didn't like got put in group x, and candidates whose answers I thought were truly awful in group z. Then it was a simple matter of hitting "sort alphabetically"...

It was genuinely worth answering the questions that I and Andy put - one person I had never heard of before this election ended up getting my second preference for FPC - and I was not the only person using candidates answers to rank them, from the thanks I have received in blog comments, by twitter, and by email.

Shas's answers are ( under the cut )

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You can find links to all the other candidates' answers here

David's answers for FCC are ( under the cut )

David's answers for FPC are ( under this cut )

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You can find links to all the other candidates' answers here