Appearances

There's a woman in the office where I work who's almost completely deaf.  She's very friendly, always has a lovely smile for you when you come in, and can just about get by with lip reading - but when she speaks, her voice is very slurred and can be hard to understand.

I've never really had a lot to do with her (we're in completely different departments) but recently she had a problem with her computer and I had a look and fixed it.  She sent me several files by email, and re-reading them now, I'm struck by how differently she sounds in the email and in person.  Her emails almost sound as if they could have come from my mum, but talking in person it's such a job for her to understand me and for me to understand her that any sort of additional content is dropped.

I know I shouldn't find it surprising, but it just really struck me that an awful lot of the time we define people by the things that make them different and don't look through to the things that make them the same as us, or those we love.

In an attempt to keep this vaguely related to the normal topics of the blog (such as they are), I was wondering how this could be applied to politics, but it didn't work so well:

Don't view Labour as statist control-freaks, rather see them as the folks who introduced FOI (and now regret it), and who were at least partly in favour of AV...

Hmmm - not sure that really works...

The people have spoken - now they'll have to live with it

So, the results are in, and the people have said No to AV.  As predicted, a number of people are viewing this as Yes to FPTP.

'David Cameron ... said the referendum had delivered a "resounding answer that settles the question" over electoral change and people now wanted the government to get on with governing in the national interest.

'The director of the No campaign, Matthew Elliott, said he had been "astonished" at the scale of the No victory: "I personally believe that this result will settle the debate over changing our electoral system for the next generation."'

Oh well - I guess I might get a chance to get proper PR one more time before I die...

Why I'm Voting Yes

I suspect most people will have already cast their vote before reading this, but figured it was worth putting out there anyway, if only to show how I think.

I'm voting Yes to AV.

Democracy - which we like to believe that we have here in the UK - relies upon the will of the people.  The people often don't really know what they want, and only get to express their will every 4 years, but what the hell - we'll accept this idea that the will of the people determines who governs us. 

But we don't look at the will of the country overall - that sounds far too much like PR, and would mean that the BNP and UKIP would get seats.  No - we look at it on a constituency basis.  In each constituency, the people are asked who they want to rule, and they collectively decide.

Now, we're accepting here that the people have a collective will, and that it can be measured.  Then what we want to do is measure it as accurately as possible, in order to represent them as accurately as possible.

Consider an election with only two people running.  We'll call them A and B.  Now, suppose that A gets more votes that B.  We know that the people would rather have A running things than B.  Under FPTP and AV, the result is the same as there are only two candidates.

Now, consider what happens if a third candidate is introduced (and we'll call them C, just to keep it simple). As this is a thought exercise, let's suppose also that C is not very well liked and will get less votes than either A or B, but will get some votes. If C has policies that are closer to As than Bs, then more of the A voters will change from A to C.  In this way, it's possible for B to win under FPTP, thanks to the extra candidate - despite the fact that we know the voters prefer A to B.  Under AV, C would be eliminated and the votes redistributed to the people's second choice, leaving us with the A vs B situation again. 

Another way of thinking about it would be to consider a seat under our current system.  In the last election, the constituency that I'm in (Croydon Central) returned a conservative.  The Conservative had 19,657 votes, and the next best was Labour with 16,688.  For the sake of brevity, I'm disregarding everyone else except those who voted for these two (not least because we have no way of knowing where the second choice votes would have gone). Imagine if noone changed their opinion of which party to vote for, and the election were run again, but the conservatives (for some reason - miscommunication perhaps?) ran two candidates.  They'd get about 10,000 votes each, but the Labour candidate would still have 16,688, and Labour would win with twice the majority that the Conservatives currently have, despite the people still preferring the Conservatives overall.  With AV, the 10,000 votes each would most likely have the other conservative candidate as the second choice, so as soon as whichever one gets least votes is removed, the other wins, and the collective will of the people is once more triumphant.

That's why I'm voting Yes.