Linkblogging For 29/04/10
Music post shortly. For now, here are some links
Alex Wilcock reviews the CD version of Genesis Of The Daleks given away with today’s Torygraph.
David Mathewman on talking about immigration. The more this campaign goes on, the more I want to grab *EVERYONE IN THIS FUCKING COUNTRY* with the exception of a few people like Mr Mathewman, by the throat and scream the actual truth about the appaling, inhuman way we actually treat immigrants in this country, until they *SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THEIR HATRED*. David’s recent “Why I Am A Liberal Democrat” series is essential reading, too.
Leonard Pierce on the South Park Mohammed controversy .
Andrew Rilstone talks sense on ‘bigotgate’.
A Beginners’ Guide To The Election Part 2 – What The Parties Stand For
A bit later than I thought, here’s the second part of this. Before I start, some people were interested in exactly what happens in a balanced parliament situation – here’s a report from the Hansard Society (pdf) that sets it all out.
I’m going to try here to set out what all the major parties in the UK General Election believe, as simply as I can. I’m going to try to avoid words like ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ because I want this to be useful to as many people as possible – I genuinely know quite a few people who don’t know even what the most basic ideas of what the parties stand for even at this late stage. It should also, though, help my foreign friends understand things a bit better. If you’re a member or supporter of one of the parties listed and you think I’m being unfair or inaccurate (within the very simplistic way I’m doing this) please leave a comment.
The Conservative Party are the simplest party to explain. They believe that, more or less, the way things are is the best way they could be. They think that the people with power at the moment (not just politicians, but religious leaders, business leaders, banks and so on – ‘important’ people) are the people who should keep power. This also means that even though it’s not actually their policy, a lot of them think that middle-aged white straight men deserve more power than anyone who isn’t a middle-aged white straight male, though some individual Conservatives, including their current leader, don’t think that. The Conservatives are also called the Tories, and over Britain’s history they have been in government most of the time. Their leader is David Cameron.
The Labour Party are the hardest to explain. They used to believe that working people deserved to get a better share of the money than they do, and that government should make sure of that, but that otherwise it would be better to give people more freedom. Labour governments brought in the National Health Service, created the Open University, ended capital punishment (hanging) and legalised homosexuality and abortion. (Many of these were Liberal ideas originally, but Labour brought them in). However, after the Conservatives were in power for eighteen years, the leaders of the party decided that people didn’t want a government like that any more, and Labour became more-or-less identical to the Conservatives. There are some slight differences – they brought in the minimum wage and civil partnerships for gay people – but otherwise they have behaved almost exactly like the Conservatives (increasing the gap between rich and poor, supporting the Americans in illegal wars). Many Labour *members* though still hope the party will go back to the way it used to be. Labour have been in government for the last 13 years, and their leader is Gordon Brown.
The Liberal Democrats are both Britain’s oldest and newest party, being formed in 1988 from a merger between two other parties, the Liberals (Britain’s oldest party) and the Social Democrats (a new party formed by some ex-Labour members). We believe in freedom – that the government should not interfere in you doing what you want with your life. We realise, though, that you can’t be free without enough food to eat or somewhere to live or medicine if you’re sick, so we think the government should do what it can to make sure everybody has those things, even if it means interfering a bit with rich people’s freedom (by taking some of their money away) to make sure poor people have them. We also think it’s worth making sure we have a better environment for everyone, because the freedoms not to choke on fumes or to have your home not be flooded by dangerous weather are also important. We also want a fairer voting system, to give everyone the freedom to have a say in how they’re governed.
We also want to make sure that *everyone* has more freedom, so we support gay people, and transsexual people, and disabled people, and other people who have a hard time at the moment, and we want to make sure they have the same rights as everyone else and can also do what *they* want to with their lives.
The Liberal Democrats have never been in government, although the Liberals were a long, LONG time ago, and Nick Clegg is our leader.
The Green Party want to protect the environment, and to share money out more so poor people have more and rich people have less. They share a lot of the same ideals as the Liberal Democrats, but we think some of the ways they want to do things won’t work properly, while they think we’re too similar to the Conservatives and Labour and not radical enough. The Greens don’t have any Members of Parliament at the moment, but are hoping to get some. Caroline Lucas is their leader.
The Scottish Nationalist Party and Plaid Cymru are nationalists – they believe that Scotland (for the SNP) and Wales (for Plaid Cymru) should become separate countries. As you would imagine, they don’t have many MPs (Scotland and Wales don’t have many people in compared to England), but they both have a lot of members of their respective assemblies (the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly). Alex Salmond leads the SNP, and Ieuan Wyn Jones leads Plaid Cymru.
There are *lots* of smaller parties in Northern Ireland, where the major mainland parties don’t stand. Roughly speaking the Unionist parties (those that want Northern Ireland to stay part of the UK, mostly Protestants) will support the Conservatives in Parliament, while the Republican parties (those that want Northern Ireland to join with the Republic of Ireland, mostly Catholics) will support Labour, but some Republican parties (like Sinn Fein) won’t take their seats in Parliament because you have to swear allegiance to the Queen. The Alliance Party, which tries to work with both communities and bring them together, are formally linked to the Liberal Democrats.
Racist UKIP The official name of this party is the United Kingdom Independence Party, but I refuse to refer to them as anything other than Racist UKIP, because I was threatened with legal action for saying they are racists. Racist UKIP’s policy is mostly centred around not liking foreigners, so they don’t want to be part of the European Union and they want to stop any foreign people coming over here and get rid of some of the ones who already are. Other than that, they’re mostly the same as the Conservatives. Their leader is Lord Pearson Of Rannoch , and they don’t have any MPs in the Commons but do have members in the House of Lords.
The Bastard Nazi Party, officially the British National Party, are a party that formed mainly to hate black people, though in recent years they have branched out and now hate Muslims too. Their leader is DickIbegyourpardonNick Griffin, and they are bastard Nazis. They don’t have any MPs at the moment, and if you vote for them you are scum.
Linkblogging For 28/04/10
Sorry for lack of actual content – proper posts tomorrow. For now, some links.
First of all, I don’t plan to discuss Brown’s ‘gaffe’ today, where he was polite to a bigot to her face and then grumbled about her behind her back, without realising his mic was still on. It’s the kind of thing that every single politician in Britain has done, and Brown just got caught. It was fun to joke about on Twitter, but it should not have dominated the news in the way it has. This, however, is important. This illustrates exactly why we need to change the rhetoric surrounding immigration. Meanwhile Justin at Chicken Yoghurt shows precisely how disgraceful it is that this disgusting hypocritical war criminal who has destroyed the lives of millions DARES to criticise someone else for bigotry.
(I must look into how you change party policy on immigration, in fact, and work towards getting ours changed. )
David Brothers says what I’ve been saying for a long time about ‘canon’
Laurie Penny reviews a couple of books on the way the Baby Boomers have destroyed their children’s lives.
Tom at It Took Seconds examines John Cage’s 4’33 and also links to this very thorough examination of the piece.
And a good piece from Language Log absolutely demolishing the fallacy that ‘men don’t listen’
Finally, if you’re using Spotify (and yes, unfortunately, the free software clients are still not up to much, so I’m still reliant on the proprietary client – one of only three non-free pieces of software on my machine, along with Inform 7 and the nonfree rar for unpacking cbr files) you can add me to the social whatsists and send me music or something. as well as seeing all my playlists in one place.
Linkblogging For 26/04/10
Again, apologies to my foreign readers for so much of the current content being political. It’s only going to last until Thursday of next week, when the election happens, though. I promise to spend the whole next four years after that just talking about Batman.
UK Election Trend look at the different possibilities and conclude a Lib/Lab coalition is still most likely, while the Independent says Clegg has ‘hinted he could work with Labour’. James Graham, in Comment Is Free, says the same. Now will you all PLEASE stop screaming about how Clegg is Cameron’s bestest ever friend?
A wonderful thing here – the entrants into a competition for text adventure (‘interactive fiction’) games that had to be written in a total of 140 characters or fewer (except for whitespace). Most are written in Inform 7, but some are in perl, or even sed or awk, and all are playable…
Jim Jepps (a Green) talks about members of other parties he admires – Lib Dems, Labour and far left.
The Honorable Lady Mark wonders which ‘home’ the Bastard Nazi Party want him to go to.
On Coalitions
A lot of Labour supporters – and Green supporters – have been up in arms for the last day or so, practically frothing at the mouth and screaming because Nick Clegg has said that
if Labour gets the smallest share of the vote of the three main parties and the most seats, he would not tolerate Brown remaining prime minister.
(from here. Warning – Murdoch paper.)
A lot of Labour supporters seem to be seeing the Lib Dems as basically the same as Labour really (in the attitude that ‘Liberal’ Conspiracy takes), and as some kind of secret backup plan – and so they’ve been incredibly hurt by this, and got angry, accusing Clegg of saying he will form a coalition with the Conservatives, and screaming ‘vote Clegg get Cameron’.
But look at what he’s actually saying:
IF Labour come third in the vote
THEN we would not tolerate
GORDON BROWN remaining Prime Minister.
What this *DOESN’T* say:
We won’t work with Labour if they come second
We won’t work with Labour with another leader
We won’t work with Labour as the junior partner in a Lib Dem-led coalition.
It’s very simple – if Labour come THIRD (not second, note, THIRD), Gordon Brown doesn’t get to be Prime Minister any more. That’s all he’s said.
I’ve spent much of this election staggered at the sense of entitlement coming from the Tories, their sense that they don’t need to actually do anything because it’s their turn to be in power – but even they don’t have the nerve to suggest that IF THEY COME THIRD they should run the country, and be angry at A DIFFERENT PARTY for not agreeing with them about that.
Just to be clear, I don’t think we will form a coalition with the Tories – in fact I would leave the party if we did so, because I remember the Thatcher and Major years too well, and even though I actually have no rational basis for preferring Labour – both parties being evil, as far as I can see – I have a visceral, irrational hatred of the Tories. So if I thought I was supporting a Lib/Tory coalition, I would leave today. It’s not going to happen.
But all along Clegg has made clear exactly what would have to be agreed to form a coalition with either other major party – tax rises on the rich to pay for tax cuts for the poor, spending more on education for poor children, electoral reform and a change from an economy based on financial services to a more environmentally-friendly one. Those don’t sound especially Tory to me.
I suspect it simply never occurred to him until this week to say “the party with the most votes should be in charge” because it would take a sense of entitlement the size of a small galaxy to demand to still be in charge AFTER COMING THIRD, and to make that demand of a party WITH THE WORD ‘DEMOCRATS’ IN ITS NAME.
To be honest, I think Labour and the Tories would make better coalition partners together than either would with us. As I said in the comments to this post by millennium, “Let the war criminals and the idiot sons of privilege go into coalition together. They deserve each other.”
In this election, for the first time in my lifetime, there’s a chance for *REAL* change. Vote for the party *YOU WANT TO WIN*. If you want a bunch of corrupt war criminals, vote Labour. If you want a bunch of inbred aristocratic cretins who think they have a right to rule because their great-grandmother slept with the Queen, vote Tory. Me, I want a Liberal and Democratic government, so I’m voting Liberal Democrat.
But if the Liberal Democrats come third, I won’t go stamping my feet and demanding that Nick Clegg get to be Prime Minister anyway, as Labour supporters are already doing. Because I am mature enough to know that ‘coming third’ is not the same as ‘winning’.
The second part of my Beginners’ Guide will be up tonight.
Linkblogging For 25/04/10
Proper post tonight…
Terence Eden, who describes himself as a ‘natural Labour voter’ who went into the election thinking he might vote for them, is joining the Lib Dems. I’m quite astonished at how many people I know, respect and like, but who have previously been non-partisan, are becoming active campaigners for the party this time round. I feel like a trendsetter!
David Mitchell says David Cameron is feeling the hand of history where it hurts.
The Heresiarch has a post on PR. It’s full of unsubstantiated claims and things I disagree with, but it *does* show that it is possible to be a Tory and have a coherent argument for PR.
Via Wesley, an essay on Farmville which suggests we should call it a ‘sociopathic application’ rather than a social one.
Left Outside, like me, is tired of arguing on the internet about immigration and is doing a series of posts addressing most of the biggest myths on the subject put about by racist pricks. Here’s the first post, on population density.
Jonathan Calder thinks the election ‘turning American’ is, for once, a good thing.
James Graham tells Polly Toynbee where she can stick her clothespeg.
We Need To Change The Rhetoric On Immigration
While I am proud to be a Liberal Democrat, and for the most part agree with our manifesto, there was one part that really stuck in my throat.
We’ve got a ‘firm but fair’ policy on immigration.
Firm but fair.
FIRM but fair.
That sounds like a policy about crime, about tax evasion, about *bad stuff*.
Now, the actual policy is not a good one – it talks about restricting the areas where people can work, to make sure that we don’t have more and more people coming into the same areas – but it’s markedly more liberal than the other two parties, in that we have things like an amnesty for illegal immigrants.
But it’s still fundamentally accepting that immigration is a problem. And that’s just wrong.
This affects real people. See this for one example. Another example is my wife. As an immigrant, she has made a large net contribution to our country. When she’s been unable to work, she’s been unable to claim benefits, so she’s not taken from society – I had to support her. On the other hand, when she’s worked, she’s still paid taxes. She’s not entitled to vote, and we had to pay several thousand pounds just to get her permission to live here at all (and would have to pay even more were she to want citizenship).
People complain about immigrants adding to the population. You know what adds to the population? HAVING CHILDREN adds to the population, yet we don’t see tabloid newspapers talking about ‘the baby problem’. We don’t talk about being firm but fair on motherhood. And of course babies, unlike adult immigrants, have to be supported by society for between sixteen and twenty-one years before they can start being productive at all – immigrants *have* to work from day one, because they can’t claim benefits.
And the people who come over here, the immigrants, are generally the ones who do the jobs that people born here *won’t do*. I don’t know how many of you realise this, but the NHS would collapse overnight were it not for immigration. Not just doctors – though we import enough of those that it would be a problem – but nurses, nursing assistants and cleaners.
And even there, they’re doing the shitty jobs. Until two years ago, I worked on a mental health ward. During the day, the staff were predominantly British-born, but during the night they were all African immigrants. This wasn’t an isolated thing – this is true for the vast majority of mental health wards in the city where I live, and I suspect it’s true for other areas of health, too. They did that work because night shift work on a mental health ward is one of the most horrible, soul-destroying jobs you can imagine. At not much more than minimum wage, you have to put up with a constant fear of physical or sexual assault, the loss of any kind of normal social life, long periods of boredom punctuated by periods of cleaning excrement and bodily fluids off walls, or stripping the sheets off beds of HIV positive drug users who are known to hide needles in them. And coupled with that, there’s the threat to your *own* mental health, as you spend ten hours every day in the company of people with schizophrenia and become accustomed to that being the ‘normal’ way of thinking.
To put it bluntly, there are simply not enough people in a privileged, pampered country like the UK who are willing to put in that much work for that little reward. Immigrants are.
And contrary to what parties like Racist UKIP say, we do not have an ‘open door’ policy for immigrants. VERY far from it. To come over here my wife firstly had to marry me – otherwise she could never have come to live here at all. She then had to pay £750 for a two-year visa, at the end of which she then had to pay £1500 for the right to permanent residency. She also had to take a test on British life to prove she was worthy of staying here – and they were questions that NONE of the British people to whom I showed the practice test could answer. She literally had to be more British than the British to live here. And if she wanted to get citizenship and actually have the right to vote – the right to have a say in what happens to her, a right the rest of us take for granted or don’t even use, she would have to pay another thousand pounds or so. And those are the prices from a few years back – I believe they’ve more than doubled since.
We have an unconscionable, unjustifiable situation right now, where *all* the major parties are, to a greater or lesser extent, pandering to the outright *LIES* being told by racist fuckheads in the right-wing newspapers. Even my own party, who are, I repeat, better than most on the issue, are still being far too illiberal on this matter, trying to find nonsensical ‘solutions’ to a non-existent ‘problem’.
I don’t regard nursing assistants as a problem. I don’t regard *my wife* as a problem. And I am becoming increasingly disgusted at those who do.
Doctor Who – The Time Of Angels
That was good.
That was actually good.
For the first time since about half way through the Eccleston series, an episode of the Welsh series has felt to me like a proper Doctor Who episode. For the first time since Dalek, I’m wanting to watch it again straight after seeing it.
I’m far from convinced yet about Moffat’s take on the show as a whole, and I still don’t think they’ve got the character down properly – that cliffhanger line is, as Lawrence Miles pointed out, more suited to Clint Eastwood than to the Doctor, but with surprisingly little modification that could have been a Troughton story, and it would have fitted in nicely in series 12 too, and would have held its own against the rest of that year.
And the thing is, it definitely *shouldn’t* have worked. It’s entirely built out of cliches and reused ideas, cobbled together in a way that shouldn’t possibly work.
I believed the Weeping Angels should be a one-off thing. Blink, the story they first appeared in, is deservedly thought of as one of the best episodes of the Welsh series (thanks, in large part, to the fact that it didn’t have Tennant’s travesty of a Doctor in it for more than a few seconds). It was a wonderfully constructed piece of TV, albeit horribly emotionally manipulative, cynical, and with a nasty nerd-mocking aspect to it, and the Angels were a fantastic monster for the story. But they were essentially a plot device.
And indeed, for much of this story, the Angels could be any monster at all, as a big chunk of it is just standard eighties action-movie formula stuff. But if any show has a right to do eighties formula action-movie it’s Doctor Who – this story is clearly a descendant of Alien, but Alien itself was ripped off almost entirely from The Ark In Space, and this feels nicely like a combination between that and Tomb Of The Cybermen. Not as *good* as those, but it’s got that feeling.
But Moffat has always understood that one of the things Doctor Who always did best was to use the fact it was on TV as a plot point – the Troughton era was full of things on monitors, while the Colin Baker period was almost Brechtian in the way it emphasised its own televisuality. Even in Hartnell’s day the TARDIS had a horizontal hold…
Moffat has often had people speaking out of TV screens – most obviously in Blink – but here he takes it one step further. Here we have monsters that *WILL COME OUT OF THE TV AND GET YOU IF YOU STOP WATCHING*. If you’re looking for a way to absolutely scare the shit out of little kids – one of Doctor Who’s hallowed functions since its inception – then that has to be a good one.
And the idea that the Angels are in fact living *ideas* – thrown out quite casually – not only explains this new power, but fits with the quantum handwaviness in their previous appearance. Moffat has actually made these creatures make *MORE* sense.
And while each part of the story is absolutely cliched – we’ve got the James Bond bit, the time-travel message sending, the action movie and a load of Moffatisms on top (things in the TV, repeated phrases from dead/possessed people), but the way the tone of this episode could wheel around on a pinhead, the sudden realisation of just how bad the situation was for the Doctor and his companions… there wasn’t a single new idea in the entire thing – in fact there wasn’t an idea that wasn’t as worn down as those Angels’ faces – but it was rather like watching a master bluesman play a twelve-bar. It’s all in the execution.
As for River Song, the returning character, I’d not seen her previous appearance, having given up on the RTD show in disgust long before, but I’d heard she was essentially Bernice Summerfield (a companion from the books and audios). Luckily, she seemed far more interesting here. In fact, with her hallucinogenic lipstick and the way she treated the Doctor, she reminded me far more of Iris Wildthyme, just without the annoying joke-Northernness.
And this was clearly an episode done on a budget, too. Other than one or two shots, there was nothing here that couldn’t have been done in the 80s – including some slightly dodgy matte work. And the lack of money has clearly made the programme-makers concentrate on the script and the drama rather than the big moments.
This was by far the tightest script of the series so far – which is to say, the tightest script since the Welsh series started – and while it wasn’t perfect – I’d put it at somewhere in the top 35 or 40% of Doctor Who stories, no better – there were no actual *problems* with it either.
I’d still like to see this series have some ambition to it – it’s very clearly sitting in a very comfortable, formulaic place right now – at the same time, it’s doing the formula very well. If it doesn’t break out of that formula soon, it won’t really be Doctor Who – Doctor Who should never be about doing the safe thing – but for now, at least, it’s just good to see something *competent* and *enjoyable* going out under the Doctor Who name.
I am very scared of what’s coming up – we have episodes by Richard Curtis and Simon Nye to come, and one with that horrible annoying bloke from Lesbian Vampire Hunters – but at this point Moffat would actually have to make an effort to mess this up.
A Beginners’ Guide To The Election: Part 1 – The Voting System
I’ve spoken to a lot of people recently – British people who can vote, and indeed who have voted in the past – who don’t understand some very basic things about our political system. They think, for example, that the party that gets the most votes always has to form the government, or that we vote for a Prime Minister directly. Neither of these things is true.
In the UK we are governed by Parliament, which is split into two ‘Houses’. The House Of Lords is a sort of advisory body, made up of retired politicians, business leaders, bishops, and a few people who have inherited their place in the Lords from their parents. We can’t vote for anyone in the Lords.
The other House, the House of Commons, is the part of the government we can vote for. There are 650 members of the House of Commons, known as Members of Parliament, or MPs.
To select these, the country is split into 650 areas known as constituencies. In each of these constituencies, people vote for the person they want to represent them, from a choice of candidates who are mostly members of political parties, and the person with the highest number of votes wins and becomes their MP.
Note that we don’t vote for a *party*, or for a *government* – we vote for a single person. It would be entirely possible for someone to want, say, a Conservative government, but to dislike their local Conservative candidate and like their local Labour candidate. In that case, they would vote for the Labour candidate.
After the election, most of the time one party has more than 325 MPs – so more than half the MPs in Parliament, and that party gets to become the government. The leader of the government party is the Prime Minister – we don’t get to vote directly for the Prime Minister, and if the current Prime Minister resigns, or gets kicked out by their party, the party in government chooses the new one. This happens a lot – roughly half the Prime Ministers we’ve had since the Second World War weren’t the leader of their party at the election before they became Prime Minister.
However, some times no party gets more than 325 MPs, and then we have what is usually known as a ‘hung parliament’ (though some people prefer to call it a ‘balanced Parliament’). When this happens, the different parties have to discuss between themselves what to do about forming a government. Sometimes this ends in a ‘coalition’ (two or more parties working together in government, with the leader of the bigger party being Prime Minister but members of the other party being Cabinet Ministers). At other times it leads to a ‘minority government’ where the largest individual party gets to form the government but has to try to persuade members of the other parties to vote for any new laws it wants to bring in.
Now this is a simple system, but it’s not particularly fair. To see why, imagine we have three parties, A, B and C, and two constituencies.
Now, in constituency 1, party A gets thirty thousand votes, party B gets twenty-nine thousand votes, and party C gets one thousand votes, so party A gets an MP. In constituency 2, party C gets thirty thousand votes, party B gets twenty-nine thousand votes, and party A gets one thousand votes, so party C gets an MP.
When this happens, party B has got twenty-eight thousand votes more than the other two parties, but it has no MPs while the others have one each. As you can see, this is not fair.
Most people, most of the time, either don’t know about this unfairness or don’t think it matters, because the system we have *sort of* works – at the last election Labour got most votes and most MPs, the Conservatives got second-most votes and second-most MPs, and the Liberal Democrats third most votes and third most MPs, so it sort of looks more-or-less fair until you look at the shares properly.
But this upcoming election might be different. Because of the way the different parties have different levels of support in different parts of the country, and the way the polls are at the moment, it is entirely possible (not likely, but very possible, say a one in four chance) that the Liberal Democrats will get the most votes, the Conservatives second and Labour third, but that Labour will get the most MPs, with the Conservatives second and the Liberal Democrats third.
Many political parties (most of the smaller ones, and the Liberal Democrats) want to change the system to make it fairer. People have suggested many different ways of making the voting system fairer, and these are all collectively known as ‘proportional representation’ systems. However, there are big differences between them. The system we use for European elections, the d’Hondt system, is horrible, as I explained here, and is why the Bastard Nazi Party got seats in the European Parliament.
The system the Liberal Democrats want is called Single Transferable Vote (STV), and I talked a little bit about it here. It is both simple and fair. (Fixed – Tez Burke corrected my stupid error here).
When politicians talk about ‘proportional representation’ leading to corruption or to Nazis getting in, they are usually talking about systems like d’Hondt, not systems like STV, and lots of them are deliberately confusing the two – or outright lying – because they benefit from the current system. STV is fair to everyone. You may prefer the current system after they’ve both been described, but please do so for the right reasons, not because of lies people have told about ‘proportional representation’ as a whole.
I hope this helps – any questions?
(ETA, have corrected a misstatement of fact after Tez Burke and Andrew Ducker called me on it in the comments.)
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