Can you claim to be on the right side of history?

On several major issues, we all need to decide where we stand. We can obfuscate and waffle and use distractions and other tricks to avoid discussing them and perhaps having an argument, or losing friends if we make our position clear, but your conscience knows what you think, and whether you do anything about it or try to hide.

I’ve lost a lot of social media followers and quite a few former friends by repeatedly laying out my own opinions on controversial issues such as climate change, trans rights v women’s rights, antisemitism, capitalism v socialism, freedom of speech and what I often call the new dark age. I don’t have any grandchildren yet but hope one day I will, and if any of them ask me what I thought and said and did when big decisions were being made around now, I will either be proudly able to say I was on the right side of history, or – and we all must accept this is always a possibility – that I got it wrong, that I believed and said and did the wrong things.

We all live in different information environments. We have different friends, different educations, different personalities, and consume different media. Some of it is not our fault, some of it is results of personal choices. You can’t excuse yourself for not being aware of something if you choose to only ever read media that ignores that issue or always puts heavy spin on it. That’s your free choice (though it is certainly getting harder to find media without bias).

Elections are a time where such personal choices come to the fore.  Us Brits have to vote this week, my yank followers are deep in the very long run up to theirs. In both cases, the decisions are more about big moral issues and will have deeper consequences than most previous elections. Our choice counts, not just for this election, but for our future consciences, for the notional personal account we could give our descendants in the world we have helped architect (or opposed).

It’s not for me to tell you how to vote – it’s your decision and your conscience you’ll have to live with years down the line. My blogs and tweets lay out my own positions on the important issues frequently and my regular readers will know them. But this is my blog, so I’m happy to lay them out briefly again. Maybe it will help think more about your own positions.

Antisemitism: I don’t know if I know any Jews (I don’t know anyone who has told me they are), but I do know that antisemitism is wrong. The Holocaust was only possible because many people stood by and let it. I will not be one of them now. If anyone votes for an antisemitic party, they are complicit in antisemitism. If Jews feel they have to leave the UK because an antisemitic party gains power, that will be shameful for the UK, and anyone who helps them gain power should feel deeply ashamed. It has become very clear that Labour is currently an antisemitic party. I have voted for them several times before, but I will certainly never vote for them again while they are antisemitic.

Capitalism v socialism: Capitalism works. Socialism doesn’t. A socialist government would make it much more difficult for people to lead comfortable lives, including the poorest in our society, and would leave massive debts crippling our children and grandchildren. I don’t want that on my conscience.

Climate change: we have seen some warming in the last few decades. Some of that is likely caused by nature – mainly ocean and solar cycles, but some of it, an unknown amount, is probably caused by humans. CO2 emissions of course but also deforestation, pollution, industry, farming, and all of our personal lifestyle choices. I believe we should not be complacent about any of these, and should work towards a cleaner environment and better stewardship, including developing better forms of clean energy. However, although I want a cleaner world with better environmental stewardship, I most certainly do not agree we are in a ‘climate emergency’, that we are all doomed if we don’t dramatically change our way of life immediately. I believe much of the information we are presented with has been distorted and exaggerated, that the climate models predict too high levels for future warming, and that deeply reduces solar activity likely to last until around 2050 will provide a cooling effect that at least offsets warming, and perhaps even results in net cooling. Consequently, nature has effectively give us a few decades to carry on developing solar and fusion energy technology, that we can invest gradually as free markets incentivise development and reduce the costs, and that we do not need to spend massively right now, because the problem will essentially go away. By 2050, CO2 output will be a lot less than today, the real warming we see by then will be much smaller than is often predicted in the media and there is therefore no real reason to jeopardise our economies by massively overspending on CO2 reduction while the associated costs and lifestyle impacts are so high. Massively spending on scales wanted by XR, the Green party etc, would cause huge harm to our kids’ futures with no significant benefit. If we want to spend huge sums of money, we have a duty to aim for the biggest benefit and there are plenty of real problems such as poverty and disease that could use those funds better. Waste trillions on pointless virtue signalling, or make the world a better place? I know where I stand. None of my local candidates come out well here.

Trans rights v women’s rights: I support trans rights to a point, but we are quickly passing that point, and now eroding women’s rights. Women have had to fight long and hard to get where they are today. In my view, women being forced to accept former men competing with them in sports (or indeed in any field where biological men have an advantage) is unfair to biological women. Having to share changing rooms and lavatories with people who still have male genitalia is unfair to biological women. Deliberate conflation of sex and gender as a means to influencing debate or regulation is wrong. Encouraging young children to change gender and schools preventing parents from even knowing is going too far. Given the potential life consequences, great care should be exercised before gender change is considered and it seems that care is not always present. Making it illegal to discuss these issues is certainly going too far. If someone feels they are in the wrong body and wants hormone treatment or surgery, or if they want to cross-dress or call themselves by a different gender, I don’t object at all, and I’d even defend their right to do so, provided that doing so doesn’t undermine someone else’s rights. Women are a vulnerable group because of physical and historic disadvantages compared to men, and in conflict between trans rights and women’s rights, I think women’s rights should take priority. Good luck with finding a party that agrees.

Freedom of speech and the new dark age: I believe people should be able to say what they want and others should be able to challenge them. I believe in a few sensible restrictions – e.g shouting “FIRE” in a crowded cinema, or deliberate incitement to violence. I disagree with the concepts of hate speech and hate crime, invariably used to close down debate that is essential for a free and cohesive society. Making the law into a tool to restrict freedom of speech (and thought) has already resulted in harm, and has created a large and rapidly growing class of ‘truths’ that everyone must give lip service to even if they believe them to be wrong. They must also lie and state that they believe them if challenged or face punishment, by the law or social media mob. This is simply anti-knowledge. It inhibits genuine progress and the development of genuine knowledge and it therefore inhibits quality of life. Even naming such anti-knowledge is punishable, and it has already caused a high degree of self-censorship in journalism and blogging, so you must use your own judgement on what it includes. My censored thoughts on the new dark age are here: https://timeguide.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/the-new-dark-age.pdf. Again, most parties seem very happy to take us further into the dark age.

I could have picked many other policies and issues. Every reader has their own priorities. These are just some in my mind today.

I don’t think any of the parties come out well today. For many people, spoiling their vote is a valid alternative that officially says they’re not prepared to support any of those on offer on the ballot paper. Others will vote for who they see as the lesser of evils. Others will happily support a candidate and turn a blind eye to their associated moral issues.

Your conscience, your choice, your future memory of where you stood. Choose well.

 

Better representational democracy

We’re on the run-up to a general election in the UK. In theory, one person gets one vote, all votes are equal and every person gets equal representation in parliament. In practice it is far from that. Parties win seats in proportions very different from their proportion of the votes. Some parties get ten times more seats per vote than others, and that is far from fair and distorts the democratic working of parliament. The situation is made even worse by the particulars of UK party politics in this next election, where there seems unlikely to be a clear winner and we will probably need to have coalition government. The representational distortion that already exists is amplified even further when a party gets far more seats than it justifies and thereby has far greater power in negotiating a place in coalition.

For decades, the UK electoral system worked fine for the two party system – Labour and Conservative (broadly equivalent to Democrat and Republican in the USA). Labour wins more seats per vote than the Conservatives because of the geographic distribution of their voter base, but the difference has been tolerable. The UK’s third party, the Liberal Democrats, generally won only a few seats even when they won a significant share of the vote, because they were thinly spread across the country, so achieved a local majority in very few places. Conservatives generally had a majority in most southern seats and labour had a majority in most northern seats.

Now we have a very different mixture. Scotland has the SNP, we have the Greens, UKIP, the Libdems, Conservatives and Labour. A geographic party like the SNP will always win far more seats per vote because instead of being spread across the whole country, they are concentrated in a smaller region where they count for a higher average proportion and therefore win more local majorities. By contrast Libdems have their voters spread thinly across the whole country with a few pockets of strong support, and UKIP and the Greens are also pretty uniformly dispersed so reaching a majority anywhere is very difficult. Very few seats are won by parties that don’t have 30% or more of the national vote. For the three bottom parties, that results in gross under-representation in parliament. A party could win 20% of the votes and still get no seats. Or they could have only 2% of the vote but win 10% of the seats if the voters are concentrated in one region.

A Channel 4 blog provides a good analysis of the problem that discusses distortion effects of turnout, constituency size and vote distribution which saves me having to repeat it all:

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-voting-system-rigged-favour-labour/19025

Looking to the future, I believe an old remedy would help a lot in leveling the playing field:

Firstly, if a party wins more than a certain percentage of votes, say 1%, they should be allocated at least one seat, if necessary a seat without constituency. Secondly, once a party has one or more seats, those seats can have their parliamentary votes scaled according to the number of votes their party has won. The block voting idea has been used by trades unions for decades, it isn’t new. I find it astonishing that it hasn’t already been implemented

So a party with 5 seats that won 15% of the vote would get the same say on a decision as one with 50 seats that also won 15% of the vote, even though they have far fewer seats. In each case, the 15% who voted for them would see the correct representation in decision-making. Parties such as the Greens, Libdems and UKIP would have a say in Parliament representative of their level of support in the electorate. The larger parties Labour and Conservatives would have far less say, but one that is representative of their support. The SNP would have to live with only having as much power as the voter numbers they represent, a fraction of what they will likely achieve under this broken present system.

That would be fair. MPs would still be able to talk, make arguments, win influence and take places on committees. We would still have plenty of diversity to ensure a wide enough range of opinions are aired when debating. But when a decision is made, every voter in the country gets equal representation, and that is how democracy is supposed to be.

Further refinements might let voters split their vote between parties, but let’s concentrate on making the playing field at least a bit level first.