Season's Greetings

Season's Greetings! Northern-Hemisphere temperate summer to you all! (and some cheerful plant photos to make a change from the gloomy news recently)

The first daffodil of spring - well, in our garden anyway - exactly one year on from the first daffodil of last spring.

Some other flowers are coming out rather faster this year - these anenomes for instance.

Recycling austerity

The local council has announced that from April it will be charging £24 to replace lost or damaged recycling bins or bags, except where they were damaged by the collection staff.

These things do get lost fairly often - ours have gone missing twice this year already - we put them out for collection in the morning; come back in the afternoon and they're gone - and no-one else on the street seems to have more than they should, either, so where they went is a mystery.

Which is most likely when someone's recycling bin goes missing?

1. Pay £24 for a replacement (expensive, especially if it keeps happening)
2. Drive waste to the local tip instead (inconvenient, and not an option for many)
3. Use disposable rubbish bags to put waste out instead (wasteful, and dangerous for recycling glass)
4. Throw everything in the non-recycling bin instead (easy, but defeats the point)
5. Steal someone else's bin (criminal)

Most people are honest enough not to go for option 5. But they probably won't pick option 1 either, given the choice. Still, I suppose the council saves money whichever option is chosen, and they need to do a lot of that right now, given the central funding cuts they've been given.

But it's yet another case where budget cuts are going to end up costing more in the long run as waste that could be recycled goes into landfill instead.

Coalition: untrained and stressed workers better for the economy

On 6 April 2011, parents of children aged 17 were to be given the right to request flexible working from their employers. Not the right to have flexible working, understand - just the right to request it.

The coalition intends to cancel this regulation before it takes effect.

From that press release.

The Government is committed to extending the right to request flexible working to all employees in due course, as set out in the Coalition Agreement.

The aim behind delaying the extension of flexible working is to allow businesses breathing space in the current economic climate.

Flexible working is currently available for parents with children 16 and under and carers.

Okay. So, let's go through this more slowly.

1. The right to request flexible working is currently available for parents of children 16 or under, and carers. Employees do not have to grant flexible working - ever - but the employee has the right to ask and have their employer consider it, and the employer must have a good reason to say no.
2. On the 6 April, the number "16" in that sentence would have changed to "17".
3. But to reduce red tape by keeping the number and complexity of regulations related to flexible working exactly the same, it now won't.
4. This will save the economy, because rather than worrying about whether all their employees with children aged exactly 17 (many small businesses have exactly zero employees fitting that description) were suddenly going to descend on them and ask for flexible working, employers will be able to ... um ... er ... Profit!
5. Later, if the economy is better, they will increase red tape again by simplifying that regulation even further so that it says "all employees" rather than "all employees meeting conditions X, Y, Z"

No surprises for guessing that this sort of change will harm non-default employees - women, disabled people, working class people especially - far more than it harms the default ones (who weren't going to request flexible working much anyway)

And don't think about developing your skills either

Similarly, the right to request time off to train will be removed for employees of businesses with under 250 people.

Most economists would say that increasing the skill levels of your workforce improved productivity and so led to increased economic growth - but not Vince Cable and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS): they know the truth. Their next step will presumably be to rename themselves to the Department of Business, Stagnation, and Lack of Skills, to better reflect what the country needs right now.

Has DBIS said anything economically sound recently?

Hmm... it was also Cable's department that was responsible for the economically bizarre plans for tuition fees:

1. Make students take out at least a "very large" loan to go to university at all
2. Set the repayment terms such that for most of them (except the ones who get rich enough not to care) the total repayments will be exactly the same for a "very large" loan and a "really very large" loan.
3. Let the universities choose whether their students will need a "very large" or "really very large" loan (but give the universities more money per student in the "really very large" case)
4. Act incredibly shocked when every single university says "really very large".

Perhaps they've already fired all their well-trained economists, and aren't letting their replacements read any textbooks in case they learn something. This would explain rather a lot about their recent policy announcements.

Apologies for unchecked privilege

[trigger warning for ablist language]

As eateroftrees and others point out, using X-phobia to describe a type of discrimination is appropriative and disablist in its own right. Privilege and intentional hatred, not a disability, is the cause of the discrimination.

I apologise for not realising this far sooner. In retrospect, of course, it's incredibly obvious - just as racist behaviour is not "crazy" or "blackphobic", discrimination against LGB and/or trans people is heterosexist and/or cissexist, not "homophobic" or "transphobic".

I've removed the problematic labels from older posts and replaced them with the suggested alternatives, so new posts and the label list won't contain this language. (Older posts will still contain X-phobia constructions in the body: there doesn't appear to be a way to do a search and replace on every post - again, my apologies for it being there in the first place)

Or it might be that your major underlying assumption is rubbish

[trigger warning]

Another piece of terrible BBC reporting (complete with stock "headless fatty" photo), this time about life expectancy and the "obesity epidemic".

The lead paragraph is:

Life expectancy in the UK is on the rise, along with the rest of Europe, despite fears over the impact of obesity, a population expert has said.

In summary: life expectancy has been rising in the UK, mainly because of better treatment for heart conditions. This is a surprise, because as reading the news makes clear, everyone is becoming "obese" and should be dead already.

It can't at all be because - as major population studies in Canada, Germany and the USA have consistently shown - there is no statistically significant link between BMI (the measure of "obesity") and life expectancy.

We are yet to see the impact of a generation of people who have been obese from childhood through to adulthood. We can't predict how that will affect life expectancy figures in the future.

While more individuals nowadays are likely to be sufficiently far above the government-mandated weight that they count as "obese" for most of their lives (and especially now that the government - through the time-honoured technique of "making it up" - is defining more and more children as "overweight"), there are plenty of people who have been "obese" for all their lives, who were in those major studies, and who didn't die at any greater rates than anyone else.

But this argument¹ will keep them going on the "fat will kill you" track for a few decades.

At some point historians of medicine are going to look back and show how researchers managed to completely ignore major population studies saying "no effect" in favour of studies that don't get beyond correlation is causation, because they were so convinced of the truth of their main hypothesis that they just ignored evidence against it.

Until then, more terrible public policy and reporting, and more encouraging of hatred against fat people.

Footnote

¹ It occurs to me that this resembles the backstop argument for people when presented with unbeatable evidence of (e.g.) gender or racial inequality: "that is due to discrimination 30 years ago the after-effects of which haven't worked their way out of the system yet; in another 30 years it'll have gone". It's an argument that never gets old.

Friday Links

• Gwen Sharp at Sociological Images: Politically Expedient Sexism
• Lisa Ansell: Political capital and strategy
• DavidG at Where's the Benefit: Clegg's Alarm Clock Britain
• Modus Dopens: Double discrimination
• FeministaSista at BlackFeminists: No minorities in the English countryside, or in Midsomer Murders
• Zero at the Bone: The best thing a woman can hope for
• [trigger warning] Spark in Darkness: The BBC again indulges in gross homophobia
• Flash Says: Your legs came for free – why don’t my wheels?
• Anjum Klair at Touchstone: Job vacancies twice as sparse in Labour held constituencies
• HarpyMarx: Daffodils and Midsomer
• Jessie at Racism Review: St. Patrick’s Day and the Changing Boundaries of Whiteness
• s.e. smith: A Matter of Class: Legal Action and Barriers to Such
• Bird of Paradox: Blessed are the bean-counters, for they shall inherit the NHS
• [trigger warning] We Mixed Our Drinks: Daily Mail calls 12-year-old rape victims 'Lolitas'

This Guardian tool seems useful Coalition pledge tracker

Bad for families, bad for small businesses? How very conservative.

The Telegraph reports that "Ministers plan to exempt small firms from maternity leave rules" as part of the Budget.

If the leak is accurate, businesses with 10 or fewer employees would be exempt from the statutory maternity and paternity leave requirements. Instead, employees would have to negotiate it individually.

Bad for families

The bad for families bit is pretty obvious. A lot of people are employed by small businesses, and if they have to personally negotiate their new parent's leave, they're unlikely to get as good a deal as the statutory leave available to people working for larger businesses.

The statutory requirements are currently:

• Maternity leave, available to the person actually giving birth, is 6 weeks at 90% of salary, then another 33 weeks at the statutory rate (either 90% of salary or £124.88, whichever is lower), then another 13 weeks unpaid.
• Paternity leave, available to one partner of the person giving birth - despite the name, this person need not be male or the father - 2 weeks at the same statutory rate.

There must also be the same or an equivalent job to return to at the end of the leave period.

The maternity leave is relatively generous - though much less than provided by some other European countries - and it might be difficult to negotiate something that good on one's own. In a small business, support from a union is difficult to come by, too.

So, that's a lot of new parents who - at an expensive time in their life - will be getting less financial support because they happened to work for a smaller employer than their neighbours. And, of course, the majority of people who are really much worse off as a result will be women. Typical.

Bad for small businesses

Firstly, negotiating leave like this is extra effort for the employer, too - especially if the employee actually puts up an argument. Make too low an offer, and you might not get your employee back after the leave is over, now that they know the value that you place on their work.

Secondly, at the moment, the government covers the expenses associated with statutory maternity and paternity pay. Businesses making less than £45,000 in class 1 National Insurance contributions annually (roughly: businesses with less than £400,000 in staff salary costs, which will be just about every business with ten or fewer employees) can reclaim from the government 104.5% of the costs of paying statutory pay to the employees.

Yes, that's more than 100% reclaimable. Small businesses actually make a small amount of money - in addition to not having to pay their salary (though that might go on hiring a temp) - by having employees on maternity or paternity leave. This is not a well-known fact.

Furthermore, the reclaiming is done by taking the money out of the income tax the business sends to the government for its employees, so the money is available immediately with no delays.

That's at the moment. The government, however, only refunds statutory pay. If a company - as my employer does - chooses to give a more generous maternity or paternity leave package, then the government only allows the statutory portion to be reclaimed.

Now consider the effect of removing any statutory requirement for small businesses - it goes from being marginally profitable (in reality, this is to cover increased payroll administration costs, rather than actual profit) to costing the business several thousand pounds to keep the same terms.

So small businesses that value their employees and want to keep giving the same terms as before - as generous terms, as with other signs that an employer actually values its employees, make it more likely that employees will return at the end of their leave - might end up several thousand pounds out of pocket as a result.

So who is it good for?

The government balance sheets. If they can stop paying maternity leave to employees of small businesses, that's a fairly large direct cost saving overall. (The indirect costs will probably vastly exceed the saving, of course)

It's a leaked proposal, so the details aren't available, and they might instead retain reimbursement at the statutory rates. But if they do that, the proposal basically does nothing other than aggravate employers and employees. In that situation:

• There's no point in paying less than the statutory rates, if they remain reimbursed for small businesses, because it doesn't cost any more.
• For paternity leave, the length of leave is nothing that employees couldn't reasonably take as holiday anyway. There's not much point in trying to argue it below two weeks.
• For maternity leave, the employee is going to have a child and going to need some time off work as a result. If you try to skip that, you'll just end up with them taking sick leave instead, for which the repayment terms aren't as generous. They'll be away long enough that if your business can't manage without them, you'll need to hire a temp - at which point, unless qualified temps are either much rarer or much more expensive than qualified permanent staff (both unlikely, especially with these unemployment levels), the big hassle of temporarily losing an employee is over and done with.
• But rather than this all being agreed in statute, you have to argue over it with every single employee.

In this alternative case the benefit to the government is that it gets to "cut red tape" (by increasing it) and get a policy boost with the "mothers belong at home" crowd, at no direct financial cost.

Friday Links

• s.e. smith: Hiding the Words Doesn’t Make the Problem Go Away
• JKBC at The F-Word: Those things that we are
• [trigger warning] A Bee of a Certain Age: If only those poor people would stop breeding
• Restructure: Across the calculus sections, women outperformed men on grades.
• Renee at Womanist Musings: The Origin of the Term Woman of Colour
• Strange Maps: United Diagrams of Europe
• Monkey at Feminist Philosophers: America’s No-Fly List
• Christie Elan-Cane: (untitled) - a letter to the census authorities
• [trigger warning] BBC fails again - child sexual abuse is not why we are gay
• [trigger warning] mmy at Shakesville: Today in Rape Culture
• Same Difference: GP Report Could Mean Eviction For Disabled Man

Oppression and the implementation of democracy

This BBC article highlights the likely effects on North East councils of making business rates go to the local council that raised them.

As with other "local taxation" initiatives, it of course ignores the fact that it's the economically depressed areas, with high unemployment and very few rich residents, which have the most need for public services. Meanwhile, the local areas with numerous wealthy families, which could raise a lot of money from local taxation ... don't need to. They can fund all the necessary local services on a much smaller budget anyway.

It occurs to me that this sort of regional class-based neglect - and other areas of oppression where a less-privileged group is geographically separated from a more-privileged group - is in part an artifact of our current way of electing MPs to Parliament.

If you look at an electoral map of the North East region, it's almost entirely red. A couple of large rural seats to the north of the region - Berwick-upon-Tweed and Hexham - are safe Lib Dem and Conservative seats. The rest of the seats were uniformly Labour from 1997 to 2005, with Stockton South (a politically very divided seat) moving back to the Conservatives in 2010, and Redcar being taken over by the Lib Dems after the closure of the Corus steel plant, and the resulting loss of 1,600 jobs.

Under a constituency-based electoral system - the current First Past The Post, or the proposed Alternative Vote - this is basically unchangeable. At the height of recent Labour unpopularity, they lost two out of their usual 27 seats. The reorganisation of seats as part of the reduction in the number of MPs will, if anything, further reinforce their hold.

It's not surprising that Labour do well up here, of course - the region consists of lots of ex-mining villages, ex-industrial towns, and ex-employed people - and suffered heavily in the 1980s under Thatcher's Conservative government.

Nevertheless, in the 2010 election, after excluding the two atypical rural seats, Labour only got just over 45% of the votes. The Lib Dems and Conservatives each got almost exactly half that (22.5%) - but only a twenty-fifth of the number of seats.

This ends up, I think, being very bad for the region as a whole, and North-East Labour should be pushing for a PR system despite - indeed because of - the side effect of reducing their seats¹.

That's a startling conclusion, so let's step through the logic more slowly.

The aim of politics, in theory, is about making sure that your preferred policies, whatever they are, become reality. As I pointed out in my earlier Principles and Power post, this doesn't actually require having a majority in government (or, indeed, any MPs at all)

So, the aim of the North-East Labour party should be to get Labour policies implemented, and to get the best result for the North-East.

Surely, then, the best way to do this is to have lots of Labour MPs from the North-East in Parliament? Well, no. Not always. If the government is Labour-controlled, then this works quite well. But more than half the time, it isn't. Various of the local MPs have been raising the consequences of the current government policy on the North-East in Parliament, to no avail. They're doing what they can, but it's not making a difference in the short term.

The Conservatives (and to a lesser extent the Lib Dems), on the other hand, have basically no electoral incentive to help the North East.

In any situation where Labour are not right at the bottom of the polls, they will win 27 of the 29 North-East seats (and the other two are not the same ex-industrial landscape anyway). The boundary changes, proposed to reduce Labour's advantage under FPTP, will if anything make it even easier for them up here.

So, the political cost of passing policies that are unpleasant to the North-East is basically nil. They can't lose seats that way. Nor can they really win seats by passing better policies - even at the height of Labour unpopularity they were nowhere near in almost every seat.

Under Proportional Representation - assuming no major changes in voting intention for the first election or two - it would be somewhat different. On the current results, Labour would get around 14 of the 27 seats, the Lib Dems and Conservatives 5 or 6 each, and the remaining ones would go to either minor parties, or an extra seat to each of the big three, depending on exactly how the seats were calculated.

The crucial thing, however, is that the last few seats for each side would be rather precarious. A mere 10,000 votes - across the whole region of over a million voters - changing from Labour to Conservative, would give the Conservatives an extra seat. Conversely, losing a similar amount would give Labour an extra seat. A larger swing would be worth even more.

The very real risk of losing two or three North-East MPs as a consequence of anti-Northern policies might make the Conservatives rather less inclined to try them (and their own precariously-seated MPs might well be leading the internal campaign for an alternative).

By making lost votes actually harm the parties (and yes, lost votes would also harm Labour far more than they currently do), the intentional harm caused to the region by successive Conservative (or mostly-Conservative) governments could be avoided.

(And, indeed, by making the Labour party no longer able to take the votes of the North-East completely for granted, it might be more inclined to pass policies specifically to strengthen the North-East, proposed by the local Labour MPs)

And so, back to the counter-intuitive conclusion - Labour's policies in the North-East would actually be more likely to happen if they had fewer North-East MPs and a more responsive voting system.

The way in which politicians are elected makes a big difference, especially when geographical segregation applies. The intricacies of voting systems are not necessarily the most interesting topic, but (as with more obvious areas of democracy such as disenfranchisement) they can make a major difference to how politics happens, and whose interests are represented by it.

¹ They would of course get some of their loss back in areas of the country which are similarly safely-Conservative, but would nevertheless almost certainly lose seats overall. With a mindset that views seats gained rather than policies implemented as its measure of success, this would never be considered.

The (non-)paradox of agency and oppression

This isn't really a paradox, but it's very easy to get drawn into lines of reasoning where it looks like one if you're not careful. Stated simply:

If it's okay for any individual to do X, why is it a problem if most individuals do X?

Or in inverse:

If it's a problem that most people do X, why shouldn't individuals who do X be criticised?

So, the apparent paradox is that it's okay for any individual to do X, but when most people do X, it's considered a problem. For a topical example, there have been a few reports recently about the domination of the press by men¹. One of the common responses to the suggestion that this might be a problem is the suggestion that "maybe women just don't choose to be journalists".

That probably is a significant factor. So - if it's a problem that women don't become journalists, especially senior journalists (and it is, because of the effect on what gets considered news and how it gets reported) - isn't that a criticism of women who didn't choose journalism as a career? Aren't you just wanting to force society to conform to some gender-equal state regardless of the wishes of its members?

Or, for an example that works from the other direction, that I've criticised before, "if the female beauty standard is a problem, isn't it wrong for women to wear makeup?"

Two apparently-opposed statements

In a bit more detail: one of the major principles of social justice activism is that less-privileged people have as much agency as more-privileged people, and so should be assumed (as with a default person) to have the capability to make autonomous decisions about their own life. Criticising those decisions is almost always a really bad idea because you don't know why they made them, and the idea that you could guess better than them what the correct decision was is extremely arrogant and completely erases their capacity to make their own decisions. Just the way that pro-default society likes it.

Another principle is that there are real widely-held stereotypes of behaviour, differences in treatment, and so on, that lead to some people being privileged over others, and that this privilege is a bad thing and should be dismantled. Such dismantling is likely to be resisted, of course, by the people who benefit from that privilege.

The conflict then comes in a flawed chain of reasoning something like the following:

• Upholding privilege is bad
• Actions which accept the path of privilege tend to uphold it
• Therefore actions which privilege wants you to take are bad

Or perhaps from the other side

• All of this is a consequence of the sum of individual decisions
• Individual decisions shouldn't be criticised
• Therefore the sum effect shouldn't be criticised

This gets used either as an excuse to uphold the status quo, or an excuse to attack non-privileged people who are not seen to be doing enough to dismantle it.

Neither is a good situation.

The really obvious flaw in the logic

I'm not claiming this is the only flaw or even the most major one. But it's the stand-out neon letters one, for me.

People's choices are constrained

No-one ever gets a completely free choice about what they do. For instance, when I was last job-hunting, I had two broad options:

1. Restrict my search roughly to County Durham. This reduced the chances of finding a suitable job, but meant that I could stay in a part of the country where I knew several good friends.
2. Search nationally, increasing the chances of finding a job, but also increasing the chances of having to move to a place where I knew no-one.

I'm not going to say which I chose, but for me, both were viable options.

For someone with a partner who already had a job in County Durham, the first option becomes much more preferable, if at all possible.

For someone who was shorter on cash at the start of their search than I was, the second option might have to be taken.

For someone who was more widely-travelled than me, and had plenty of spare cash, they might have plenty of friends in London already, and have the third option of moving there and then looking for work. That option wasn't even on my list.

The options that any individual has in a particular situation depend on their more general circumstances, their privilege, and many other externally-imposed factors.

Those factors, of course, include other people's decisions. In the case of employment, for instance, if you have a Muslim-sounding name, you might choose to apply for a job at an airport, but that doesn't mean anyone will treat the application fairly.

Resolution

That, of course, makes the resolution of the apparent paradox entirely straightforward. It's absolutely legitimate to look at what factors are influencing whether people apply for careers in journalism, and why those factors are different for different genders.

It's also legitimate to see if there's anything that can be done to change those factors if the overall effect appears to be harmful.

It's possible that, after changing those factors, some people will make a choice that they otherwise wouldn't have made. This isn't interfering with people's choices, or restricting them - it's giving them extra options² in addition to those they already had.

Similarly, one can criticise and try to dismantle the beauty standards while not criticising any individual for their own choices over their appearance³. (The people who are ready to criticise women for wearing make-up rarely seem willing to equally criticise men for not doing so, as eastsidekate points out, though surely both "reinforce" the same gendered beauty standards)

The distinction between external factors affecting people's choices, and those choices themselves, should be very obvious. In general, it only serves the interests of the hierarchical status quo to hide that distinction.

Footnotes

¹ While it's not mentioned in the preview of this survey, one could find much the same result for white people, rich people, non-disabled people, and most other axes of privilege. It also suggests that of the 3,700ish people surveyed, only two genders were represented at all (which is either evidence of a far more significant bias in journalism, or evidence of bad data gathering at some stage - the full report isn't out yet, so I don't know which)

² Which works both ways, of course - if people who aren't men are more likely to choose journalism as a career, that would be one way to adjust the balance. But likewise, if men are made less likely to choose journalism as a career, by making it a more viable choice for some of them to enter other (currently mostly female) careers, that would also have the same effect.

³ Some choices like blackface need criticism, of course, but that sort of choice is obviously not what I'm talking about here. I'm discussing choices for which there is no problem with any individual making that choice, but there may be a problem when most individuals feel they have to make that choice.

Friday Links

• The Rotund: Job Number One; Destroying the Paradigm, Not Shifting It
• Mary at Where's the Benefit?: To err is human...
• [trigger warning] Heg at Feminist Philosophers: Legal aid and domestic violence
• Trouble is everywhere: History and Repeating It: Funding Through Taxation and why David Cameron is a lousy Victorian
• eastsidekate at Shakesville: The People's House
• Complicity: There is no hierarchy of diversity (BBC and others, take note)
• Pink News: Mozambicans seek constitutional amendment to enshrine gay rights
• [trigger warning] Time-Machine at Shakesville: Feminism 101: Helpful Hints for Dudes, Part 3
• [trigger warning] Afua Hirsch at the Guardian: Rape and crimes against the disabled: the state admits it should do more
• [trigger warning] Thomas at Yes means Yes Gender Differences and Casual Sex: The New Research
• Ms Humphrey Cushion: M.E and my #ATOS test…

Incompetent campaigning

Two weeks ago, I noted that, apparently lacking good arguments in favour of FPTP, the No2AV campaign were instead campaigning on cost - and had significantly exaggerated the cost through a mix of accounting fraud and the political technique commonly known as "making stuff up".

Fortunately for No2AV, the Yes campaign seems determined not to capitalise on this mistake.

It should be a major mistake - if you start complaining about the cost of democracy, what other "cost saving" measures are you willing to entertain? Less frequent elections? Increased restrictions on suffrage? Dictatorship? We don't have democracy because it's cheap but because it's worth it.

Rather than pointing this out - and indeed, pointing out that even the massively inflated £250 million price tag is insignificant - the Yes To Fairer Votes campaign have instead chosen to ... complain to the Advertising Standards Authority

The ASA replied to point out that they don't regulate political campaigning, to which the Yes campaign's response was to start a petition asking them to start doing so.

Yes. Really.

Reasons this is a major mistake include:

1. The ASA doesn't regulate political campaigning, and it would probably need legislation to give it that power. Chances of this happening before 5 May: nil
2. The ASA takes months to make decisions over commercial advertising. Chances, even if it decided to unilaterally take power over political campaigning tomorrow, of it returning a verdict before 5 May: nil
3. The ASA's typical verdict, in the cases where an advert is found to be misleading, is an instruction not to run an advert making that claim again. This is virtually useless, of course, since everyone has already seen it. Indeed, there are a few companies who specialise in exploiting this commercially. Chances of an ASA ruling, even it had the powers and speed to make it before 5 May, making any difference: nil

They should be taking this major opportunity to portray the No campaign as self-admittedly anti-democratic. They should be pointing out that we can afford a better democracy. Instead, they're chasing after a giant red herring.

Just in case it makes it clearer, here's a quick picture.

Edit: As MarkWadsworth points out, GDP is around £1,400 billion, not £2,250 billion. I've updated the graphic, and corrected the figures in the rest of the post.

Description: Most of the image is filled with a large blue rectangle, labelled "Annual UK GDP: £1,400,000 million.
Inside that is a smaller yellow rectangle to scale with the rectangle labelled "Annual government spending: £644,000 million"
Inside the yellow rectangle, barely visible, is a tiny purple rectangle (again, to scale). An arrow points to it indicating that this is the £250 million alleged cost of AV.
Below the diagram, the text: "Real cost of AV: £20 million (too small to show)", and then in larger type "Good democracy is worth paying for. We can afford it: Vote YES to AV."

£20 million is probably an overestimate too, but should comfortably cover the slightly larger ballot papers needed, any voter education campaign, user research into the best format of ballot paper, and other one-off transitional costs.

If we can't spend - once, not every year - around a fifth of a percent of a percent of our national GDP on improving the voting system (or even a fiftieth of a percent, if you accept the massively inflated figure), then we are basically concluding that democracy is too expensive in general¹.

This sort of campaign - and the Yes campaign can afford better graphics than I can put together in a few minutes - could completely nullify the No campaign and leave them without much of an argument.

It should be an extremely easy argument to win, but the Yes campaign seems determined to lose it anyway - I agree with Matt Wootton's assessment that the Yes campaign simply does not understand how to run a political campaign. (Their letter-writing to the BBC over the use or otherwise of 'reform' is much the same)

So, that delicious red herring?

There is, absolutely, a strong argument that political campaigning should be regulated to make sure that candidates/supporters can't intentionally deceive the electorate.

In practice, though, there's no reasonable way to do this for a referendum. There is no candidate, and there is no extent to which a supporter could falsely campaign that would make it proportionate to disqualify a referendum option. Fines or disqualification from further campaigning on the issue are not major deterrents in the context of a one-off referendum campaign. (Whereas in elections, which are regulated somewhat, losing the seat that you won can be a deterrent)

Additionally, there's the timescale. The determination of the election court over former MP Phil Woolas's campaigning took months to conclude that he had intentionally misled the electorate about his opponent's character. Likewise, any robust system for determining whether the electorate were deceived (or whether the disputed point was just fair differences in opinion), and whether this was intentional, would take months with respect to a referendum. The capacity to respond within a couple of days would be virtually impossible (indeed, submitting vexatious requests would be a good way to slow the system and your opponents even if it could respond this quickly)

The ASA certainly isn't the right body to be doing this, but there aren't any other suitable ones either.

Footnote

¹If you genuinely prefer FPTP to AV, of course, then any money spent on switching to what, for you, is an inferior voting system is obviously mis-spent. But it would also be a bad idea for you to switch to AV even if it turned out to save a little money. Either way, the financial argument isn't compelling.

The danger of headline statistics

One of the most common ways of misleading people with statistics is to carefully select a statistic from a larger data set, and then make inferences from that statistic as if it were representative of the data set. This can lead to headline statistics which imply the opposite of the underlying reality.

Being able to spot these and show up the misdirection is sometimes quite tricky.

For a (relatively straightforward) example, a statistic that often gets quoted in arguments about gender equality is that "over 80% of those dying in workplace accidents are men". I'll use this to illustrate some of the common problems with these sorts of headline statistics.

[trigger warning: workplace deaths, murders]

Problem 1: scoping of the statistic

There's no indication on this statistic of what country it's related to or when the data was gathered. I couldn't find a formal breakdown for the UK at all, and didn't feel like guessing from the names on the accident summaries. Looking at the available statistics for other rich industrialised English-speaking nations, the headline figure is almost certainly true, though.

However, not having a year or country specified makes it very difficult to look beyond the headline at the details - which details?

Specifying "workplace accidents" also statistically excludes those cases where someone is intentionally harmed while working, since that would be compartmentalised as a police rather than a health and safety matter. The various murders of sex workers would not, for instance, be counted, which significantly skews the gender balance of the statistics, but not of the actual workplace dangers.

Problem 2: implying a cause

The implied cause is that there is discrimination against men which causes them to die more in workplace accidents. There are actually several other factors involved.

Who can die in the workplace?

Firstly, more men than women have jobs at all. Here's the UK's Labour Force Survey.

In 1971, the ratio of men to women in employment was 3:2. ¹

In 1992 - the first year for which detailed statistics are available - the ratio is closer to 5:4, but the detailed statistics show that almost all the men are in full-time employment, while only slightly over half of women are.

In 2010, the base ratio is around 8:7, but the full-time/part-time patterns are much the same. There has been a slight rise in the number of men working part-time, and a slight rise in the number of women working full-time, since 1992, but it's not a major difference.

If we assume on average that a part-time worker works half the hours of a full-time worker, that means that men are collectively working in paid employment between a third more and twice as many hours as women collectively work in paid employment (depending on the year)

So, some of the difference is caused by the difference in hours worked. Men are more likely to die at work because they collectively spend longer there. Note that greater male employment is generally not considered evidence of discrimination against men.

Who is likely to die at work?

Some jobs are considerably more dangerous than others. The Health and Safety Executive collects data on fatal injuries at work (including fatal injuries to members of the public who were in a workplace).

Many of the deaths of workers occurred in the Construction and Agriculture sectors, both of which mostly employ men and involve large amounts of heavy machinery.

There are a number of reasons for most employees in these sectors being men, but they are not reasonable to describe as discrimination against men.

Problem 3: missing the real problem

The problem with workplace deaths is not that men die in workplace accidents, it's that people die in workplace accidents. The correct thing to ask the magical society fairy for is an end to workplace accidents, not an equalisation of who dies in them by gender.

There can't be many accidents that wouldn't have happened if - all else equal - the worker in the unfortunate position hadn't been a man². Nor are there likely to be many potential fatal accidents which were only avoided (or at least not fatal) because the worker wasn't a man.

So, primarily, the solution is to try to make workplaces safer. This - at least in the UK - is happening. Fatal workplace accidents have fallen to less than a half of their rate in the early 90s³. A combination of regulation and guidance of health and safety has helped make the UK one of the safest places in the world to work⁴ (though that's not the only reason, of course; see below).

Problem 4: not distinguishing between primary and secondary effects

There are privilege-related issues here - class, gender, immigration status, and disability, for instance, can all lead to situations where someone has to take a job which is less safe. Internationally, the UK is able to use its trading wealth to export a lot of the more dangerous work to other countries so that foreigners die on our behalf.

These are all important issues, with established campaigning groups for all of them, especially in the trade union movement.

For immigration status, it's a direct consequence of the harsh treatment we give to undocumented migrants - and the low value we place on their lives as a society - which makes it easy for unscrupulous employers to exploit them knowing that they can't easily report their employer to the authorities.

The danger they are in is a primary consequence of their immigration status, and so the solutions have to consider that: generally making workplaces safer won't help because there is no practical mechanism for enforcement against that employer (who is already breaking a vast range of laws and won't mind breaking health and safety law too).

For gender, the disparity in workplace accidents (not workplace deaths in general - see above - but accidents specifically) is not a primary consequence of the workers' gender, but a secondary effect from a number of gender-related issues:

• Men are more likely to have paid work, and for more hours, due to well-documented discrimination against women, childcare being seen as primarily (or even only) a woman's job, and so on.
• Men (especially working-class men) are encouraged into paid work requiring physical activity, whereas women are discouraged from this. This happens both at the stage of career choices, and in the workplace itself where hostile anti-women environments can be self-perpetuating. The "men's work" is generally better paid than the "women's work" for equivalent knowledge and experience.

As a consequence of these, there are more men in dangerous jobs than there are women - but it's a consequence of discrimination against women, not discrimination against men: all of the components that cause it are positive for men, even if this one side-effect is negative.

Conclusion

The headline statistic is often used to imply discrimination against men. The underlying data shows no such thing (though there are genuine issues related to gender and other aspects of discrimination).

Footnotes

¹ As with all UK official statistics, the existence of people who are neither men nor women is ignored. Depending on the method by which statistics are collected, misgendering of at least some of the trans people in the sample is also extremely likely. The lack of useful data means that I can only discuss men and women for this post.

² I've no idea about how you'd ethically go about testing this, but it's not a completely outlandish hypothesis that since men are socialised to be more confident than women, and get more tolerance for minor errors, they're more likely to cut corners on safety procedures as confidence shades into recklessness, and this accounts for a higher proportion of accidents in male-dominated workplaces.

³ Adjusted for the relative proportions of industries, the UK has the lowest fatal accident rate of all EU countries, and less than a third (per 100,000 workers) of the rate in the USA.

⁴ Naturally, rather than taking some pride in this achievement, many of the popular papers and politicians feel that we aren't, as a nation, killing enough workers, and want to see much of the protective regulations repealed. The people suggesting this generally do not work in jobs involving heavy machinery, steep drops, or other dangerous environments, where the trades unions representing the actual workers tend to be quite in favour of workplace safety.

Friday Links

• [trigger warning] Lisa: P and enforced sterilisation
• [trigger warning] Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time: Triumph of the Swill
• [trigger warning] Herald Scotland: Demand for fairer benefits tests as two die
• Hangbitch: So council services go
• Restructure: Discrimination against job applicants with non-white names continues.
• s.e. smith: Accentuating the Positive
• Declan Gaffney at Left Foot Forward: How to fake up a Daily Mail benefits story in five easy steps

Arguments for Alternative Vote

Having covered the arguments against Alternative Vote, I should probably also cover its advantages. Again, because it's topical, I'll also compare Alternative Vote (AV) directly against the First Past The Post (FPTP) system, and list other voting systems that share these advantages.

There are no ideal voting systems - every voting system is good for some things and bad for others. When choosing a voting system, you need to consider the factors that are important to you, and pick a system that exemplifies those factors, while only being bad at things that don't matter so much to you.

• AV balances core support and broad appeal
• AV allows independent candidates
• AV is easy to count
• AV discourages tactical voting

There are also some common false arguments for Alternative Vote

AV balances core support and broad appeal

The candidate elected under AV requires sufficient broad appeal to gain transferred votes from eliminated opponents, but also sufficient core support to avoid being eliminated in an early round.

Voting systems which only require broad appeal have a tendency to massively benefit 'centrist' candidates even if they are no-one's first choice, which can harm the standard of political debate. Conversely, voting systems which only require core support can be extremely divisive and exacerbate tensions between communities.

Candidates with strong core support and very little broad appeal will find it very difficult to win AV elections. An "anyone but X" trend in the electorate is therefore magnified in AV, making it easier to remove unpopular politicians and parties from office.

Depending on your point of view, this may not be a good thing, which is why there's a very similar entry in the "arguments against" list.

Other voting systems

Borda or Range Voting, and to a lesser extent Approval Voting, also share this property, although the increased possibilities for tactical voting in those systems may make AV stronger in this regard.

Proportional Representation systems such as Single Transferable Vote balance support levels in a different way. Nevertheless, Single Transferable Vote (unlike the List systems) does provide some bonus to candidates who can appeal to a broad electorate while also electing candidates in rough proportion to their core support.

If extreme tension between disparate communities is a problem, using Proportional Representation where possible is strongly recommended. Single-seat systems such as AV are not sufficient for this problem (they may be suitable for electing a single President, but not for a Parliament).

Compared with FPTP

FPTP formally elects candidates based solely on their core support. There may be some element of broad appeal considered due to tactical voting from the voters in the core support of third-party candidates, but this is considerably weaker than in AV.

This is essentially the major point of using Alternative Vote, so it's unsurprising that it does better than other voting systems. If balancing core and broad support is your aim (and a proportional representation is either unwanted, not an option, or inappropriate for other reasons) then AV is ideal.

AV allows independent candidates

AV, like most voting systems, does not excessively penalise independent candidates. Party affiliations are not required to stand, and a lack of party affiliation only harms a candidate in terms of the campaigning resources and volunteers they have access to, not in terms of a penalty built in to the electoral system.

Other voting systems

List systems of proportional representation heavily penalise independent candidates as a consequence of the way the votes are counted. Most other voting systems treat independent candidates and party candidates identically.

AV does have a particular advantage beyond most other voting systems in that a successful independent candidate may find it easier to beat an incumbent, or maintain their position, provided their core support is strong enough, by getting transfers from sympathetic supporters of party candidates.

Compared with FPTP

AV, by allowing the collection of transfer votes, is generally better for independent candidates who amass a strong core vote - thousands instead of the tens or hundreds most independents get - and are well-placed to pick up transfers from the party candidates they get ahead of.

Such independents are very rare, under any electoral system, but have an even harder task under FPTP than under AV. The same applies to mainstream minor party candidates (e.g. UKIP or Greens)

AV is easy to count

AV is one of the most straightforward systems to count. Each vote is only being counted in a single position at a time, and only when votes are transferred do the preferences need to be re-examined.

This straightforwardness makes it possible to count AV by hand, and to use it for elections at meetings even without pre-prepared ballot papers.

Other voting systems like this

First Past The Post, List systems and Approval Voting are also straightforward to count. Pairwise voting is straightforward to count in the context of shows of hands at a meeting, but is less straightforward when using ballot papers for a secret ballot.

Single Transferable Vote is no harder to count than AV in terms of the mechanics of counting, but depending on the variant of STV in use, may require complicated calculations.

Other voting systems tend to require repeated examination of ballot papers, and so are difficult to count by hand.

Compared with FPTP

AV is marginally slower to count than FPTP, but not significantly more difficult. For an election with 4-5 credible candidates, in the worst case, an AV election will probably take around twice as long to count as an FPTP election.

Numerous non-credible candidates with very low vote totals add significantly to the number of rounds in the AV count, but provided the vote bundles were left sorted after the first counting round, this will not significantly increase the count time.

AV discourages tactical voting

AV strongly discourages tactical voting. While there are theoretical situations in which tactical voting is possible and practical, it is extremely difficult in general to identify these situations in advance.

The rare situations in which it is possible are covered in the 'arguments against' list.

Other voting systems

Condorcet is the only other single-seat system that discourages tactical voting, and it does this considerably more effectively than AV.

Proportional Representation systems such as Single Transferable Vote or List systems also largely avoid tactical voting.

Compared with FPTP

FPTP strongly encourages voters for third party candidates to vote tactically for one of the two major candidates in a constituency instead, and also gives an incentive to the two major candidates to actively encourage tactical voting.

Conversely, AV makes tactical voting generally impractical, and the forms that exist are not generally ones that political parties would encourage.

False arguments for AV

There are some arguments for AV which are either entirely untrue, or depend on the context in which AV is being used.

AV ensures that a candidate has the support of the majority of voters

Not really. This is usually implied from the fact that a candidate needs 50% (plus one) of the votes remaining at the current stage of the count to be elected.

This is not usually the same as the number of votes cast, unless the rules require every voter to use all their preferences. In optional preference AV (the form proposed for the UK), voters can use as many or as few preferences as they like. This means that in the late stages of the count, a vote without a complete set of preferences might not have any remaining candidates to be transferred to, because the voter couldn't decide between what were to them all unsatisfactory options.

If this happens, the vote plays no further part in the count, and the target number of votes (also called the quota) is reduced slightly to compensate.

In England, between 60% and 90% of constituencies - depending on how the election went - would probably have the winner receiving at least 50% of the original votes in the final round. The vast majority of the remainder would be in the 48%-50% range, with below 45% being exceptionally rare. (I don't have sufficiently reliable polling data for UK countries other than England to make a guess at those, but having four or more major parties rather than just three would generally make wins below 50% of the original votes a little more likely)

[Edit 11 April 2011: The Swingometer now gives basic statistics on the proportion of seats where fewer than 50% of the original votes are held by the winner, and the "worst-case" percentage needed for that scenario.]

However, a couple of percentage points here or there is not the main reason this argument is false. The major reason is that it relies on the interpretation "giving someone a preference - any preference - means support".

This is not necessarily true, of course. In a six candidate election, an unlucky voter who sees their four favourite candidates knocked out may still have an opinion over which of the other two is least bad, but to call their choice 'support' for their fifth may be excessive.

Another possible definition of "support" is "preferred to the alternatives", but while the elected candidate is guaranteed to be preferred by the electorate to any remaining candidates, it is possible that there is another candidate, eliminated at an earlier round, whom a majority of the electorate would rather have seen win.

A small election to demonstrate

Number of ballot papers	First preference	Second preference	Third preference
10 voters	Alice	Cath	Bob
9 voters	Bob	Cath	Alice
2 voters	Cath	Alice	Bob

In this election, no candidate has half the votes, so Cath, with the fewest votes, is eliminated from the election, and her two votes redistributed to the remaining candidates. They both go to Alice, so Alice wins. But 11 of the 21 voters - more than half - would in a straight choice between Alice and Cath have picked Cath.

If you want a voting system where the winner is guaranteed to have majority support over any other candidate (should such a winner exist, anyway - it's not guaranteed), then the Condorcet system should be used, rather than AV.

On the other hand, if you want - as above - to balance both core support and broad appeal, this property of AV is an advantage. Should Cath really be elected in the election above when hardly anyone places her as a first preference? (The answer is "maybe": it depends on what you consider important for an election system)

AV generally requires the support of a larger proportion of the electorate than FPTP. But it doesn't always require majority support. (Proportional Representation advocates, at this point, would point out that requiring majority support is not a universal good thing anyway - allowing a party with 10% support to get 10% of the seats is the whole point of PR systems such as List or Single Transferable Vote)

AV prevents "safe seats" compared with FPTP

It's really quite hard to assess how much impact AV has on this. Any AV election result could, after all, also be achieved under FPTP in theory given sufficient tactical voting (or candidates withdrawing - former MP Martin Bell's win in Tatton, for instance). In the UK, the third of MPs who currently get half the FPTP votes already are extremely likely to keep their seats under AV.

While the power of AV to avoid splitting an "anyone but X" vote is extremely strong and important, the majority of safe seats in the UK are safe because the incumbent has massive levels of local support, not because the opposition is split.

Both Labour and Conservative supporters have worried that the supporters of the other party would join forces with Lib Dem supporters under AV to lock them out of government. In practice, this is very unlikely to actually happen, except where an "anyone but X" sentiment is widespread across the country (and in that case, that party is probably doomed under FPTP as well).

AV will make some seats less safe - semi-marginal seats are likely to become fully marginal, and semi-safe seats might become semi-marginal and vulnerable to an exceptional election campaign or extreme unpopularity of the incumbent, but the effect will be fairly subtle. Conversely, depending on how votes tend to transfer between parties, some currently marginal seats may become relatively safe.

There is also the possibility in the long term of the lack of need to vote tactically under AV opening some very safe seats up to a challenge from minor parties on the same 'side' of the political spectrum as the incumbent (for instance UKIP in a safe Conservative seat), but this is likely to take several elections to become apparent.

So, while AV will reduce the safety of some seats compared with FPTP, the effect is not likely to be spectacular.

To largely avoid safe seats, a proportional representation system is needed - either Single Transferable Vote, or an open List system. Even then, successful parties can usually get a few seats which are safe against all but the worst national landslide victories.

[Edit, 14 April: More detail in the new post Alternative vote and safe seats. The swingometer has also been updated so you can look at scenarios yourself.