Initial thoughts on the programme for government

So, the Program for Government. It's even possible to comment on the individual aspects of it online, which is impressive (well, now that they've got that bit working) but probably not useful.

The classifications are somewhat arbitrary, and it could do with more linking between sections, which makes it a little hard to read (and also allows things to be a little hidden on anything other than a comprehensive search). Some things appear to be missing entirely from the logical section, but have adequate coverage elsewhere. Other things are more notable for their complete absence from the programme.

It's - as is to be expected for a programme covering a planned 5-year term - very long. It's also short on details almost everywhere, which will only be revealed if and when the relevant legislation or guidelines or budgets are released.

In general, the principles seem fine, but what details there are for proposals don't always back up the principles. There are some long overdue ideas, and also plenty that it would have been better if they had never been put forward. On the whole, I'm cautiously optimistic - it's not a good programme for government, but it's not in most areas a disaster either, and the nature of a coalition government means that campaigning might be able to lead to more satisfactory outcomes.

Details and comments on some of the proposals below. There's a lot I've not commented on, on the basis that I just don't know enough about the area to know what the likely effects are.

Banking

At a first glance, this all looks okay. It'll depend on what the details of the new regulations are.

Business

This is a large section, and a lot of it is relatively uncontroversial. Help for small businesses, requirements for businesses to report on social and environmental duties, etc. However, there's some quite worrying clauses too.

We will cut red tape by introducing a ‘one-in, one-out’ rule whereby no new regulation is brought in without other regulation being cut by a greater amount.

So, on banking, it's all "too much deregulation, everything went wrong, let's regulate them again", but for other businesses it's "too much regulation, let's deregulate". There probably are some regulations that could be removed harmlessly, but imposing a requirement that the total amount of regulation always decreases is absurd - especially when a lot of the rest of the section is talking about things that would require added regulations. It seems like it's just a grab for an easy soundbite.

We will review employment and workplace laws, for employers and employees, to ensure they maximise flexibility for both parties while protecting fairness and providing the competitive environment required for enterprise to thrive.

Given the parties of the current government, I'm fairly certain that this will see more restrictions on the rights to take industrial action, and a net reduction in employee protections in other areas.

Civil liberties

All good stuff, now that the government seems to have accepted that it essentially can't usefully repeal the Human Rights Act (and would never have the Commons votes for it anyway).

Given that this was one of the previous government's worst areas, "stop doing that" is all you really need for a policy success, of course.

In practice, of course, it may just be a different set of civil liberties that get restricted.

Communities and local government

Again, some good things in here, such as improvements to energy efficiency standards, greater protection against aggressive debt collectors, and so on, though how much use they'll be in practice is hard to tell. Also some worrying bits:

We will freeze Council Tax in England for at least one year, and seek to freeze it for a further year, in partnership with local authorities.

Combine that with a likely drop in central government funding for local authorities, and a lot of important local services are going to have to be reduced or dropped entirely, with the usual greater effects on people who are working-class and/or disabled and/or old.

Consumer protection

It's hard for any government to put "actually, we think consumers are too protected", at least, not in this section of the document. There doesn't seem to be anything actually bad here, though how much good any of it does will as always depend on the detail.

Crime and policing

We will reduce time-wasting bureaucracy that hampers police operations, and introduce better technology to make policing more effective while saving taxpayers’ money.

We will amend the health and safety laws that stand in the way of common sense policing.

Making police record - for instance - every stop and search they do, is often perceived, both by the police and large parts of the press, as "time-wasting bureaucracy". Given that it's the only thing that makes it possible to definitively tell how much racial profiling the police are doing, and perhaps gives them second thoughts about doing so on occasion, slowing them down slightly seems a good thing.

As far as "health and safety laws" go, I have no idea what this refers to, but "health and safety" and "common sense" in the same sentence sets off alarms.

We will promote better recording of hate crimes against disabled, homosexual and transgender people, which are frequently not centrally recorded.

Definitely good. Should, of course, have been a requirement from the start.

Culture, Olympics, media and sport

They're in favour of them.

We will cut red tape to encourage the performance of more live music.

If this is about Form 696, then this is definitely a good thing.

Defence

We will maintain Britain’s nuclear deterrent, and have agreed that the renewal of Trident should be scrutinised to ensure value for money. Liberal Democrats will continue to make the case for alternatives. We will immediately play a strong role in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, and press for continued progress on multilateral disarmament.

"Value for money" is a strange concept to apply to nuclear weapons. In the event that you use them, there will be a near-complete collapse of civilisation and economic systems very soon afterwards. At that point, how much you previously paid for them is irrelevant (and before that point, the less you spend on them, the more you have left over for other things). If you don't use them (which is the plan), the most cost-effective one is the cheapest that your hypothetical enemy believes would work if you did use it.

Also, of course, maintaining the nuclear deterrent while wanting multilateral disarmament seems impossibly inconsistent.

Deficit reduction

We will significantly accelerate the reduction of the structural deficit over the course of a Parliament, with the main burden of deficit reduction borne by reduced spending rather than increased taxes.

In other words, reduced services for those who need them rather than more taxes on those who could do without the reduced services anyway. There might be sufficient unnecessary spending to reduce the deficit without harming services, but I doubt it.

Energy and climate change

Nothing particularly bad, but it's probably not ambitious enough either.

Environment, food and rural affairs

They're in favour of that, too. Lots of "investigate" and "work towards" and not so much actual commitments. Oh, and fox hunting.

Equalities

We will stop the deportation of asylum seekers who have had to leave particular countries because their sexual orientation or gender identification puts them at proven risk of imprisonment, torture or execution.

Better late than never (though "proven" allows a lot of room for error).

There doesn't seem to be anything on disabilities and despite the preamble nothing much on class either.

Europe

We will ensure that there is no further transfer of sovereignty or powers over the course of the next Parliament. We will examine the balance of the EU’s existing competences and will, in particular, work to limit the application of the Working Time Directive in the United Kingdom.

See previous comments on employer versus employee rights.

Otherwise nothing particularly surprising. Not getting any closer to Europe, but not getting further away either.

Families and children

We will review the criminal records and vetting and barring regime and scale it back to common sense levels.

...This will give us plenty of room to scale it back up again in response to the next five years of "how could this person ever have been allowed near children" headlines in the press.

We will encourage shared parenting from the earliest stages of pregnancy – including the promotion of a system of flexible parental leave.

Better leave arrangements in this area could be a big improvement, but the big difference between here and the Scandinavian countries that have more flexible leave is that those countries also pay that leave better.

Foreign affairs

Lots of bits in favour of world peace and co-operation, except for unpopular countries.

We will never condone the use of torture.

It's worrying how far the boundaries of what is acceptable have deteriorated that this even needs to be said.

Government transparency

They're in favour of that too.

We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.

This bit would be very good if it actually happens.

Immigration

Given how bad a mostly-Conservative policy on immigration could have been, it could be a lot worse. There's even some good bits

We will end the detention of children for immigration purposes.

Though it's not just the detention of children that makes the detention centres a problem, of course - and stopping the abuse of adult detainees doesn't get a mention.

The proposals for a cap on non-EU immigration really depend on where the cap is set. If it's too low, and the pressure from the media and the right will always be to lower it, then people who should be allowed in will be turned away (which happens enough as it is). If it's high enough not to actually restrict immigration significantly, then it will cause problems anyway with the reinforcement of the dominant "immigration is bad" framing.

International development

We will support actions to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. In particular, we will prioritise aid spending on programmes to ensure that everyone has access to clean water, sanitation, healthcare and education; to reduce maternal and infant mortality; and to restrict the spread of major diseases like HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria. We will recognise the vital role of women in development, promote gender equality and focus on the rights of women, children and disabled people to access services.

And lots of other things that sound good on paper.

Jobs and welfare

We will re-assess all current claimants of Incapacity Benefit for their readiness to work. Those assessed as fully capable for work will be moved onto Jobseeker’s Allowance.

This sounds like continuing with the previous government's programme, which has not been good. The comments on that page are full of complaints about it, and there was a highly critical report by Citizens Advice not long ago.

Nothing on job creation, either.

Justice

Lots of focus on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending, which is good.

We will change the law so that historical convictions for consensual gay sex with over-16s will be treated as spent and will not show up on criminal records checks.

Good.

We will extend anonymity in rape cases to defendants.

A lot has been said on this already. It's still a bad idea.

National security

Nothing surprising. I'm not sure exactly what constitutes a "verifiable guarantee" in:

We believe that Britain should be able to deport foreign nationals who threaten our security to countries where there are verifiable guarantees that they will not be tortured. We will seek to extend these guarantees to more countries.

Depending on how much verifying gets done, this could allow a lot of torture that apparently we don't condone.

NHS

They're promising to increase real-terms funding despite general cuts in government spending, which means that they can promise a lot more with this.

Lots of cuts on the easy target of "admin", though. I seriously doubt that a third of administration costs are unnecessary - done well, all your admin costs should either be saving money overall or improving service quality anyway.

We will seek to stop foreign healthcare professionals working in the NHS unless they have passed robust language and competence tests.

I keep reading this as "(robust language) and (competence) tests" rather than as "robust (language and competence) tests". Ties in with some of their anti-immigration policies.

As pointed out in the comments there already, the big thing that is missing is anything on mental health treatment. (People with mental health problems get a mention in Justice instead, next to "drugs offenders")

Pensions and older people

We will commit to establishing an independent commission to review the long-term affordability of public sector pensions, while protecting accrued rights.

This could be very controversial, depending on what it says. Public sector salaries are generally lower than private sector salaries for a comparable job, which means other benefits such as good pensions help to make up the difference.

Political reform

Five years seems a bit long for a fixed Parliamentary term, though it does at least ensure that they drift with respect to the local elections rather than being held with the same set each time.

Of course, whether the coalition actually lasts five years is hard to tell at the moment.

We will bring forward a Referendum Bill on electoral reform, which includes provision for the introduction of the Alternative Vote in the event of a positive result in the referendum, as well as for the creation of fewer and more equal sized constituencies. We will whip both Parliamentary parties in both Houses to support a simple majority referendum on the Alternative Vote, without prejudice to the positions parties will take during such a referendum.

Alternative Vote isn't great, and wouldn't make much difference in most seats (except that the uniform transfer calculations don't take into account unpopular incumbents who could still maintain a plurality of the votes), but it's still an improvement on the current system, and a potential step towards a proportional voting system.

We will establish a committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation. [...]

A proportionally-elected upper chamber and a constituency-based lower chamber might actually work out quite well as a compromise system. They're going to adjust the composition of the Lords to make it proportional to vote share in the meantime, so that will provide some testing.

We will ensure that any petition that secures 100,000 signatures will be eligible for formal debate in Parliament. The petition with the most signatures will enable members of the public to table a bill eligible to be voted on in Parliament.

Here are the previous petitions in order of size. There were eight that got above 100,000 and there's one currently open that will probably reach that threshold too if the new government continues with the system.

The responses to the eight were "No", "No", "no answer" (it ended not long before the start of the election campaign), "No-one was planning to do that in the first place", "Still no", "No-one was planning to do that either", "We'll think about it" and "No", which perhaps gives an idea of why the new government is uncertain about what to do with the system, but doesn't explain why they think this is a good idea.

We will introduce extra support for people with disabilities who want to become MPs, councillors or other elected officials.

Good, but again, it'll be the details that matter.

Public health

The Government believes that we need action to promote public health, and encourage behaviour change to help people live healthier lives.

No explicit mention of the role of government in providing safe and affordable facilities for exercise, for instance, but there's also no explicit mention of the "obesity epidemic" in this section, which might allow for some improvements in policy there.

Schools

This section as a whole does not seem particularly good. A lot will depend, as usual, on the details, but many of the principles are worrying in themselves. No mention of home education (it doesn't belong in this section, but it wasn't in "Families and children" either) which hopefully means they're going to leave it alone.

We will give parents, teachers, charities and local communities the chance to set up new schools, as part of our plans to allow new providers to enter the state school system in response to parental demand.

How this will work in practice is difficult to tell. I don't know how many groups would want to take up this offer, or how easy they'd find it to set up a new school anyway. It seems like it would spread the state funding more thinly, and it's somewhat stretched as it is.

We will help schools tackle bullying in schools, especially homophobic bullying.

Again, the details will be important (and since they've mentioned recording transphobic and disablist hate crimes elsewhere, it seems unusual that they aren't also mentioned here), but this is urgently needed.

Social action

The principles are good, but the ideas seem a bit lacking.

I'm fully in favour of volunteering, collective action, and so on, as a way of making improvements to society. Obviously so. However, it's time-consuming, difficult, can have worse accessibility issues than more formalised work, and sometimes expensive. There's a lot of talk in this section about encouraging volunteering, but nothing about giving people the spare time to be able to do it.

We will give public sector workers a new right to form employee-owned co-operatives and bid to take over the services they deliver. This will empower millions of public sector workers to become their own boss and help them to deliver better services.

I'm not completely clear how outsourcing your job to yourself is supposed to improve services (if it really does give them better control, then it might increase morale, which might help). If they then don't deliver better services, can they be replaced? (Either answer makes it a bad idea for someone to actually let this happen for their public services)

Social care and disability

As with many sections, the principles are sufficiently uncontroversial that they're meaningless (who in mainstream politics would admit to being opposed to dignity and respect in a document like this?) but it all depends on the details.

Taxation

The compromises of coalition seem to have meant that most of the tax cuts - at least to start with - will be for people with low incomes and wealth. I expect the Conservatives will want to get back to the Inheritance tax cuts sooner rather than later, though, which they've left quite open.

We will seek ways of taxing non-business capital gains at rates similar or close to those applied to income, with generous exemptions for entrepreneurial business activities.

Good. Capital Gains Tax being lower than Income Tax makes sense for the riskier sort of gains associated with setting up a new business, but not for many of the other sources of money covered by this tax. It's very vague language, though, so whether it actually happens or not will be hard to tell.

We will make every effort to tackle tax avoidance, including detailed development of Liberal Democrat proposals.

I'll believe it when I see it. No government is ever explicitly in favour of tax avoidance, but they all leave enough loopholes.

Transport

Mainly focused on improvements to rail.

We will grant longer rail franchises in order to give operators the incentive to invest in the improvements passengers want – like better services, better stations, longer trains and better rolling stock.

I wonder if this might work better if they were given shorter franchises, renewal of which was made conditional on making improvements (and possibly on continuing the improvements of the previous holder), since the other possibility here is that they'll take the longer franchises as an excuse to do as little as possible.

Universities and further education

As usual, unpopular policy is being held off until a report scheduled for after the election. Funding for universities is quite a problem, and it wouldn't surprise me to see a few universities go bankrupt in the next five years.

Student fees is the big election issue here, but won't make a large difference to university funding as a whole. It really depends how they are implemented - if done well, with good-quality means testing (which, among other things, doesn't assume that students will necessarily be supported by their families) it could actually be beneficial for less wealthy students.

Notes

The deficit reduction programme takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement, and the speed of implementation of any measures that have a cost to the public finances will depend on decisions to be made in the Comprehensive Spending Review.

In other words "don't expect any of the bits which cost money to be done". Unfortunately, that includes a lot of the good bits and doesn't include a lot of the worse bits.

Predator-friendly government (letters)

[trigger warning]

I've written letters to the obvious contacts now, and I'll post any replies I get here. More coverage of this is at Shakesville and The Curvature.

Full text of the letters below (very long):

Firstly, to the ministers:

Dear Kenneth Clarke QC MP, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice

I note that in the Justice section of the coalition's Programme for Government is "We will extend anonymity in rape cases to defendants." I ask that this proposal be dropped.

The Conservative government of 1988 rightly abolished anonymity for defendants, as it was reducing the likelihood that victims of rape would report it. Studies such as the British Crime Survey show that only around 10% of victims of rape report the attack to the police. Of the reports made to the police, only around 6% result in a conviction. Combining these two figures shows that a rapist has around a 99% chance of getting away with their crime.

The recent review by Baroness Stern into rape reporting for the Equalities Office briefly examined the issue of anonymity for defendants, and concluded that no change should be made without further research. The review made a number of other recommendations for policy and practice which should surely be implemented before a change such as this.

The arguments for providing anonymity for rape defendants hinge on two premises - that a false accusation of rape is so damaging to someone's reputation that anonymity should be granted to defendants who have not yet been convicted, and that false accusations of rape are sufficiently commonplace for this to be a serious problem.

The first premise may be true, although the continuing professional success of a number of high-profile acquittals suggests otherwise. However, it seems implausible that an acquittal in a rape case is more damaging to one's reputation than an acquittal in any other case. There is no suggestion in the Programme for Government that anonymity will be given to defendants on trial for more serious crimes such as murder or terrorism, or for other similarly serious violent crimes.

The second premise is clearly false. Research conducted by the government and others - for example Home Office Research Study 293, conducted by Kelly, Lovett and Regan - shows that there is a very low false report rate (HORS293 estimates around 3%). Furthermore, studies have shown that in most false reports, no perpetrator is named. The number of false reports where a named perpetrator exists for their reputation to be harmed is vanishingly low.

There are, additionally, major advantages for defendants in rape trials to be publicly named. Research by Lisak and Miller in their 2002 paper "Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists" shows that the majority - around 85% - of rapes are carried out by serial offenders who have committed other rapes, sexual assaults, and non-sexual violent crimes.

Furthermore, this study and other similar studies carried out since show that these serial rapists intentionally seek out victims whom they perceive as vulnerable. They use the widely believed myths about rape - that the victim is partly responsible if they had been drinking, or wearing revealing clothing, that the majority of rapes are stranger rapes combined with other forms of physical violence, and so on - to ensure that their victims are likely to be disbelieved if they do report.

For this reason, they usually, as the conviction figures show, are able to get away with their crimes, and often continue committing them.

Because the reporting rate for rape is so low, it is only for the most extreme predators that multiple reports are likely. If only 10% of victims report, then it is unlikely that the police will receive two reports for the same rapist until they have committed around twenty offences. Depending on the quality of the local police and their approach to rape, which is incredibly variable across the country, it could take even longer before the police realise that they are dealing with a serial rapist for whom there is an excellent chance of conviction.

The recent high profile case of John Worboys, recently convicted of multiple rapes carried out over several years is an example of this. He was arrested after carrying out perhaps hundreds of rapes in London. While the Metropolitan police were at fault in this case for not properly dealing with previous reports of his actions, it is also notable that, following his arrest, eighty-five women came forward to report that they had also been attacked by him, and the CPS was able to secure twelve convictions, as a result of which Worboys is thankfully serving a life sentence.

Had Worboys been granted anonymity, none of this would have happened. He may even have been able to be acquitted of the rape he was charged for - a single report being harder to convict with than the massed evidence of eighty-five independent reports - but would almost certainly have received a much lighter sentence even if convicted.

The conviction rate for rape is so appallingly low, and taking steps such as this simply makes avoiding suitable punishment easier for the serial sexual predators who commit most of the offences.

Furthermore, while this policy has been Liberal Democrat party policy since 2006, it was not in their manifesto, nor in the Conservative manifesto. It is not, therefore, a policy for which the coalition government can claim any form of public mandate. I hope that the government, in light of this and the concerns raised by numerous rape-prevention campaigners and victim support organisations, will drop this proposal from its programme.

Yours sincerely,

[me]

I sent similar letters by different routes to Lord McNally, Theresa May MP, and Lynne Featherstone MP, adjusting the wording slightly for their party affiliations and ministerial responsibilities. Hopefully at least one of them will read it.

Secondly, to the party whose fault this is:

Dear Liberal Democrats

The inclusion in the coalition government's Programme for Government of the proposal to grant anonymity to rape defendants drew to my attention that this has been the policy of your party since 2006.

Rape is a strongly gendered crime. Around 90% of the victims are women, and almost all of the perpetrators are men. It is also a crime which successive governments have failed to prosecute successfully. Studies such as the British Crime Survey show that only around 10% of victims of rape report the attack to the police. Of the reports made to the police, only around 6% result in a conviction. Combining these two figures shows that a rapist has a greater than 99% chance of getting away with their crime.

This proposal to grant anonymity will give significant advantage to rapists, and nothing to their victims.

The arguments for providing anonymity for rape defendants hinge on two premises - that a false accusation of rape is so damaging to someone's reputation that anonymity should be granted to defendants who have not yet been convicted, and that false accusations of rape are sufficiently commonplace for this to be a serious problem.

The first premise may be true, although the continuing professional success of a number of high-profile acquittals suggests otherwise. However, it seems implausible that an acquittal in a rape case is more damaging to one's reputation than an acquittal in any other case. There is no suggestion in the Programme for Government that anonymity will be given to defendants on trial for more serious crimes such as murder or terrorism, or for other similarly serious violent crimes.

The second premise is clearly false. Research conducted by the government and others - for example Home Office Research Study 293, conducted by Kelly, Lovett and Regan - shows that there is a very low false report rate (HORS293 estimates around 3%). Furthermore, studies have shown that in most false reports, no perpetrator is named. The number of false reports where a named perpetrator exists for their reputation to be harmed is vanishingly low.

There are, additionally, major advantages for defendants in rape trials to be publicly named. Research by Lisak and Miller in their 2002 paper "Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists" shows that the majority - around 85% - of rapes are carried out by serial offenders who have committed other rapes, sexual assaults, and non-sexual violent crimes.

Furthermore, this study and other similar studies carried out since show that these serial rapists intentionally seek out victims whom they perceive as vulnerable. They use the widely believed myths about rape - that the victim is partly responsible if they had been drinking, or wearing revealing clothing, that the majority of rapes are stranger rapes combined with other forms of physical violence, and so on - to ensure that their victims are likely to be disbelieved if they do report.

For this reason, they usually, as the conviction figures show, are able to get away with their crimes, and often continue committing them.

Because the reporting rate for rape is so low, it is only for the most extreme predators that multiple reports are likely. If only 10% of victims report, then it is unlikely that the police will receive two reports for the same rapist until they have committed around twenty offences. Depending on the quality of the local police and their approach to rape, which is incredibly variable across the country, it could take even longer before the police realise that they are dealing with a serial rapist for whom there is an excellent chance of conviction.

The recent high profile case of John Worboys, recently convicted of multiple rapes carried out over several years is an example of this. He was arrested after carrying out perhaps hundreds of rapes in London. While the Metropolitan police were at fault in this case for not properly dealing with previous reports of his actions, it is also notable that, following his arrest, eighty-five women came forward to report that they had also been attacked by him, and the CPS was able to secure twelve convictions, as a result of which Worboys is thankfully serving a life sentence.

Had Worboys been granted anonymity, none of this would have happened. He may even have been able to be acquitted of the rape he was charged for - a single report being harder to convict with than the massed evidence of eighty-five independent reports - but would almost certainly have received a much lighter sentence even if convicted.

The conviction rate for rape is so appallingly low, and taking steps such as this simply makes avoiding suitable punishment easier for the serial sexual predators who commit most of the offences.

Your party's federal constitution, in its preamble, contains the sentence:

Upholding these values of individual and social justice, we reject all prejudice and discrimination based upon race, colour, religion, age, disability, sex or sexual orientation and oppose all forms of entrenched privilege and inequality.

These are fine aims, though there seems to be no provision in your constitution that your party's policy be consistent with them. Nevertheless, it seems highly inappropriate for a party that claims to oppose "all forms of entrenched privilege and inequality" to be promoting a policy that will further increase the advantages that rapists have over their victims in the criminal justice system.

It seems even more inappropriate, and undemocratic as well, to have negotiated this policy into the Programme for Government despite it appearing nowhere in your manifesto. Its inclusion also goes against the recommendations of the recent Stern Review of rape reporting, which recommended that nothing be done in this area until research into the consequences could be carried out.

Please take the necessary steps to have this policy removed from the Programme of Government, at the very least until it receives a public mandate through being included in a national manifesto. I hope, furthermore, that you strongly consider removing this policy entirely as inconsistent with the stated aims of your party.

Yours faithfully,

[me]

Finally to my own Labour MP:

Dear Roberta Blackman-Woods MP,

I wrote to you twice during the previous government regarding the handling of aspects of the prosecution of rape cases, and you replied to inform me of the steps that the government had been taking to improve this and also of your own strong feelings that more still needed to be done.

The new coalition government has recently published its Programme for Government, containing a proposal to give anonymity to the defendants in rape trials. This will be a significant step backwards in the handling of rape by the criminal justice system, giving yet more advantages to rapists over their victims.

The arguments for providing anonymity for rape defendants hinge on two premises - that a false accusation of rape is so damaging to someone's reputation that anonymity should be granted to defendants who have not yet been convicted, and that false accusations of rape are sufficiently commonplace for this to be a serious problem. The former seems unlikely - especially when it is considered that for other serious violent crimes, including murder and terrorism, there is no proposal to provide defendants with anonymity, nor any public call for one. The latter is of course entirely untrue, as numerous research studies (for example, Home Office Research Study 293, conducted by Kelly, Lovett and Regan) have shown.

The disadvantages of such a provision are also obvious. The previous legislation allowing defendants anonymity was abolished in 1988 after it was found to be discouraging reporting. Research by Lisak and Miller in their 2002 paper "Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists" shows that the majority - around 85% - of rapes are carried out by serial offenders who have committed other rapes, sexual assaults, and non-sexual violent crimes. It is therefore likely, especially given the low proportion of rapes that are heard in court, that for most rapists who are charged it will not be their first offence, and there is an obvious public interest in encouraging other victims of the same attacker to come forward.

If this legislation had been in place recently, it is likely that John Worboys, for example, would only have been charged for one of his attacks, and would either have been acquitted and free to attack again, or at best received a much reduced sentence.

The proposal has been condemned by numerous anti-rape campaigners, victim support organisations, and women's groups. It is clearly not intended to help the victims of crime, but will instead provide shelter to some of the countries worst sexual predators.

I would appreciate it if you could pass my concerns to the appropriate ministers in the coalition government, and vote against any legislation containing this provision should it reach Parliament.

Thank you

Yours sincerely,

[me]

Friday Links

• Rumbold at Pickled Politics: Why more women aren't in politics
• Melissa at Shakesville: Speaking of Racism
• [trigger warning] Cara at The Curvature: Defense Attorney Claims Convicted Rapist "Didn't Realize" the Severity of Rape
• Kate at Cruella-Blog: We Need To Talk About Immigration
• Operation Black Vote: Judge out of order
• [trigger warning] EastSideKate at Shakesville: For All of Us
• [trigger warning] s.e. smith at FWD: Dear Imprudence: Have You Considered Violating Your Son's Bodily Autonomy Today?
• Bird of Paradox: Malawi: Couple sentenced to 14 years in prison with hard labour for getting engaged
• s.e. smith: Beyond the Binary: Where Do I Fit In?

Predator-friendly government

The Con-Lib coalition government has just released their "programme for government" - essentially a merger of the bits they're keeping from the two manifestos. Exactly where it lives keeps changing, but the PDF version of the programme should be readable from there for the immediate future.

I haven't had time to read through it in detail, but one particular bit stood out very strongly as a really bad idea.

[trigger warning]

On page 23 of the PDF, in section 20 (Justice), is this bullet point:

We will extend anonymity in rape cases to defendants.

Jess at The F-Word and Kate at Cruella-Blog have got some strong criticism for this proposal up already, to which I don't have a lot to add.

This proposal was in neither the Conservative nor the Lib Dem manifestos. It's a Lib Dem policy¹, but not one that made it into their manifesto. Now, somehow, despite it being in neither manifesto, the negotiating team - made up of eight white men, of course - has put it in the coalition programme anyway.

The majority of rapes and other sexual assaults are committed by serial predators like John Worboys. Looking at the graphs in Lisak and Miller's paper (PDF) shows that 90% of the rapes were committed by serial rapists (who also committed the majority of the other violent acts studied).

The British Crime Survey estimates that the reporting rate (to the police) for rape is around 10%. The chances are that for all but the very worst predators, at most one of their victims will initially report it to the police. No matter how good the police and CPS are at tying together separate reports (maybe there's not enough evidence to prosecute either case separately, but two independent reports is a lot more convincing) - and they aren't, in fact, very good at this, as the Worboys case showed, this can't start until they have at least two reports about the same perpetrator.

Except for the very worst predators - even in a world where the police had ideal data analysis, this probably means 20+ rapes or other offences - the only way they'll get those reports is if the identity of the accused is publicised, and this encourages other survivors to come forwards.

It's not the first time we've had a measure like this - this BBC article points out that Labour introduced one in 1976, which the Conservatives repealed in 1988.

It's not clear how to comment on the coalition programme itself, so here's a list of people who might be worth contacting. Firstly, ministers who might be able to get the proposal dropped before it gets near legislation:

• In the Ministry of Justice, Kenneth Clarke QC MP (Con, Rushcliffe), Secretary of State for Justice and the other ministers (including Crispin Blunt MP (Con, Reigate) and Nick Herbert MP (Con, Arundel & South Downs) who have relevant ministerial responsibilities, and Lord McNally, the sole Lib Dem minister in that department. The General Enquiries details seem the most likely contact method for the ministers.
• In the Equalities Office, the ministers are Theresa May MP (Con, Maidenhead) and Lynne Featherstone MP (LD, Hornsey & Wood Green). This department recently published the Stern Review on the handling of rape reports which made no recommendation on the matter but recommended that it continued to be considered. Contact details for the Equalities Office

Secondly, people who might be able to help defeat it in Parliament if it gets that far.

• The Shadow Minister for Justice, Jack Straw MP (Lab, Blackburn), who it will hopefully be possible to convince to strongly oppose the idea. Harriet Harman MP (Lab, Camberwell & Peckham), as the former Minister for Equalities and Women, and the current acting Labour leader, might also be worth contacting.
• Your own MP. If they're Labour or another opposition party, they need to be convinced to vote against it and submit amendments against it. If they're Conservative or Lib Dem, then even better (and in this case, even a commitment to abstain or be elsewhere for the vote is better than nothing). Furthermore, a Conservative or Lib Dem MP might be more likely to quietly persuade the government to drop the proposal.
  All MPs, regardless of party, should also pass your concerns on to the relevant ministers.

As regards who you are "allowed" to write to. If you're a UK citizen or resident:

• You can write to any minister directly, but they really make it hard to find their direct ministerial contact details in a lot of cases, because they prefer to receive communications via MPs. The general departmental contacts are better than nothing.
• You can write to your own MP as a constituent.
• You can write to any member of the House of Lords.

If you're not, then I've no idea who you could usefully contact. Your local British Embassy, perhaps?

I'll post my letters once I've written them, in case people want a starting point for their own - in the meantime, the blog posts linked to above have a lot of good points to include. If you can find better contact details for any of the ministers, or have any ideas for who to write to that I've missed, drop them into comments.

¹ Something I was unfortunately not aware of before voting for them, though it fits well with the party's over-theoretical and over-privileged attitude to equality issues, so I really shouldn't be so surprised.

Paying people to be healthy

From the BBC, NHS explores paying people to become healthier.

The NHS is exploring the possibility of using financial incentives to encourage healthier lifestyles.

[...]

NICE, which advises the NHS in England and Wales, believes they may help tackle obesity, smoking and drinking.

[...]

And in Kent cash payments have been given to people who lose weight.

There are several major problems with this plan. Leaving aside the practical difficulties of implementation, and the likelihood of generating a perverse incentive (say, to take up smoking so that you can get paid more than the cigarettes cost to give it up), the proposed schemes take health care in a worrying direction and reinforce existing prejudices.

Firstly, the whole point of a universal health care system like the NHS is that it helps everyone. Obviously, the healthier the population in general, and the less frequently they require its services, the more money and staff time it has left to help the rest. Public health and prevention of disease are areas it should be spending time on.

However, if the system is allowed to mark certain people as "more deserving" of health care, then the consequences will be very severe indeed. The system is of course - in practice, possibly also in theory - allowed to do this, as in the case of Daisy's "death by indifference" [trigger warning], so further extensions into the realm of officially-condoned actions are extremely unwelcome.

Giving direct incentives like this does that. There's not a lot of difference in practice between giving someone money to "behave in a more healthy fashion" and charging them extra if they don't.

There's no moral requirement to be "healthy". The disablism that says that there is, is very closely related to the disablism used to justify killing Daisy and many others. It's an attitude that needs to be removed from health care entirely, not encouraged.

Secondly, there's the hugely oversimplistic and incredibly commonplace use of "losing weight"¹ as a proxy for "getting healthier". That the two are conflated is a big enough problem already, both for the NHS and health care specifically, and for society and fat people in society more generally.

Paying people to lose weight seems a pretty sure way to encourage disorded eating, including in people who you aren't actually paying. What worries me is that this particular likely consequence is very unlikely to be picked up in any trials of this scheme. Let's think about the format the trial would take, in the probable best case:

• Find a sample of X people who want to lose weight. X is small relative to the local population, but large enough to be statistically valid
• Pay half of them based on whether they do or not, don't give the other half anything. Well-designed controlled experiment etc. etc.
• Look at the differences in the average weight loss of the two samples after six months. Let's assume for the rest of this that there will be a difference, and the paid group will have on average lost more weight by a statistically significant amount.
• Approve the bribery scheme for wider use, forgetting that:
  1. Weight loss does not equal health gain.
  2. Just about anything will show weight loss over a six month period compared with the control. Nothing, yet, has been shown to do so over a longer follow-up period of five years.
  3. The trial didn't consider side-effects on people outside the sample.

When released to the public, of course, it will add to all the social pressure to be thin, but it might be years before the NHS actually starts getting the bill for the disordered eating that results, by which time the process will be too embedded to easily stop.

Thirdly, it largely ignores the social factors that cause these particular public health problems. Bribing people might work temporarily, but perhaps the money would be better spent on subsidising the provision of healthy, cheap and convenient food (and it has to be all three), or on providing more accessible spaces for exercise. The whole thing is based on the assumption that people just don't care "enough" about being healthy (which may, because it's not a moral requirement, be true and not a problem for some people), rather than not actually having the resources to reach their preferred level of health.

Yes, a bit of extra cash might well help them with this aim, but in that case, why not just give them the extra cash for whatever purpose they choose and let them get on with it! (The likely study above will probably also forget this other control group)

¹ As measured, this being the NHS, either by the uselessly two-dimensional BMI measure, or by the even sillier one-dimensional "waist circumference" measure.

Parents have more sense than BBC journalists, then

From the BBC, another reprint-the-press-release article, this time with the headline Parents 'more worried about murder than obesity' threat.

On the whole, this seems like a sensible balance. Murder may be rarer than "obesity" but the consequences are significantly more severe.

The findings, in a YouGov poll of 1,244 parents, contrast with data showing the risk of a child being killed by a stranger is a million to one.

The risk of severe health problems for children due to lack of exercise is one in three, figures have suggested.

"Figures have suggested". No mention of what figures, or how reliable, or anything. Also note the addition of the qualifier "by a stranger", which is necessary given that the risk of being killed - at any age - by someone one knows is considerably higher.

As mentioned before, research shows that - for Western industrialised populations at least - the death rate is not significantly correlated with weight (and in so far as it is, the government-mandated weight is correlated with a higher risk of death within a particular time period than heavier weights).

The article does talk more about "long-term health problems" than death as a consequence of obesity, but what's not mentioned is that the evidence that the correlation is causative is sparse. Indeed, for many "obesity-related" conditions, there is more evidence of the reverse - that weight gain is either a symptom of an underlying condition or caused by an underlying factor that also causes susceptibility to that condition.

That lack of evidence of causation is of course a serious problem for the government policies developed around this. It's much like the government, upon discovering that people with blonde hair were more likely to have a particular health condition, recommending hair dye - except that in this case some of the suggestions for hiding the symptom are actively harmful to health.

The article doesn't, at least, mention restrictive diets for children as a possible "solution", instead advocating more exercise and walking to school. The problems with "more exercise" and "walking to school" as a solution have been repeatedly said elsewhere, so to summarise:

• Not every child can exercise that much, because of disabilities, and/or a lack of suitable or sufficiently cheap places to exercise near where they live, and/or a lack of free time.
• Similarly, it's not practical for every child to walk to their primary school, due to the distance, or lack of time, or inaccessible routes.
• The effects of exercise on weight are not particularly clear in adults. I don't know if there have been useful studies specifically for children.

So that's the conclusions, but what about the data used to conclude them? Going back to the article, it's fairly clear that - despite YouGov being a reputable survey company - the questions that they were given to ask were clearly set with the aim of producing the press release in mind. From the BBC article.

But only one in 20 picked concerns about poor health in later life due to the child's levels of physical activity.

Here's the options for the question, which was "which of these do you fear most for your child?"

• They are injured or killed in a road traffic accident - 30%
• They are abducted or murdered - 30%
• Poor health in later life due to your child's current levels of physical activity - 5%
• None of these - 21%
• Don't know - 7%
• Prefer not to say - 7%

This is not a good question.

Note that the survey - unlike the press release and the article - doesn't qualify "abducted or murdered" with "by a stranger". Given how prevalent abusive relationships are, that makes the "million to one" statistic pretty much irrelevant. It's like asking someone whether they're scared of being bitten, and then laughing at them if they say "yes" on the grounds that hardly anyone is attacked by sharks.

The important thing to note is that the survey only gives those three options, plus a few standard "none" options. If the survey was repeated, but with a more substantial list of plausible fears (and perhaps some that the surveyors believed less plausible), then this would give a very different result. People tend to go more for options that they're prompted for, rather than "Other". Of the three options, especially as worded, the third is - regardless of relative risk - considerably less scary.

It wouldn't surprise me if they wrote most of this press release before the survey results were back, and just added the exact numbers later.

So, bad data collection, and then conclusions that aren't really supported by the data anyway, and then reprinted pretty much from the press release without any challenge. Exactly the "standards" I've come to expect from science reporting, in fact.

Friday Links

Quite a few election-related ones this week. Again, separated out for those not interested.

General

• Melissa at Shakesville: I am not a bunsen burner
• flaneuse at Graphic Sociology: How Genetics Works
PinkNews: Gay asylum seekers challenge UK's policy in court and Spark in Darkness: Asylum - a GLBT issue
• s.e. smith at FWD: Science Says 'Go Outside and You'll Feel Better!'
• [trigger warning] Melissa at Shakesville: What About the Menz Indeed
• The Intersex Roadshow: Five Myths that Hurt Intersex People
• Sarah, The Bringer of Tea: You Can Take 1984 and Shove It...
• [trigger warning] Lauredhel at Hoyden about Town: Carer hits PWD on the head in public; World points and laughs
• Casey at The Lay Scientist: Sex Matters! in Vaccine Efficacy
• Andrew at Generalising: Glossing over the past
• Lauredhel at Hoyden about Town: Kelly Vincent’s maiden speech: Dignity 4 Disability not a "single-issue party"

UK election

• UK Polling Report: Some stats from the general election
• Operation Black Vote: An Historic Political Election for Black Britain
• Lynne Miles at The F-Word: Cameron's cabinet - spot the difference and Operation Black Vote: Prime Minister David Cameron Needs to Deliver a Cabinet that Reflects Britain

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.