Alternative Vote

So, we have a Conservative/Lib Dem majority coalition in government now. Part of the deal was that there'd be a referendum on changing to the Alternative Vote (AV) before the next election.

Alternative Vote - called Instant Runoff Voting in some countries - is a good system for electing a single representative. It could be applied to the UK with minimal legislation - no need to change boundaries at all, for instance - and would not need significant changes to the design of ballot papers.

It is not a proportional representation system, and shares most of the same problems of the current "First Past the Post" system for parties without geographically concentrated support.

How bad a deal is this for the Conservatives? It's the minimum offer they had to make - the Lib Dems needed some voting system reform to avoid looking weak to their own supporters, and Labour were offering (possibly with not much credibility) AV and a referendum on proportional representation. It's also, in practice, the maximum offer they could make and still be able to avoid too many defections from their own side.

Looking at the 2010 election, I think they would have been okay - about 20 seats down, which still leaves them the largest party - and most of that change going to the Lib Dems. Enough of a change to make a Lab-Lib coalition viable, but this was an exceptionally close election. In most cases, it wouldn't make much difference, and in some it could benefit them.

An analysis of some scenarios follows below (warning: may cause extreme boredom in people who don't like discussing voting systems), and then a quick guess about what this means for UK politics.

(skip past the boring and speculative bit)

Andrew at Generalising, as part of discussions on "how many seats did UKIP take off the Conservatives?", mentioned this ComRes poll (PDF). The interesting data is on page 21 of the PDF - second preferences of voters for the major parties.

The data for UKIP is based on 19 answers - far too small a sample to be statistically useful - but the transfers for the three main parties are probably usable if somewhat error-prone.

So, I put together a simulator that uses that data to re-run the 2010 election under AV. It only covers English seats (data on transfers to and from the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru was too small to be usable). I got the constituency data from the Guardian DataBlog. Here's how it works.

• Assume that the transfer percentages between the three main parties are accurate. What else can I do...
• Assume that people who "refused" or "didn't know" wouldn't transfer at all. Specifying of partial preferences is very common in AV, and this doesn't seem unreasonable.
• Group all "Other" parties together. There are very few English seats where a fourth party or an independent is in contention, and the local situation is sufficently unusual there to make mass predictions pointless anyway. Assume their voters will transfer equally to all three main parties, and so have no effect on the result.
• Assume that first preference votes don't change. Tactical voting tends to hurt the third and fourth parties anyway, so this shouldn't generally change the results, and AV will unwind the tactical voting anyway.
• Assume that votes with a particular party will transfer out in the same proportions regardless of their original source. Transfers to parties that have already been eliminated are just discarded. There's no data on third preferences, so this will have to do.
• Then run an AV count in each constituency.

Here's what it comes up with for the English seats, for a re-run of 2010 under AV:

Party	Seats	Change as a result of switching voting system
Conservative	276	-20
Labour	193	+2
Lib Dem	61	+18
Others (Green)	1	0

The Conservatives lose 20 constituencies, slightly more to the Lib Dems than to Labour. Labour gain some from the Conservatives, but lose almost as many to the Lib Dems as well. Here's the full list of changes.

Constituency	Real result	Predicted under AV
Amber Valley	Con	Lab
Ashfield	Lab	Lib
Bosworth	Con	Lib
Bristol North West	Con	Lib
Broxtowe	Con	Lab
Camborne and Redruth	Con	Lib
Chesterfield	Lab	Lib
Colne Valley	Con	Lib
Harrogate and Knaresborough	Con	Lib
Hendon	Con	Lab
Hull North	Lab	Lib
Lancaster and Fleetwood	Con	Lab
Newton Abbot	Con	Lib
Oldham East and Saddleworth	Lab	Lib
Oxford West and Abingdon	Con	Lib
Rochdale	Lab	Lib
Sheffield Central	Lab	Lib
Sherwood	Con	Lab
St Albans	Con	Lib
Stockton South	Con	Lab
Thurrock	Con	Lab
Truro and Falmouth	Con	Lib
Warwickshire North	Con	Lab
Watford	Con	Lib
Weston-Super-Mare	Con	Lib
York Outer	Con	Lib

That particular change makes a Lab-Lib coalition also numerically viable, though this was an unusually close election to start with.

Having got the simulator working, it's not hard to plug in alternative assumptions.

What if the coalition government collapses, and Labour's vote recovers - in effect, we move back to the 2005 vote shares for England. I'll use Uniform National Swing (UNS) because it's easy to calculate and isn't significantly worse than other models, and because I've been assuming Uniform Transfers anyway. This would probably affect transfer preferences as well, but it's a relatively small change in first preference vote, and those preferences are only approximate anyway.

Party	Seats	Change as a result of switching voting system	Change as a result of UNS
Conservative	191	-27	-78
Labour	276	+7	+78
Lib Dem	62	+20	-1
Others	2	0	+1

The Conservatives lose most of the gains they made this time round in England, and then lose another 7 (compared with AV with no swing), though one of those is Wyre Forest lost to "Other" which would be unlikely to happen now. Again, the net effect is a transfer of seats from the Conservatives to the Lib Dems.

What if it works, though? Five years of Con-Lib coalition moves the Lib Dems a bit more press coverage - and favourable coverage from the right-wing papers, too. Labour works well in opposition, but the arguments currently ongoing between Labour and Lib Dem activists about whose fault this all is break the two parties further apart, and the "anyone but Tory vote" deserts the Lib Dems. Conversely, the "anyone but Labour vote" strengthens.

I assumed that transfers from Labour to Lib Dems halved, the difference going to 'Others' instead. Similarly, I gave half of the Conservatives' current transfers to 'Others' to the Lib Dems. For Lib Dem transfers, I swapped the Labour and Conservative values (not that big a change).

Party	Predicted vote	Change from using AV
Conservative	295	-1
Labour	175	-16
Lib Dem	59	+16
Others	2	+1

The effect is roughly reversed. The Lib Dems take a few seats from the Conservatives, but only as many as the Conservatives take from Labour. The Lib Dems also pick up a few from Labour, and you can probably ignore Wyre Forest (Other +1) again.

Modifying the above, let's assume that the Lib Dems pick up a few more points of the "anyone but Labour" vote as first preferences that went to the Conservatives in 2010, but that Labour manages to regroup a bit better in opposition too.

Party	Predicted vote	Change from using AV	Change from UNS
Conservative	259	+6	-43
Labour	198	-24	+31
Lib Dem	72	+18	+11
Others	2	0	+1

Labour win a lot of seats from the swing on first preferences, but then lose most of them back after transfers. The Conservatives inevitably lose quite a few seats as their vote share reduces, but gain some back from transfers from the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems benefit from both factors.

It's not all good for the Lib Dems. What if the confusion over who they'd go with strikes again, and the supporters of other parties decide not to transfer to them. In this simulation, I dropped the transfer rate from both Labour and Conservative to the Lib Dems to be not much more than the transfer rate to each other (10% each). It's still enough to change a few close marginals, but that's all.

Party	Predicted vote	Change from using AV
Conservative	287	-9
Labour	197	+6
Lib Dem	46	+3
Others	1	0

Combine this with the tactical vote they may have received already backing off, and it looks even worse. I took 5% off their vote, and split it 3:2 to Labour and Conservatives (to roughly match how the second preferences split).

Party	Predicted vote	Change from using AV	Change from UNS
Conservative	293	-8	+5
Labour	216	+8	+17
Lib Dem	21	0	-22
Others	1	0	0

Labour pick up a few seats from the Conservatives on transfers, but the UNS component means that the Lib Dems really suffer.

What might this mean?

AV is unequivocally an improvement on the current system. It's a largely non-partisan improvement, and so I'd urge you to vote for it if we get a referendum regardless of your affiliation (unless you're a UKIP voter trying to drag the Conservatives rightwards by costing them seats, in which case we're still trying to figure out if you did or not...)

It's also not a very big improvement. Don't expect any more non-default MPs as a result of it, for instance, or results that are more proportional to the vote share (it won't usually make things worse either, at least)

The biggest implication of the change is likely to be that much more intensive polling will be needed, with second preference (and perhaps third) as a routine question. There will be virtually no point to polls covering all of mainland Britain together - I'd expect to see those shrink to England-only, with some having parallel Welsh and Scottish polls. It will certainly make the swingometers more fun.

Alternative Vote raises the stakes. The Lib Dems are probably in the best place to gain from it, taking seats from both Conservatives and Labour. However, there's also usually a noticeable effect where one of the Conservatives and Labour gains seats from the other as a result of Lib Dem second preferences. Which one wins from this depends on how the Lib Dem voters are feeling. Previously they split about 3:2 for Labour.

It's certainly not true that it necessarily harms the Conservatives - indeed, if the Conservative-Labour balance (both nationally and more crucially within Lib Dem voters) swung more towards the Conservatives (as it has been in the past), it could easily help them.

What this means for what people wanting the Conservatives out at the next election should do I don't know. Really, a change from FPTP to AV, though an improvement, is not going to be a major factor.

Friday Links

• amandaw at FWD: I can't count on anybody to understand.
• lisa at Sociological Images: Job Segregation by Sex, 1972-2008
• s.e. smith: Unwanted In Any Neighborhood
• Resist Racism: See? Told ya!
• s.e. smith at FWD: Chocolate, Correlation, Causation, and Depression
• Andrew at Generalising: Signalling changes
• Penny Red: UK election: where are the women?

Disenfranchisement

When people in the UK usually talk about electoral disenfranchisement, they're usually referring to the perverse results generated by our first-past-the-post voting system, where, for example, Labour and the Lib Dems can get almost the same number of votes nationally, but Labour get 5 times as many seats.

There are plenty of campaigns springing up now, even before the last vote is counted, to protest against this and demand electoral reform and a fairer voting system before the next election.

Good for them. I support them, and have been a firm believer in the need for a Proportional Representation system of voting for many years myself.

This election, though, saw an even worse form of disenfranchisement, where people were not even able to get into the polling booths to cast their vote. When you can't even cast a vote, exactly how much value it would have if you could becomes an entirely academic question.

ETA: The human rights group Liberty is campaigning on this issue.

• In "parts of London, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle and Surrey" voters were turned away as the polling stations didn't have enough staff to deal with the queues before the 10pm deadline.
• At least two blind voters may have unintentionally spoilt their papers due to a lack of polling staff trained in the correct use of the provided accessibility aids. Most polling stations have some form of accessibility problems.
• In Liverpool, at least one polling station ran out of ballot papers.
• In Sheffield Hallam, there are reports that students were treated as second-class voters, causing many to be unable to vote.
• In Chester, the updated electoral register was not distributed properly to polling stations, potentially losing hundreds of people their votes.

CaitieCat at Shakesville is collecting reports of disenfranchisement, and the comments thread there is where I found most of the above. Please add your own reports over there if you know of any.

As she says, "... it's really important for progressivists to be all over this disenfranchisement, because it almost certainly will have disproportionately affected people with lower incomes and less societal power.".

So, let's get working!

This is an initial draft of a letter that I'm going to be sending to my MP (Yay! I have an MP again!). Please let me know in comments what you think - is there anything I've missed out, anything that could be better worded, any displays of unacknowledged privilege, etc?

I also intend to send a slightly modified version of this letter to the Electoral Commission, who are directly responsible for the conduct of elections.

Dear [MP]

At this general election, there have been numerous cases of people being denied their right to vote, or having voting made far more difficult for them than it needs to be. This disenfranchisement has generally hit the people who already had little societal power, and reflects very badly on the state of democracy in the UK.

In numerous constituencies, many people were turned away from the polling stations at 10pm, despite having arrived in what they believed to be plenty of time. I believe that we should change the law on polling to match the model used in Canada and other countries, where provided that someone is queueing to vote before the deadline, they will be guaranteed a vote.

Anyone who works traditional 9-to-5 hours will find it difficult to vote, unless they happen to work within easy walking distance of their own polling station, except in the evening. There is therefore an inevitability in many areas that the polling stations will be most busy in the late evenings, when there may be fewer spare staff to run them, and a rapidly approaching deadline. In addition to changing the law on deadlines, I therefore believe that election days (general, local or European) should be public holidays, so that the majority of people do not need to arrange voting around their work or childcare needs, and those people whose jobs still require work on public holidays will at least have to compete with fewer people for space at the polling booth once they do leave work.

There have also been reports of many polling stations lacking the necessary accessibility measures to allow all UK electors their vote. The polling station I visited did not have any lowered voting booths suitable for wheelchair users. At http://jady-lady.livejournal.com/99603.html a voter talks about their experience as a blind person, where the polling station staff had not been trained in using the tactile templates intended to allow blind people to vote in secrecy, and the possibility that this may have led to their vote being spoilt. At the very least, steps must be taken to ensure that all polling stations are universally accessible and all polling staff are thoroughly trained in the use of any accessibility aids.

Continuing on the theme of accessibility, I note that some elections staff have been blaming voters for their own predicament in the press for not being willing to brave long queues for their vote. Not everyone has the time or energy to stand in a queue - possibily in the cold and rain - for an unknown length of time. Expecting people to do so is a failure to provide reasonable adjustments under the Disability Discrimination Act, in my opinion, and not something that anyone should be recommending.

This country has been running democratic elections for a very long time, and it reflects very badly on the country and on the priorities of its successive governments that it still does not appear to achieve the basic requirements of universal suffrage. People with disabilities, people with demanding jobs and unsympathetic bosses, people with unavoidable childcare commitments, people who were just unlucky on the day - this disenfranchisement is hitting hardest the people who society already makes life difficult for.

Will you, whether your party forms part of the next government or not, push strongly for urgent legislation on the conduct of elections to ensure that no future UK election - be it general, local or European - has the same unacceptable disenfranchisement of voters?

Yours sincerely,

[Me]

Feel free to steal or adapt any parts of the letter you want to use in your own writing, of course.

Some good news

Bita Ghaedi, one of the four people the government was sending back to Iran, in the knowledge that this would likely lead to them being killed by the Iranian government or their family, has been given at least a temporary reprieve.

They will now have a hearing on 21 July, although they will be detained in the infamous Yarl's Wood until then.

I cannot understand how anyone can claim with a straight face that we have a good asylum system when it takes a combination of a volcanic eruption and both the UK and European courts to save someone's life.

UK Election

I have a guest post up at Shakesville about the UK election.

At the last few elections I've spent election night sat in front of a TV at someone's house watching the results come in (2001 was really not worth staying up for). This year, with the people I know more geographically dispersed, and busier with their lives, the internet is probably going to be a more fun place to spend it.

Here's hoping the polls are wrong...

ETA: That thread overloaded Disqus, so part 2 for comments after about 0030.

Gender and the UK general election

A few interesting links on gender and this election. Only a couple more days and I can go back to writing to MPs rather than about them.

The Centre for Women and Democracy has some interesting reports on the gender balance of candidates.

One thing that they've found is that there are only ten seats (out of 650) where the candidates for the three main parties are all women. If all parties were 50% balanced, this should be about 1 in 8 (81 seats). Approximately 30% of Labour candidates, 24% of Conservative candidates, and 20% of Lib Dem candidates are women, so 10 is about the statistical expectation.

There are 205 seats (32%) where all the candidates for the three main parties are men. The largest all-male candidate list I've found is 8 (both Barnsley Central and Barnsley East). I gave up looking after A-B, but I'd be surprised if there were many larger than that, since candidate lists larger than 8 are rare in general. There are, as far as I know, no all-female candidate lists.

The bias is difficult to overcome by doing nothing. Being a candidate is much easier for people with lots of free time (to campaign) and money (to deal with lost earnings for taking time off work to campaign). The main parties aren't doing nothing, but they aren't doing enough either - CFWD estimates 2065 as the year in which Parliament will be 50% women (though 30% is widely considered a "critical mass" point beyond which further progress becomes easier, and that is estimated to be achieved around 2025).

The Fawcett Society has the results of a survey of candidates (via Cruella-blog).

Getting answers of any sort out of candidates around election time is difficult at best, because just about everyone is trying to do the same on their own issues, while meanwhile the candidates are trying to campaign and get votes (and don't view answering inconvenient questions from the more politically-active members of the electorate as a high priority, perhaps?). Nevertheless, even given that, the response rates were low for the Labour and Lib Dem candidates, and the Conservative response rate was terrible (only 15 replied to say they agreed with all three largely uncontroversial points).

ETA: Fawcett have the full list of responses up now. - 8 Conservative PPCs responded to say No to all 3 questions. (When you consider how much less likely a 'No' response is than not saying anything, for most who disagree, 15:8 looks a very scary ratio).

Jackie Ashley writes in the Guardian about the Lib Dem's equality problem.

This year they're the only (large) party to have a reduction in the number of candidates who are women compared with the previous election. The Lib Dems have the problem that they oppose all-women shortlists as an idea, but haven't yet found anything even close to being that effective in the short term to use instead. Given that the logic that's usually used in rejecting all-women shortlists usually misses both the point and anything resembling a consideration of privilege, I'm not at all sure if they can come up with anything better if they won't take steps to actively cancel structural inequalities.

I hate this election so much

There's less than a week to go before the general election now, and I'm tired of it. None of the candidates I could vote for are ones that I really support, and another pile of election publicity has just come through the door. In common with most election publicity, it actually makes me less likely to support the party it's from.

This has been an election by and for the default, as usual, and it's getting less and less hopeful by the day.

In my constituency, ignoring the far-right BNP, the almost as problematic UKIP and the independent candidate (nothing against independent candidates in general, I just don't agree with either of this particular candidates's major policies), that leaves the three main parties. The Conservatives of course are the party of the default, and their claims otherwise are not believable. Unfortunately it's looking more and more likely that they'll win nationally.

That leaves two candidates - Labour and Lib Dem. They're better than the rest, but that's such a low bar.

Labour

Labour have come up with some excellent policies over the years that weren't for the benefit of the default. They undid most of the homophobic legislation that had built up over the years, introduced SENDA (which provides some legal protections for students with disabilities) and the Equality Act, introduced hate speech protections for LGB people, and many other good things. They're also the party with by far the greatest proportion of non-default candidates and former MPs - though still much less than the population in general - and have taken significant steps to fight entrenched privilege internally to get that far.

They've also done a lot of things wrong. The Equality Act was good in many ways, but went backwards on trans* rights and in some areas of anti-racism. The laws protecting LGB people from hate speech were modelled on the religious hate speech rather than the stronger racial hate speech laws, and missed out protection for asexual people entirely (and that was before the Lords diluted them further).

The areas where they've spent the most time following the demands of the right-wing press and ignoring the needs of people, though, as far as I can tell, have been on immigration, terrorism and disabilities.

On disabilities, they have introduced incredibly tough checks to try to catch "benefit cheats" (despite disability-related benefits having the lowest fraud rate of all benefits), designed without any consideration of whether it's reasonable to put disabled people through those checks.

These are especially bad for people with disabilities with intermittent symptoms, who might well be able on one particular day to carry out the demands of a job designed by people with abled privilege, but who won't be able to consistently do the same every day, every week, every month. So they're "well enough to work" and don't get the benefits from the point of view of the government, but not "well enough to work" from the point of view of anyone offering employment (and, of course, this was introduced mid-recession, so there are even fewer jobs around than usual). There is an anti-discrimination law in place, but it doesn't go far enough as regards making employers make the necessary adjustments.

In the name of fighting terrorism, they've brought in more and more powers for the police - which they've then used in non-terrorism cases, disproportionately against black African-Carribean people. They've brought in compulsory strip-search scanners, with all the horrible implications for everyone with a non-default body of any sort. They've contributed to the demonisation of Muslims, and it's looking very likely that at the very best they've not done enough to stop our allies using torture on our behalf. And that's at best. That would all be bad enough, but then there was the assistance with the invasion of two countries, causing the avoidable deaths of thousands of people, and then failing to deal with the aftermath of invasion at all well.

On immigration, they've bought entirely into the racist rhetoric and framing of the subject (and then act surprised and shocked when their own supporters repeat it back to them). They've passed 5 separate acts related to immigration in the last 13 years - all designed to increase restrictiveness of non-EU immigration (EU immigration cannot be restricted under the terms of EU membership, but then, most of the people migrating around the EU are white, so maybe they don't want to)

The Yarls Wood detention centre is infamous for its abuse of detainees. Oakington is perhaps less well known, but a man died there not long ago. There are probably many others where I haven't seen the news, or no-one's reported it. Rejection and deportation of LGBT asylum seekers seems to be almost automatic, no matter how likely they are to be killed when we force them back. The Labour government has not only continued previous immigration policies, but extended them to make them more restrictive, more harmful, more racist, and more violent.

In the recent Labour publicity today, there are these lines:

There are three important facts you should bear in mind before giving [the Lib Dems] your vote:

1. They want an amnesty for illegal immigrants even though this could encourage more illegal immigration to the country.

...and in a separate letter, personally signed by the local ex-MP...

And [the Lib Dems] policy on immigration could encourage more people to try and come here illegally.

This is unsolicited publicity. I haven't written to them and said "I'm a bigot and worried about black people coming over here - can you do something about it?". This is what they think will appeal to me. This is what they think I want. This is one of their reasons I shouldn't vote for the other party. This is in the same leaflet where they criticise the Conservatives saying

The Tories haven't changed. David Cameron and the Tory policies deliver for the privileged few not the many.

Hah. The Conservatives certainly would do that, but Labour don't have the moral high ground here.

This is not what I want. I want an immigration policy that treats people as people. I want one that doesn't bend to the dehumanising wishes of racists.

Enough of this.

The Liberal Democrats

So, with my anger at Labour out of the way for now, let's look at the only plausible alternative on my ballot paper, the Lib Dems.

The Lib Dems have, as a point in their favour, not been in power for decades, and so have not as a result of their policies yet killed anyone.

Their party constitution is the only one to include an explicit non-discrimination statement. Their voting record on LGBT rights is extremely strong (and they put forward many good amendments to the Equality Act, many of which didn't even make it to a vote). Their manifesto includes a range of good policies, many of which explicitly for non-default people.

They support electoral reform and proportional representation, which I believe would make it easier for views outside the default to be represented in government.

And yet...

For all these fine words and talk, I'm very uneasy. They have this big policy on non-discrimination in their Constitution - but they also have the lowest proportion of the three major parties of female candidates (lower even than the Conservatives) without anywhere near as much use of the partial excuse that the other two parties have that in most cases incumbents should be allowed to continue (the same was true a few years back in local elections here). They refuse to use all-female shortlists which even the Conservatives are trying, and which Labour's use of is the only reason we're on ~20% women in Parliament rather than about 6%.

Of their BAME candidates, of which they only have 43, none are in a seat they could plausibly win. Regardless of the election result, the Lib Dem parliamentary party is likely to remain extremely white (and it shows in their policies)

On abortion and pro-choice legislation, the party is split roughly 50:50, compared with Labour whose MPs mostly vote in favour. (On the other hand, they do have the strongly pro-choice Evan Harris, who did a lot - without success - to try to get actual pro-choice amendments passed).

And then there was Charles Kennedy. He was elected as leader of the party, replacing Paddy Ashdown, in 1999. Over the following years, he led the Lib Dems to their highest number of seats since the collapse of the old Liberal party in the early 20th century. In 2006, he announced that he had been seeking treatment for alcoholism to pre-empt this being announced in the press. Within a day, most of the senior Lib Dem MPs had said that they could not accept him as leader. He'd had this condition for a while and at the same time he'd run the party well and led it to its best election results. Once he announced that he was seeking treatment for it, with some success, though, no, he had to go.

The Lib Dems remind me very much of my days as a Students' Union officer, where we had a massive equal opportunities policy, listing about 20 separate grounds on which discrimination would not be tolerated (and still omitted gender identity, because we were cisnormative like that), and officers for each of the types of discrimination that Students' Unions considered major (sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia and homophobia) - and did very little useful about any of them (a good LGBT association excepted) because there was so much privilege in the people who could do something that we were no less discriminatory than we would have been without the policy. We also liked STV.

So, it's not like they're particularly trustworthy on these matters either. They'd make different mistakes to Labour, but that's not necessarily a reason to vote for them.

Spoilt Ballot

I can't help feeling that after thinking about this for so long I should be able to make some decision between the two least worst options available.

I'm furious with both parties for their failures, which are not exhaustively listed above (but neither are their successes, so that seems fair). I do know that both would be better than any of the alternatives. A spoilt vote gives equal weight to all six parties on the ballot paper. That's definitely not what I mean. I can't give them half each, so giving one of them 1 whole vote is better than giving the BNP or UKIP even a sixth of a vote.

Help?

If anyone knows anything about the two parties that I'm missing - good or bad - along the same lines as above, that you think might be useful for making my decision, please let me know in comments. (But bear in mind, I am really not in the mood for partisan apologists right now)

ETA: I've already read Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy, and Penny Red on this subject, both of which were helpful and on similar lines. Neither is particularly convincing about why the Lib Dems are better, though they are right about why Labour is not good enough.

Possible versus desirable

In "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should", there's this BBC article. I'm not going to comment on the article itself, though it has problems, but on the headline.

Not the article headline, "Sudan's date-gin brewers thrive despite Sharia" but the even shorter summary headline that is used in links to it from elsewhere. "Getting lashed".

You can see why it's there, and since headline writers are often paid for the skill at fitting puns into extremely small places, it's not surprising. On the other hand, it is disappointing that a quite serious article on brewing of araqi against the local laws is felt an appropriate place to put a silly headline based on "lashed" being both UK slang for "intoxicated" and the penalty for distilling alcohol being a beating.

From a context-free point of view, it's a very good headline, combining the two major themes of the article into just two words. Not considering the context, and not realising that just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done is a pretty common expression of privilege, though.

Friday Links

• OBV: Falsely Accused
• Renee at Womanist Musings: Where the Disabled are not Welcome
• Amelia Gentleman in the Guardian: Women in a very male general election
• Native Appropriations: Cultural Appropriation Bingo
• abby jean at FWD: When Accommodations Conflict
• Gwen at Sociological Images: Contradictory Messages from American Airlines
• TransGriot: Hubble Space Telescope Launch 20th Anniversary
• s.e. smith: It's Unreal
• Resist Racism: Whites only
• Ros Ball at The F-Word: The case for all-women shortlists
• Spark in Darkness: We apologised to the freaking POPE?!
• Hagley Road to Ladywood: Domestic violence "in the Clegg household", Daily Mail implies
• Afua Hirsch at the Guardian: If Britain is really post-racial, why is the election so white? via OBV
• In a Strange Land: Making a difference already
• Jenn at Racialicious: Confronting Racism Raises Self-Esteem
• [strong trigger warning] Cara at The Curvature: This is Not an Analysis of Rape Culture. This is a Rant.
• Left Outside: Gordon Brown is the worst sort of Hypocrite
• OBV: Racial Violence - the Buried Issue
• Mind: Welfare? What welfare?

Is the aim to be a fatally unwelcoming country?

[trigger warning]

Via Shakesville, the news that yet another asylum seeker has had their application refused, on the apparent grounds that "will be executed because of their sexuality" is not sufficient persecution.

There is a petition to sign.

It is also possible to contact the Home Office and the Home Secretary Alan Johnson directly, even though the general election means that there are currently no MPs. Contact details are on the Home Office website.

My letter to them follows. You may find the government's information on UK asylum policy useful when drafting your own.

Dear Home Secretary Alan Johnson,

The asylum decisions made in the case of Kiana Firouz, a lesbian actress from Iran, have recently been brought to my attention. It is my understanding that the Home Office has rejected her asylum request and appeals.

According to the UK Asylum web pages,

"Asylum is protection given by a country to someone who is fleeing persecution in their own country"

and

"The UK also adheres to the European Convention on Human Rights, which prevents us sending someone to a country where there is a real risk they will be exposed to torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."

In Iran, the penalty for homosexuality is 100 lashes for the first three offences, followed by execution for a fourth offence. All of these surely count as "torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" and the strong possibly of execution surely must count as "persecution"

Returning Kiana Firouz to Iran is likely to lead to her death, and this decision seems to have been taken despite it contradicting both the European Convention on Human Rights, the Home Office's own statements on the criteria for accepting an asylum application, and the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which states:

"No Contracting State shall expel or return a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of [...] membership of a particular social group."

I ask you to please reverse this decision in the case of Kiana Firouz, and to take steps to ensure that the UK never in future abandons any person to be executed, imprisoned or otherwise persecuted on the grounds of their sexual orientation.

Yours sincerely,
[me]

Friday Links

• [trigger warning] Jill at Feministe: You're not a rape victim unless the police say so
• [trigger warning] Resist Racism: The unfortunate factual circumstances
• In a Strange Land: Tell me something I didn't know already
• [trigger warning] AngryBlackBitch: Daaaamn (the approach to child abuse of the US Catholic Church)
• [trigger warning] Mind: Crime victims with mental distress - unreliable witnesses?
• [trigger warning] C. L. Minou at Feministe: We Are the Dead: Sex, Assault, and Trans Women
• Thea Lim at Racialicious: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• [trigger warning] s.e. smith: Words, Words, Words: On Verbal Abuse
• Lisa at Flip Flopping Joy: Birthing A New Feminism
• Iona at Generalising: Cookbook publishing, it's very difficult
• [trigger warning] Tigtog at Hoyden about Town: Sonoma County demonstrates why I support marriage equality
• [trigger warning] Cara at The Curvature: Rape Apologism in Action: "She didn't say anything at all."
• Penny Red: There's just no pleasing some people
• Spark in Darkness: Live journal and more trans fail.
• Fibonacci's Narwhal: Dear everyone, please stop raising money with transphobia
• Operation Black Vote: Belgium set to introduce Burqa Ban
• [trigger warning] Melissa at Shakesville: But It's All Okay Because Obama's Protecting Roe
• [trigger warning] Spark in Darkness: The Violence continues
• Resist Racism: The convergence of race and the internet

No, just no.

So, Labour have just released a poster. A quick description of it:

A landscape poster in billboard proportions, black background. The right three-quarters are taken up with white sans-serif text - large text saying "They'll turn Great Britain into Little Britain."¹ and smaller text below saying "Under the Tories, Britain would have less influence on the world stage.". The left quarter is a picture of the fictional characters "Lou and Andy" from the TV show "Little Britain" but with David Cameron's face pasted over the standing Lou, and William Hague's face pasted over the sitting Andy.

I hadn't seen the show, so I looked up the synopsis of the characters on Wikipedia. The premise is horribly ableist, drawing heavily on the "disabled people are just faking it" and "disabled people have unpleasant personalities and/or are unintelligent" tropes.

The selection of those particular characters (the TV show had a lot to choose from) adds to that. It's trying to draw a link between Cameron and Hague and the unpleasantness of the characters, but that link only makes sense as a negative link because of the ableism associated with the characters in the first place. Otherwise it would be "Cameron is like an assistant for the wheelchair-using Hague" which doesn't make much sense as a metaphor in the first place, and only makes sense as a negative metaphor if people with disabilities (or their assistants) are seen as bad (which, of course, ableism means that they are) either generically or specifically in terms of running the country.

That latter message, of course, is the only one that people not familiar with the show would get. Knowing the show doesn't make it any better, of course.

This is the letter I've sent to my local Labour candidate.

Dear [candidate],

Today I saw Labour's recently released "They'll turn Great Britain into Little Britain" poster. I was very disappointed to see Labour releasing this poster, which relies very strongly on negative stereotypes about disability to make its point.

The characters from the Little Britain show are themselves negative stereotypes of disability, using the very common and pernicious stereotypes of disabled people as "faking it", or as unintelligent. As you are aware, these attitudes are very harmful to people with disabilities, and it is extremely distasteful for Labour to make use of them in its publicity.

Furthermore, there is the added message - and the only one that people unfamiliar with the show will see - that people with disabilities and their assistants are considered unsuitable to run the country or be an international presence.

The use of negative stereotypes about under-represented and under-privileged groups is a common tactic in political campaigning, but not one that a party that claims to be "determined that the UK should always be a world leader in disability rights" should have any use for. The use of posters such as these puts your party's sincerity in that respect into serious doubt.

Will you, as Labour candidate for [constituency]:

1. Ensure that these posters are not used in any form in campaigning in this consituency, and disavow this style of campaigning in general?
2. Encourage your fellow candidates to do likewise?
3. Strongly pressure the Labour party centrally to completely abandon these posters, to release a full and sincere apology for having produced them, and to commit to never doing the same again?

Yours sincerely,
[me]

This is the one I've sent to the Labour party itself, using their contact form.

Dear Labour Party,

[first four paragraphs the same as the other letter]

Will you:

1. Completely withdraw the posters and any related publicity from use, with immediate effect?
2. Make a full and sincere public apology to all of the people for whom the reinforcement of negative stereotypes by these posters has caused harm?
3. Put in place consistent and effective procedures to make sure that future Labour publicity does not rely on or use negative stereotypes about people with disabilities?

Yours faithfully,
[me]

In the event that I get a reply, I'll post it.

¹ Gordon Brown used this line in the "international issues" leaders' TV debate roughly simultaneously with the launch of this poster. Clearly it's all planned to fit together, should they try to sidle away and blame it on a "rogue marketing employee" or some such.

Edit: 19:40 23 April

Well, that didn't take long. The link on the Labour website now goes to an error page. For now you can still see the poster on Left Foot Forward (who approve of it, just to warn you). Now, what about the apology and the procedures?

Spring Flowers

For a break from all the bad news, some plant photos (the cat moves too fast)

The yellow-flowered one on the left is cowslip (Primula Veris), the big purple one in the middle is a Violetta of some sort, and I forget what the big green one at the top right is. Something later flowering, anyway.

We didn't plant this tulip - it must have been a deep bulb from the previous year, but it's a cheerful red. One other is poking up as well, but only just.

The lemon balm is now a giant dome of green. It hides the bare earth well, but I'm thinking I might not have pruned it back quite enough earlier.

Not an aspect of US culture I'd have chosen to borrow

So, the Daily Mail is criticising Nick Clegg for not being "British enough".

This particular line of racism is one that's shown up in US politics a lot recently. I expected we'd have to wait (probably several decades, at the current rate) for a BME leader of a major political party before seeing it here.

Of course, it's not surprising that racism itself is being used. Partisans for all UK political parties, including the "left" or "progressive" ones, are happy to use all kinds of privilege-based and stereotype-based slurs and metaphors - racist, sexist, ablist, etc. - against their political opponents, without thinking about the wider effect this has on either the usefulness or trustworthiness of their party's anti-discrimination policies.

The attack itself will probably do more harm than good, this time. The Lib Dems jumped from 20% to 30% in the polls largely based on reminders that they existed. It's quite possible that the attacks on them, combined with the existing "underdog" narrative, will push them even higher, not lower.

An unvalued life

[trigger warning for links]

A 40-year old Kenyan man has died in detention at the Oakington "Immigration Reception Centre", after apparently being refused medical treatment. Other than the article linked, there's this piece in the Morning Star, a couple of pieces in local news, and a short piece on the BBC. No other major news sources have mentioned this, as far as I can tell, nor the protests by the other people in detention there.

It's not the first time Oakington IRC has been in the news for mistreatment, either. The centre is run by the private security company G4S on behalf of the UK Border Agency, in the usual way of hiding the accountability in the fine print of the outsourcing contracts.

Yarl's Wood detention centre, also run by a (different) private company on behalf of the Border Agency, likewise has a catalogue of abuse. The surprise nowadays would be to find one that doesn't.

The government defends these places, and refuses to close or completely overhaul them. The principle, presumably, is that asylum seekers claim to have fled an extremely dangerous and/or abusive situation, so won't complain if put in only a very dangerous and/or abusive situation, or perhaps that if the asylum process is made as unwelcoming as possible, people attempting to flee to a "safe" country won't consider Britain "safe".

It's another very stark reminder of how the government and the mainstream media consider the lives of foreign, mostly-BME, mostly-poor people (and there are intersections with other types of discriminations such as ablism and sexism as well) worth far less than the lives of mostly-white UK citizens, and also less than the relatively small increases in costs associated with properly training the staff at these centres, having proper monitoring and accountability to stop abuse occurring, and immediately dismissing and pursuing criminal charges against anyone who does abuse a detainee.

There have been a few civil cases where people subjected to abuse at these centres have managed to get significant settlements from the government as some form of partial compensation - but where are the criminal cases against the abusers themselves, who are presumably able to do the same again.

The media and the far-right parties have managed to create a very racist and dangerous set of attitudes towards foreigners (except the white English-speaking sort) and immigrants, which rather than pushing back against, the more centrist parties, including the allegedly centre-left Labour government, have encouraged and competed with a race to who can be tougher against immigration and asylum seekers.

They would all complain extremely loudly if other countries were to take a similarly abusive approach to the UK's citizens, of course (though it might take something happening to a rich white citizen before anything more than complaints were done). Meanwhile, another person is dead, almost certainly in part due to racism, and nothing will be done.