Scotland's butterfly ballot

Much attention has been given, rightly, to the confusion that has been caused by holding elections under two different PR systems (one, a "mixed" system already) on the same day.

While this confusion clearly did exist, and many voters put numbers or Xs on the wrong ballot papers, most of the spoilt parliamentary papers I saw were not like this. A great many had two Xs on the list vote, and nothing on the constituency vote. And many had a single vote on the list, and nothing on the constitency - and so were valid votes on the list.

Why were the constituency and list votes on the same ballot paper at all? Because, I suppose, this makes the scanning process much more efficient. Obviously with hand-counting, two contests on one ballot paper would be more work, but with machine scanning, it is less.

The list contest was on the left half of the paper. This makes it the 'first' vote. The greens, for example, after successfully winning seats with the message 'second vote green' have had to campaign 'first vote green' this time. This is an acceptable strategy, but it is bound to lead to confusion between first vote and second vote, and first choice and second choice - and hence spoilage rates. The psychological advantage the greens had previously, that they may get second votes from people who considered them a second choice, has gone. This will have harmed them, but that was never an advantage they were entitled to keep. On the other hand, a lot of papers spoiled with two votes on the list included one for the greens or socialists, and so they do have a grievance there.

What must have aggravated the confusion was the way that the list options took the entire column on the left of the ballot paper, and the constituency candidates were at the top of the right column. This looks very much like one long list carried over into a second column. How many voters saw it thus, and thought they had one, or two votes to be used anywhere in the long list? Tens of thousands, it seems, that's how many.


On the question of the computer failures, I am looking forward to the conclusions from the enquiry. But I am rather less concerned here than I am about some of the systems used in England, that are completely paperless, and thus have no way for results to be checked, and, frankly, for which we have no grounds to trust the result. While scanning does have transparency issues, these are an order of magnitude less than they are for things like internet voting. Yes, it seems a fix had to be applied to a live election system, and this itself can be a security question mark. I hope the electoral commission has the know-how to ask the right questions here.

Greens would condemn billions to poverty

I posted on a liberal view of Sheffield a letter I sent to the Sheffield Telegraph in which I suggested that Green Party hostility to business and trade threatened to condemn millions to poverty - billions worldwide. The Greens have replied to a similar letter to the Sheffield Star, and this is what they say:

As for Lib Dem Joe Otten's claim that our policies would be bad for business, we
are the only party to recognise fully the damage often done to the local economy
by inappropriate developments. This is why we vigorously opposed Sheffield's
Supercasino bid, and the current proposals for the New Retail Quarter and a new
market near the Moor.

The theme here is that according to the greens, there are two kinds of business. Local/small business which is good, and global/big business which is bad. The local economy must be protected from the global economy. So far so familiar.

Of course real life is not so simple. I am a one man business, which is good, but I sell all over the world, which, presumably, is bad. Although my product is transmitted electronically rather than by air freight, which is good. But it is software, so perhaps charging for it at all is bad.

Is the problem with the supercasino that it will damage all our small local casinos? I wonder.

Does this rebuttal deal with my unqualified claim that greens are hostile to business? Well no it doesn't. Big and small businesses each have their different strengths and weaknesses. Big business can pour resources into a problem. Small business can adapt rapidly, and know its customers. Each is successful where its relative strengths are decisive. Hostility to business in this case might mean refusing to recognise the benefits of this diversity and trying to impose a single model.

The bizarre thing about this belief in the moral superiority of small and local business is that it has very little to do with environmental sustainability - or - for that matter other social goods like wages and employment conditions. Why is it that greens are fascinated by what size a business is even more, seemingly, than how much pollution it generates?

Of course there are examples of good small business, contributing to civil society over and above what might be strictly necessary. And there are examples of bad big business. But the reverse examples can be found too. These examples mean very little - if you have a policy to deal with problem behaviour, shouldn't it apply equally to businesses of all sizes?

Now we do have some excellent local shops in Sheffield. One of the things that makes them excellent is that they must compete for trade. If everybody went only to their nearest shops, we wouldn't be rewarding competitiveness, we would be rewarding price gougers. Maybe you think your local shopkeeper is just too decent to gouge, and maybe they are. If so, that would be because gougers don't tend to run that sort of shop. If we rewarded them to, they would.

Wronger than the idea of protecting local business, however, is this idea of the local economy as the antithesis of the global economy. Almost all high value innovations demand a great deal of specialisation. Medicine, technology, art, you name it, to justify doing one particular thing very well indeed we need to be able to sell it worldwide. Cut off from trade it would be quite impossible to have much medicine, quality goods, never mind good renewable energy and so on. The way to build your local economy, then, is to provide goods and services in high demand and sell them as widely as possible. And with your earnings buy from elsewhere rather than trying to make do, or you will forego all the benefits of your earnings.

These are practical considerations which must trump a baseless prejudice for the small and local. Where this lesson has been learned - in much of Asia-Pacific for example - prosperity has followed. Yes, there is an environmental footprint to this - but imagine the alternative - of making do with cobbled together home grown versions of everything. If it were possible, wouldn't the environmental footprint be even higher? But it isn't possible, without specialisation and trade, to achieve anything like the standard of living people worldwide rightly demand. To try would condemn billions to poverty for no environmental benefit.

Treating celebs like human beings

With stunning topicality, the prime minister has rejected my petition, seeking a little more respect to be shown to royals by press photographers. He - or one of his people - says it was intended to be humorous. Well I am gutted. Couldn't he at least have said that it was humorous? At least that would give me some sense of achievement. And what is wrong with injecting a little humour to make a serious point? Do all petitions need to be po faced?

Anyway, this was the text:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to: 'permit members of the Royal Family to thump press photographers whenever they have the opportunity.'

With the supporting statement:

Without seeking to defend hereditary privilege in general, it is intolerable that after the paparazzi, the newspapers and their readers contributed to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the same industry can still hound surviving members of the family.

If royalty is to mean anything, it must be allowed to command the most elementary respect and dignity.

So we hear that "Kate and Wills" are splitting up. Boy has a girlfriend, boy stops having a girlfriend, big deal. At least after the Charles and Di fiasco, nobody could seriously try to tell him he has to marry her.

I saw The Queen on DVD the other week, and although it potrayed the royals as a bunch of emotional cripples, they still looked better than anybody else in the film - the PM and the press. Lots of people are excessively reserved, I probably am myself, and it is a human right to be so. Hounding celebrities to their death is not a human right. Let's get some perspective.

Denialism dot com

On cue, following my discussion of science and politics, which noted the similarity between global warming deniers, creationists, anti-vaccine and anti-animal testing movements and so on, I find the blog denialism.com, dealing, in some detail with much the same issues, with a couple of differences.

In particular denialism.com deals with the methods of denialists: conspiracy theories, selective use of evidence, fake experts, impossible expectations and faulty logic.

Denialism.com doesn't mention, as I did, alternative medicine, anti-GM food and perpetual motion. It is explained here that there isn't the same kind of organised denialism going on for alternative medicine. I guess largely this is correct, alternative medicine is interested in asserting its own efficacy, and not so much attacking the efficacy of conventional medicine. But it may be a close call.

GM food seems to be off the agenda now, and perpetual motion I suppose is just too silly to spend any time on.

Denialism.com's subjects that I didn't mention are these:

1. Anti-regulatory/Industry Apologists/Fake Consumer groups/Astroturf
2. HIV/AIDS Denialism
3. Stem Cell Denialism/Adult Stem Cell Hype/Fake Bioethicists/Cloning, Eugenics and Euthanasia Paranoids

It wouldn't have occurred to me to include group 1 in this sort of exercise. Arguments over regulation are intensely political on both sides and are rarely made with scientific rigour on either side. One or two commenters have pointed out that there are probably equivalent pro-regulatory deniers around. Still, if people are using the denialist tactics described in political debates then this should be exposed.

Group 2, good point.

Group 3, again surprising. I'm not sure how one might qualify as a fake ethicist - I tend to take the view that we're all ethicists, in the sense that we're all entitled to express our views on ethics, and that all these views matter - the idea of believing what is right or wrong on the authority of an ethicist seems bizarre. Glancing at the sites listed, I would agree that there are some terribly bad arguments being used out there to oppose stem cell research. But I do think - as I said here - it is reasonable for people to argue a position that they have only religious and not scientific reasons for believing. But on the face of it, this does seem to be denialism of a similar quality to the others, so perhaps I am being too generous. Please comment.


Anyway, while we are drifting into the denialisms of politics and ethics as well as those of science, what else could we add to the list? How about denialism of the benefits of free trade?

Remember this is about methods. 1. Conspiracy theories: Anti-traders assert that free trade is just a consipiracy by the rich and powerful to drive down wages and environmental standards. 2. Selectivity: The huge gains in prosperity in Asia-Pacific are ignored. 3. Fake Experts: The New Economics Foundation? 4. Impossible Expectations: Economists all disagree anyway, Economics doesn't work. 5. Bad logic: What ever it is, we're smart enough to make it here. (Being able to make anything doesn't mean we are able to make everything we currently consume, when giving up economies of scale.)

So far, so good, I suppose. But might this work for denying theories that should be denied because they are bunk? Like Marxism:

1. Conspiracy Theories: Anti-marxists assert that Marxists are trying to take over the world. 2. Selectivity: Er, the soviet economic boom from agrarian backwater to superpower in 50 years? 3. Fake Experts: Tories 4. Unrealistic Expectations: Worldwide revolution hasn't happened yet, so Marxism is bunk. 5. Bad logic: Trying to make the world better will only make it worse. (This is an argument you occasionally hear from some on the right who can't be arsed trying to make the world any better. Panglossian rubbish.)


So, while I very much like what denialism.com is doing, I am also a little underwhelmed. The point to keep aware of is that dealing with the poor arguments in favour of a proposition does not deal with the proposition. Denialism.com is all about identifying and disposing with common poor and deceptive arguments for certain propositions. It is the fact that most perpetrators of these poor arguments don't have any good arguments that deals with their propositions. Why make the weak argument if you have a strong one?

But the arguments that are found in politics, economics and ethics generally are weaker than those found in science, and this makes the denialism.com approach rather less biting in these fields.

The Trap: What happened to our dreams of freedom?

Having missed the first two of these programmes, I was pleased to catch the third. I hope that my profoundest observations on it weren't lost during Desperate Housewives which was on immediately after.

The thesis was, in short, that there was something missing from Isiah Berlin's negative liberty concept, which has led to failures in imposing negative liberty in Russia, Iraq and elsewhere. Cicero provides a good defence of Berlin and negative liberty.

I think you could take Curtis' arguments and arrive at the rather different conclusion that negative liberty just can't be imposed. He makes the point that when it came to the Iraq war, we were so steeped in the culture of self-interest, that we didn't trust Blair and Bush. This is what perhaps led them to fabricate the evidence of a threat from Iraq.

And here's the problem. Freedom suffers if we can't rely on legislators and politicians to be honest brokers, rather than self-interested rational men. And of course we can't rely on anybody not to be self-interested, but we can, if we have elections and a true democratic culture, create the right incentives for politicians and vote out those that fall short.

An attempt to impose negative liberty cannot introduce this kind of check on power. Without democracy, politics becomes corrupt and self-serving whether done in the name of negative liberty, of socialism, of God, or of any other cause you care to mention.

Curtis argues that negative liberty relies on people being self-interested, and that positive liberty seeks to do better than that. But this is wrong. Negative liberty allows people freedom to choose their own values - so long as that doesn't interfere with the freedom of others - and so people are perfectly free to be altruistic without undermining the system. It is positive liberty that makes some reliance on people behaving appropriately and can go wrong when they don't.

The lesson I take from The Trap is not that negative, or positive liberty is prone to fail, but that the imposition of values is prone to fail. The imposition of values is of course against the principles of negative liberty, whether negative liberty is one of the values being imposed or not. Revolutions make things worse. The way to enhance freedom, of either kind, is not to tear down the system, but to reform it incrementally and democratically.

Curtis' description of Pol Pot's murder of the entire Cambodian middle class reminded me of this quote:

As an eco-Marxist I believe that only a socialist society will meet human needs and sustain ecological diversity, politics is based on class struggle, it isn't a matter of changing a few laws we live in a social totality that is utterly destructive and must be replaced.
- Derek Wall, principal speaker of the Green Party

I discuss an alternative approach to environmental problems, offering more freedom, negative and I daresay positive as well, here.