strange_complex: (Cicero history)
Hey there, LJ / DW. I did All The Things for a few weeks there, and I am really not sure how I will ever get you caught up on it all. But let's have a go at writing about just one Thing - going to see Spartacus on a frankly ENORMOUS screen at the National Media Museum's Widescreen Weekend with [twitter.com profile] HickeyWriter.

It looked SO GOOD. It was the 2015 restoration, which not only included all the deleted footage put back in 1991 (oysters, snails and all), but had clearly been carefully visually cleaned up as well. It was incredibly crisp, bursting with colour and detail, and sometimes almost looked like it was in 3D when there was something prominent in the foreground and the camera was moving round to track something in the middle distance. It really showed off the epic scale of the closing battle scenes as well. I had a go at counting the numbers of Roman soldiers by row and by column as they performed their opening manoeuvres before Spartacus' forces, and realised to my astonishment that I was looking at easily 20,000 people on that side alone. The spectacle of them all filing into lines and presenting shields in perfect synchronicity was genuinely awe-inspiring, and really helped me to understand the psychological impact such displays must have had on opposing forces in antiquity. On the other hand, the big-screen experience perhaps revealed more than a small one might that the editing and continuity left some room for improvement. People having conversations with each other were often visibly in completely different positions when the camera cut between shots seen from the front and behind, while the final few scenes revealed the remarkable colour-changing properties of Varinia's baby's hair.

I am not going to say much about the plot or its political resonances, all of which is well-documented, but it did really strike me how we are carefully shown enslaved women and children in the gladiatorial school, not to mention a very diverse range in Spartacus' roaming troupe, including elderly people and a dwarf. We're left in no doubt of the wide-ranging impact of slavery, or the inclusiveness of Spartacus' revolution, and this shows up in its logistics as well as its demographics. It's made very clear that weaving is as important to the revolutionary cause as fighting, with a role even for Antoninus the musicus. He seems to personify the (slightly apocryphal) quotation from Emma Goldman: "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."

The art (wall-painting, statues, etc) and architecture are often a little anachronistic, but that's par for the course in screen depictions of antiquity. In fact, I found the inclusion of statuary from right up to the late antique period in the opening credits actually worked in a positive sense, in that it could be taken as signalling that the moral issues at the heart of the story remained in place throughout the Roman period - though that reading was then undermined by an opening narration suggesting that the coming of Christianity had helped to overthrow the tyranny of slavery, which it very much did not! In any case, the sets all looked broadly Roman at least, and some aspects of them were carefully researched and thoughtfully conceived. I had to suppress a squee at the sight of an hourglass-shaped millstone in the kitchen at Batiatus' gladiatorial school. Oh, and talking of Batiatus, Peter Ustinov really is just truly amazing in a film chock-full of great actors playing great characters. I understand he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in it, and it could not have been more deserved.

Although I've seen the film before, I've learnt a lot more about both late Republican politics and modern politics since then, so that political exchanges which had rather passed me by on previous watches struck closer to home this time. In some ways, this was irritating, because it opened up new dimensions of anachronism for me. For example, in the period when the action supposedly takes place, there was no such thing as a First General of the Republic (which is what Crassus is introduced as), a garrison of Rome (six cohorts of which Glabrus takes against Spartacus) or a governor of Aquitania (to whom Gracchus sends Batiatus and Varinia at the end of the film), which had not been conquered yet. Nor was there any prominent politician called Sempronius Gracchus. Rather, Laughton's character seems to be a sort of splice between Crassus' main opponent Pompey (whom he can't literally be because Pompey was away in Spain for most of the crisis) and Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, the late-second-century BC populists. On the other hand, I was able to be forgiving about all this because I could also see how the politics of the Roman Republic was being used as an analogy for American politics, with Crassus as a Republican leader and Gracchus as his main opponent - perhaps an idealised Kennedy?

Although we didn't know this before we arrived, it happened that this film was the first screening of the Widescreem Weekend's 25th anniversary edition, so we got free drinks beforehand, free ice-creams in the intermission, and free cup-cakes to take home afterwards. Given how good the film itself was, I didn't need those perks to make for an excellent evening, but they certainly didn't hurt.

Hope

Saturday, 7 November 2020 20:38
strange_complex: (C J Cregg)
Well, I am really, really happy for you tonight, America! It's just great to see people dancing in the streets for something which is actually good for once.

I must say I've never found Biden a hugely exciting candidate, and I was very worried for a long time that the Democratic campaign was relying too heavily on merely pitching him as 'not Trump', rather than offering enough that was positive and different. But I didn't follow the campaign at all closely. Maybe he offered more than I could see, or indeed maybe just not being Trump was enough this time? Certainly, Trump has set the bar for being better than him extremely low indeed. Just having a grown-up in charge who doesn't respond to a global pandemic by claiming it's a hoax, blaming it on the Chinese and suggesting people inject themselves with bleach will be a big positive change.

As for Kamala Harris as VP, what an amazing historic first and a wonderful precedent for all women and girls, but especially those of colour.

I just hope that one way or another the transition of power happens smoothly, all Trump's legal challenges come to naught, and his supporters don't rise to the violence he's already been inciting them to.

Meanwhile, those of us elsewhere can hope that Biden might reverse the tide of isolationism which has seen American pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, the WHO, UNESCO and heaven knows what else. And in Britain specifically we can cross fingers that Biden's obvious commitment to the Good Friday agreement will push our own horror-show political leaders towards a softer Brexit, and at the very least enjoy the sweet, sweet knowledge that N*gel F*rage lost £10,000 betting on Trump winning. Muahahahaha!
strange_complex: (Tonino reading)
At the end of May, my friend [personal profile] rosamicula posted this image on Facebook for a book meme designed to be played out during the 30 days of June:

Bookaday prompt list.jpg

Although I could see from the image that it had originally been designed as viral advertising for a publisher, and a poke around on Twitter revealed that it was four years old, the prompts instantly sparked lots of thoughts and ideas, so I decided to go for it. With a bit of careful forward planning, I managed to keep it going faithfully on both Twitter and Facebook every day throughout the month, despite the fact that I spent about a third of it away from home (on holiday in Scotland, visiting my family or in Swansea doing external examining), and I felt that it captured quite a faithful cross-section of my academic and personal selves. A little belatedly, and before the posts entirely disappear down the drain of social media, I'm now transposing the results here, so that a few different people can see them and I stand some chance of finding them again in future.

Lots of books under this cut )
strange_complex: (Dracula 1958 cloak)
I reckon if I just crack on with it and don't allow myself to get too carried away with any individual one, I can get my 2017 book reviews finished today. Let's see how that goes...


6. Nick Clegg (2016), Politics: Between the Extremes

I am Quite Ashamed that Nick Clegg has written and published a whole other book during the time it's taken me to get round to reviewing this one. I read it largely in the bath or by the pool-side in Cyprus, and for a book on politics it worked remarkably well in those settings. Clegg's written prose is impressively clear and fluent, while his content is very perceptive and intelligent on the current state of UK politics, articulating the significance of what's happened in recent years very clearly and often appearing extremely prescient on some of the things which have happened since it was published. It's exceptionally frustrating that he has undermined so much of what he might have had to offer in this book and in politics generally as a result of how he approached coalition government. No matter how thoughtful, valuable or well-meaning much of what he has to say is, he has now so completely trashed his capacity to reach a majority of people in this country that there is a significant extent to which he may as well not bother. But I do admire the thickness of skin which allows him to continue nonetheless, and in fairness he certainly isn't hoarding the lessons of his rather unique path through British politics to himself. He quite openly acknowledges that the coalition wasn’t exactly a roaring success for the Liberal Democrats, and sets out at least some of the reasons for that with considerable humility and perspicacity. Who can say whether he could have handled it better given the chance again, but I think his comments on the negotiation process and the day-to-day business of working with the Tories will be exceptionally useful to any smaller party attempting to form and work within a coalition with a larger party in the future. Indeed, I wondered wryly last June whether the DUP leadership had read it, given how efficiently they appear to have wrung everything they could out of the Tories in return for a mere confidence and supply deal. Few will agree with every political position he expresses - there were certainly a couple of passages which made me want to give him a shake and point out his blind-spots (though unfortunately I can't remember what on now, as I didn't take notes at the time). But it’s hard not to come away with the overall impression of an intelligent and compassionate man who is much more genuinely committed to improving the life-chances of everyone in the UK and beyond than he is often given credit for.


7. Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally (1989), Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times

Read on my Kindle in Australia. Florescu and McNally are famous in Dracula circles above all for their 1972 book In Search of Dracula, in which they argued that Bram Stoker was inspired to write Dracula by a deep and profound knowledge of the historical Vlad III Dracula (rather than setting out to write a vampire story and dressing his creation in an impressionistic mish-mash of elements which certainly include Vlad's name and a few pickings from his life-history but don't privilege them). This isn't that book, but it's important context for how I approached this one, and relates directly to the next book I read as well. Basically, although I haven't read the 1972 book, it's famous now above all for over-interpreting Bram's prose to assume things without sound justification - e.g. assuming that wooden stakes are a key weapon against vampires because Bram knew Vlad had used them to impale his enemies, rather than because he had encountered this standard method of despatch during his research into general vampire lore. But it was also clear to me from what I'd read about the 1972 book that half the problem was that it was the work of two (somewhat over-enthusiastic) historians approaching a piece of literature without really understanding how an author like Bram works. On that basis, I was prepared to give Florescu and McNally a try as historians of the real historical Dracula, which is what they are being in this book. As such, for me it was a complement to reading Treptow's book on the historical Dracula a couple of years ago (LJ / DW).

Indeed, as history, it was pretty good, and certainly better than I'd feared from the things people say about the authors' 1972 book. In particular, they present lots of direct quotations from the primary source material, which is what I’m really after with regards to the historical Dracula (and why I liked Treptow's book so much). They also took a more systematic narrative approach that Treptow, who groups his material more thematically, which helped to fill out some details and clarify causes and effects for me where I hadn't fully understood them before. But there are some errors to catch - e.g. they think Whitby has a ruined Cathedral rather than an Abbey. And, more seriously, their interpretation of some of the primary material needed more thought. They are fully aware that the German and Russian pamphlets about Dracula’s atrocities were written with strong political agendas which have obviously strongly distorted their content, and indeed they discuss those agendas and the role of the pamphlets in furthering them at the appropriate point in the book. BUT they also still take the contents of the pamphlets very nearly at face value in other parts of the book when it suits them to do so. In other words, they commit the classic undergraduate dissertation student's error of explaining the 'problems' with the primary sources in their introduction, and then ticking that task off their to-do list, dusting their hands and going on to use those sources completely uncritically in the rest of the work. Luckily I have the training and experience to realise that that is happening and read around it, but it's irritating to see professional historians doing this, and perpetuating myths as a result.


8. Elizabeth Miller (2006), Dracula: Sense and Nonsense (2nd edn)

Also read on my Kindle in Australia. The basic premise of the book is that people talk a lot of unsupported nonsense about Bram Stoker’s Dracula, so Miller goes through the most persistent and egregious myths systematically, quoting examples and explaining the problems with them. She explains the approach herself on this publishers' page about the book. I completely see the need for this. People do churn out ill-researched books on Dracula because anything with his name in the title sells, and I’ve been irritated myself often enough by the constant repetition of well-worn canards. Florescu and McNally's 1972 book claiming that Count Dracula the vampire was inspired by a detailed knowledge of Vlad III Dracula (mentioned above) is obviously a prime example, but there are plenty more. In general, Miller unpicks them very fairly, drawing on what is clearly an exceptional knowledge of the book, Bram's writing process and the scholarship around it, and guided by unerring critical facilities and a very sophisticated understanding of how both history and literature work. That said, I think the format of this book often encourages her to go a bit too far to the opposite extreme in the cause of killing off popular myths.

In the case of the relationship between the historical Dracula and the vampire Count, the detail of Miller's deconstruction of Florescu and McNally's claims is very good and entirely justified. As she shows, Bram's research notes make it very clear that he developed the character before he found the name, and probably only knew a few basic details about Vlad III Dracula's actual career. BUT the antagonistic 'what nonsense!' tone in which she presents her case has I think inspired a lot of people to take the whole issue on too much of a black-and-white basis. It's not exactly Miller's fault that lots of blokey horror fans on Facebook groups now rush to inform everybody that Bram's Dracula has 'nothing to do with' the historical Vlad every time the subject comes up, because in fact she herself is far more nuanced than this and entirely acknowledges that Bram did use snippets of Vlad to round out his creation without intending Dracula wholly to 'be' Vlad. But I think she has fed a climate in which the baby is entirely thrown out with the bathwater by people unable to appreciate these sorts of nuances. The same goes for other examples as well. E.g. she calls the idea that Bram drew on his relationship with Henry Irving to help develop his characterisation of Dracula 'fabrication', but to me 'over-simplification' would be fairer. Obviously authors draw on the real personal relationships they have experienced when crafting their characters, at least subconsciously, and there has to be a middle ground between ‘Stoker's Dracula is a thinly-veiled caricature of Irving’ and ‘Stoker's Dracula has nothing to do with Irving’ which allows for Irving to have been just one of the character's many real-world ancestors.

I spotted one actual error, which is that Miller insists Dracula's famous cape comes only from film adaptations and is not mentioned in the novel. But unless we want to argue that a cape is meaningfully different from a cloak, these words from Jonathan Harker's journal (12 May, chapter 3) contradict her: "I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over the dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings." In complete fairness to Miller, though, it's quite clear that she would acknowledge the issue straight away, as she does in fact once or twice hold her hands up to her own previously-published erroneous assumptions within this book. She also provides a very helpful annotated bibliography of major publications on Stoker and Dracula, some of which I will certainly be reading. I came away feeling great admiration for both Miller's scholarship and her open style of debate, but wishing she had presented what she knows about Stoker and his novel straightforwardly, rather than in the format of killing canards. Thankfully, elsewhere she has, so I've since acquired a copy of her book Bram Stoker's Dracula: A Documentary Journey into Vampire Country and the Dracula Phenomenon and look forward to reading it.


9. Bram Stoker (1897), Dracula

So it was fairly inevitable in the light of the other reading I'd done this year - especially Makt Myrkranna (LJ / DW) and Miller's book - that I would feel the urge to Go Back To The Text; and this feeling was only intensified by the approach of our DracSoc trip to Whitby in September (LJ / DW). I read Dracula first when I was nine, and reviewed it here on my last read in 2004: LJ / DW. I find some aspects of that review a bit cringeworthy now, feeling that it largely presents a lot of very obvious and widely-recognised points as though they were original observations. But then again, I had certainly had much less exposure to other people's writing and discussion about Dracula then than I have now, my friends at the time seemed to like it, and it's a very early example of me reviewing anything at all online. I didn't start doing it regularly and systematically until 2007, and the fact that one of the occasions before then when I was inspired to do it was after reading Dracula says quite a lot about how much the novel has always meant to me.

I enjoyed the re-read, and it certainly enhanced my trip to Whitby to have those sections fresh in my mind. I was struck throughout by Bram's facility for descriptive prose, and particularly liked the newspaper account of the storm as it brews in the prelude to the arrival of the Demeter. I also appreciated his ability to capture plausibly the voices of women. I commented on the strength of Mina's character in my last review, but here I mean rather things like the tone of her and Lucy's letters to one another, Lucy's internal thoughts as her mysterious illness increases and Mina's sensible, clear-headed pragmatism throughout. I don't mean to claim that Bram is a great feminist or his women perfect literary creations - in particular, Mina's description of herself as unclean and dramatic requests to be put out of her misery should she become a vampire come across very much as the stereotypical melodramatic and self-sacrificing Victorian female heroine. But I just mean it's better than you might expect for a late-Victorian male writer, and Bram deserves the credit for that. I was also surprised by how quickly Dracula leaves London once the vampire-hunters start seriously invading his lairs, which slightly undermines his characterisation as the ultimate demonic enemy. Within a day of snarling out his famous line at the house in Piccadilly that "My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side", he is on a ship out of there, so that the line falls a bit flat really in retrospect. Meanwhile, with my Hammer lenses on, I enjoyed the moments when their various crystallisations of the novel suddenly flared up on the page, and indeed spotted one I hadn't really taken on board before: that even as late as The Satanic Rites of Dracula, when you would think the novel had entirely been left behind, the way Jane (Valerie Van Ost) experiences Dracula's approach in the form of a mist billowing under her door while she lies helpless on the bed, unable to escape, is actually very directly based on how he gets into Mina's room in Seward's asylum in the novel.

But the main thing that happened on this read, and which I had certainly never noticed before, is that I found myself seeing a nexus of Classical references woven into the book, and indeed enough of them for it to be worth writing a paper on the topic. This is very exciting, because having enjoyed the World Dracula Congress which I attended in Dublin in 2016 (LJ / DW) and knowing that another is coming up in Brașov this October, I had been increasingly thinking that it would be really nice to attend the next one as a presenter rather than just a listener. Well, now I've found my topic and indeed have got far enough with developing the idea to have submitted an abstract to the conference committee (which I'm currently waiting to hear on). I won't say too much about it here, as it's a separate matter from an ordinary book review, and besides I don't want to give too many details of my argument away before the actual conference. But a simple and typical example of the sort of stuff I've been collecting is represented by this little speech from Van Helsing:
Let me tell you, he is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the Chersonese; and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even is he, and the peoples fear him at this day. He have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar.
There, Bram is situating Dracula within a frame of reference which explicitly extends to antiquity, although of course only alongside a whole symphony of other cultural resonances. My point is essentially going to be that we wouldn't want to isolate the Classical references from the rest of the mix, but since they are there they are worth exploring and understanding properly - and while people have spent a lot of time examining Stoker's use of Eastern European history and folklore, personal knowledge of Whitby and London etc., no-one has really pulled together the Classical references and shown what they contribute to the novel as a whole and the characterisation of Dracula in particular. I've got about 25 in all, scattered fairly evenly through the novel - some straightforward and explicit like the one I've included here, others more allusive, and others still quite fundamental and structural. Anyway, I am enjoying pursuing and thinking about them all HUGELY, and assuming that my paper is accepted will probably be banging on about this topic quite a lot more over the next few months as I steer my leisure reading in its service. You have been warned!


10. Charles Dickens (2009) Complete Ghost Stories (Wordsworth Classics edition; editor unnamed).

Finally, this was my Christmas reading. I had read M.R. James' full oeuvre the Christmas before (LJ / DW), so wanted something in the same vein but not actually James, and Dickens seemed the obvious choice. I read parts of it on a train to Göttingen, looking out over wooded valleys and light driving snow, and finished it on New Year's Eve in the somewhat chilly garret of my sister's Georgian house, listening to fireworks going off all around me - all of which (except perhaps the fireworks) seemed extremely appropriate. You can see the full table of contents via Amazon's look inside function, but I will confess that I skipped 'A Christmas Carol', on the grounds of having read it at least twice already. Several of the earlier stories in particular are actually extracted from ongoing serials such as The Pickwick Papers, rather than having been written as stand-alone stories as such.

Generally I enjoyed the collection hugely, and one of its pleasures was the organisation of most of the content into chronological order, starting in 1837 with The Queer Chair and finishing in 1866 with The Signalman (a lot of the remainder of the book after this actually consists of tongue-in-cheek meta-commentary on the standard tropes of ghost stories, rather than straightforward stories per se). In broad terms, the earlier stories show a greater interest in exploring the capacities of language, repeatedly delighting the reader with descriptions which are just perfect for and evocative of whatever is at hand, yet always original and surprising. They lean towards the moralistic, though, in a way that can sometimes strike a modern reader as rather sickly and cloying. The later stories, by contrast, are perhaps simpler in their language, but more complex in their morality - edges are greyer now, and there is less of a sense that Dickens wants to convey a Lesson. In other words, there's plenty of pleasure and value to be had throughout, though of different kinds.

My least favourite story was 'The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain', which read like an attempt to recreate the success of 'A Christmas Carol' five years later, with a similar central motif of a self-centred elderly man learning to be a better person after supernatural intervention. But this one certainly did suffer from cloying morality without ever offering anything of the seasonal good cheer also inherent in 'A Christmas Carol'. My most favourite, after giving each entry a fair hearing, was still 'The Signalman', for its masterful portrait of the human psyche under the strain of isolation and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. There's a good reason why that one was selected for the BBC's annual ghost story adaptations in the '70s. The most surprising moment, though, came in the middle of 'The Ghosts of the Mail', in which the narrator's somewhat inebriated uncle, walking late at night through the street of Edinburgh, comes across some abandoned mail-coaches, and experiences visions of the eighteenth-century cads, adventurers and damsels who once travelled in them. The story unfolds of a distressed young lady who is clearly being abducted by her male fellow travellers, and whom the uncle (now fully absorbed into his own hallucination) resolves to rescue. Once the coach stops and everything erupts into actual sword-play, though, this happens:
At this very moment, the gentleman in sky-blue turning round, and seeing the young lady with her face uncovered, vented an exclamation of rage and jealousy, and, turning his weapon against her beautiful bosom, pointed a thrust at her heart, which caused my uncle to utter a cry of apprehension that made the building ring. The lady stepped lightly aside, and snatching the young man's sword from his hand, before he had recovered his balance, drove him to the wall, and running it through him, and the panelling, up to the very hilt, pinned him there, hard and fast. It was a splendid example.
One of Xena Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's literary ancestors there!


OK, I did it. That is 2017's books all written up. That doesn't mean I'm quite at the top of my pile - I still have six 2017 films to do, besides another three already for 2018 and one book. But getting completely up to date is looking more achievable right now that it has for a long time. That is a good feeling.
strange_complex: (Chrestomanci slacking in style)
In this post I am reviewing three books which I actually read in 2015. I'm aware of how utterly ludicrous that is; just humour me. It's a thing I feel I need to do.


6. Conrad Russell (1999), An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism

After the 2015 General Election, various Lib Dems shared lists of reading recommendations in the spirit of fuelling a #LibDemFightback. This one seemed the most universally-recommended, so I got it out of the University library and read it. It is indeed a very good articulation of what liberalism is about today (or was at the time of publication), and how it has evolved from its earliest recognisable origins in Whig opposition to James II’s interference in parliamentary autonomy through a series of different issues (religion, economics, personal freedoms, the environment etc.) as UK politics has changed over the centuries. I found the chapter on economics the most interesting and helpful for clarifying my own understanding of liberalism. Broadly, it points out that liberalism does not really have a clear default economic position in the way that (say) socialism does, because it initially evolved in a context where the main dividing lines in politics were not economic ones, but others – primarily religion. But because liberalism is essentially about the redistribution of power from those who are hoarding big chunks of it to those who don’t have any, it isn’t too hard to translate this to economic forms of power, and indeed there are plenty of early examples of liberals siding with the economically-exploited over their exploiters – e.g. Whig involvement in passing laws for the ten-hour working day in the mid-19th century. This in turn opens the door for a vision of liberal economics which is much more about cooperatives, mutuals, trade unions, breaking up monopolies and cartels, encouraging entrepreneurialism and ensuring level playing fields than the laissez faire approach often described as ‘classical liberalism’. I would love that vision to be more deeply embedded and widely understood in the Liberal Democrats today, never mind in wider politics – but unfortunately it is not. Meanwhile, back to the book, its big flaw is that it is unlikely to be at all accessible to anyone not already interested in liberalism and familiar with UK politics. Fair enough, it bills itself as being for the ‘intelligent person’, but that in itself is not very liberal really – hardly in keeping with the Liberal Democrats’ constitutional pledge (adopted verbatim from the Liberals before them) to ensure that no-one is enslaved by ignorance. And, as is often the case with similar riders, ‘intelligent’ is really just a synonym for ‘educated’ or ‘pre-informed’. So Russell will refer in passing to something François Mitterrand said in 1989 (I’m inventing the example, as I no longer have the text in front of me to provide a real one), without actually saying what it was or how it relates to the issue under discussion. A more accessible introduction to liberalism could certainly be written, then, and could do a lot of good by helping to ensure a broader understanding of what it actually is. As my friend Andrew Hickey, who also recently reviewed Russell's book points out, an awful lot of the people who are currently convinced that liberalism is a terrible scourge on society are actually working with a heavily distorted understanding of it, and would probably quite like the sort of thinking which Russell outlines if they knew about it. Attempting to communicate it is, of course, on us liberals, and clearly that is what Russell was trying to do. Until anyone can achieve a more accessible articulation of the same thinking, his book will probably remain the best introduction to liberalism we have.


7. Andrew Hickey (2015), Head of State

Talking of Andrew, he wrote a book of his own, and it's great! It is a novel, technically belonging to the Faction Paradox series, but I can personally attest that you do not need to have read any prior Faction Paradox stories, or really know anything about them, to enjoy it. It helps in particular that the story is very much set on Earth; though I don't know how much that is or isn't true for other FP stories – maybe they all are? Anyway, this one follows a surprise outsider's US presidential election campaign, which is clearly being manipulated by the Faction Paradox in some way, and which relates to traces of their activities also identifiable in the historical and mythic past. In order to tell this story, Andrew has used multiple interweaving narratives: different present-day perspectives on the presidential campaign, Victorian explorer Richard Burton, the 2002nd story of Scheherazade and various interpolations from non-human dimensions. This is not easy, but I thought he did it exceptionally well, capturing the various voices of his different characters distinctly and recognisably without making any of them seem over-mannered or cariacatured. For those reasons alone I enjoyed reading the novel and would recommend it to anyone. But there is of course an extra dimension of pleasure to reading a novel by a friend whose view on the world over-laps closely with your own. I recognised a lot of both the political and the online culture described, for example: in particular a female journalist blogging on a platform called 'dreamjournal', whom Andrew confirmed when I asked him was indeed based on the journalist I thought she was. He is even sweet enough to have included me in his acknowledgements at the end, although literally all I did was lend him a book of commonly-used Latin phrases with which he could pepper Richard Burton's prose. As for that presidential candidate – he's a Bernie Sanders, not a Donald Trump, but an awful lot about the campaign sections of this book did resurface in my mind during the latter part of 2016: high-level corruption and manipulation, people gradually realising that the 'no-hope' candidate is going to win, and a load of right-wing nutjobbery to boot. It's a pity real life has managed to turn out even more horrendous than what happens at the end of this book, but that's another matter. I'm really proud to know the author of such a great read.


8. John Buchan (1927), Witch Wood

I learnt of this book from the British Library's exhibition, Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination in autumn 2014, where it was presented as an example of folk horror and likened to Witchfinder General in particular. It's a reasonable comparison. This story deploys the classic folk horror motif of an educated outsider coming into a small, traditional village community: in this case a newly-ordained priest, David Sempill, assigned to a parish named Woodilee. It's also set during the Civil Wars, though in Scotland rather than in England, and involves accusations of witchcraft. After those face-value similarities, though, it's a pretty different kind of narrative: essentially a historical novel concerned with how the ideological conflicts of 17th-century Scotland translate into personal struggles for its main character. On the one side, Sempill owes loyalty to the Kirk and, through its Solemn League and Covenant, the parliamentary side of the Civil War. On the other, he increasingly finds that his efforts to help the sick and the needy put him at odds with his parish leaders and church elders, who are more concerned with personal reputation and formal doctrine than actual morals or spirituality, and that his sympathies are drawn instead towards royalists and aristocrats. Witches and indeed fairies are overlain onto this, in ways which allow Buchan to highlight the hypocrisies of the parishioners and tangle up Sempill's political leanings with romantic attraction. But there is nothing overtly supernatural in the book: only a bit of paganism-cum-Devil-worshippery and Sempill's hyper-romanticisation of his girlfriend. Most of the politics and religion I could take or leave to be honest, not having any great investment in either, but the novel does contain some very engrossing sequences: Sempill's terror journeying through the dark wood at night, the utter devastation of his village by the plague, or the tormenting of an obviously-vulnerable old woman by a witch-pricker. Those are what have stayed with me, and what made it worth reading.
strange_complex: (Penny coin)
I cannot remember the last time I did this, but allow me to recommend to my readers the journal of [livejournal.com profile] maryanndimand.

The author is a US-based former economics professor, and she has set up the account specifically in order to deliver regular bite-sized chunks on basic economic principles over the course of this calendar year. Her rationale is that most people claim to vote on the basis of economic issues, but don't in practice have the understanding of economic principles and reasoning which they need to evaluate politicians' claims in this area critically. She'd like to help with that and I think she's doing a good job.

Obviously if you're reading this, you can simply follow her account here on LJ, but she is also posting the same content to Facebook in public posts marked with the hashtag #2017econ.

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strange_complex: (Asterix Romans)
Well then. For what it's worth, after the initial disbelief and disappointment, my basic response to the referendum result is the 'rolling up my sleeves and getting on with it' one. I won't be at all sorry if for one reason or another we never actually do end up leaving the EU - e.g. if the country ends up in such a deep economic, political and / or constitutional mess that Article 50 is never invoked. But I'm not pinning my hopes on that, and I'm certainly not signing any petitions calling for a new referendum under different rules (though I don't at all mind other people signing that petition as a way of registering the extent of disappointment and anger in the country). Rather, I now want to focus on trying to make this country the best place it can possibly be, given the hand we are now holding.

[That said, I think I will have a go at claiming the Irish (and therefore EU) citizenship to which I am perfectly entitled by dint of having an Irish grandmother - though it won't be a trivial process. As far as I can tell, I'll need no less than nine original copies of birth / marriage / death certificates and certified passports, including one (the original birth certificate on which the whole thing rests) which would have been issued in County Sligo in (I think) 1912. Yikes!]

Anyway, going back to making this country the best place it can possibly be, living through the entire referendum process has certainly done a lot to reaffirm my liberalism. Two main issues stand out, both connected, and both of which strongly reinforce (for me) the essential core of liberalism - a concern with excessive concentrations of power, and a desire to break them down and redistribute it.

Firstly, the power concentrated into the hands of people like Paul Dacre and Richard Desmond. For decades now, newspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express have been publishing front-page lies and hatred about both immigrants and the EU, while inadequate bodies for press regulation have failed to challenge them, and, on the rare occasions when they were were successfully challenged, they have only needed to publish retractions in tiny print on the inside pages of the papers. Meanwhile, the requirement on the broadcast media to provide balanced political coverage is interpreted as an instruction to give equal air-time to voices on either side, rather than to challenge lies themselves or identify any kind of prevailing consensus. This approach has been characterised by some as "Shape of the Earth: views differ".

At first sight, it may seem illiberal to restrict the freedom of the press, but the press is in any case not currently free from powerful individuals seeking to propagate lies for their own financial or political gain. More fundamentally, a democracy (which is a tool for distributing political freedom) cannot function properly if the people who live in it do not have access to accurate and impartial information on which to base their voting decisions. See e.g. Russia or North Korea for details. And it is very clear indeed that in this referendum (as also in the AV referendum five years ago), people voted on the basis of claims which were untrue, while any attempts by moderate people to counter those claims, or the decades worth of misinformation and bigotry which they tapped into, were hopelessly drowned out by the power of the tabloid press. If that press had been properly regulated years ago, this might not have happened.

Secondly, the power concentrated into the hands of the 'big two' political parties by our First Past The Post voting system. One of the most common arguments against proportional political systems is that they allow members of extremist parties to win seats at elections. But in my view, this is a good thing. Once a party's representatives have been elected to office, they are subject to the white light of accountability. If they implement policies which turn out to be disastrous, or fail to deliver on their promises, they will lose their popularity and be voted out again. In my view, we would be much better off today if UKIP had started winning council seats and parliamentary seats in serious numbers twenty years ago. Then, people might have had the chance to discover that they are a bunch of self-interested con-merchants while the damage they could inflict was still relatively limited, and before we arrived at the almighty mess we are in now.

Furthermore, most proportional voting systems, but especially the Single Transferable Vote, make politicians much more accountable to the electorate than FPTP. Safe seats largely disappear, parties campaign meaningfully against one another in all parts of the country, and voters can choose between individual members of the same party, based on nuanced preferences (e.g. liking Blairite Labour candidates but not Corbynistas), without harming that party's overall political prospects. I believe that if we had been using STV already for decades, the main parties would not have been able to get away with parachuting their favoured candidates into seats where voters were not being presented with any meaningful alternative option. Then, we would not have the huge yawning gap between the electorate and their supposed representatives which seems to have contributed to enough of that electorate deciding to use the EU referendum to deliver them a kicking in return for years of neglect and dismissal. Under STV, parties would have had an incentive to develop real solutions to the problems which older working-class voters are trying to express, rather than just telling them it's all the fault of immigrants and the EU. Even UKIP would probably have evolved into a more responsive, solution-focused party, rather than the fantasists they are.

If you've been nodding along while reading the above, and would like to help solve these problems for the future, here are some things you could do (if you haven't already):

1. Join Hacked Off, who are campaigning for a free and accountable press. It's free to sign their declaration or sign up for campaign bulletins, though of course they would love donations too.

2. Join the Electoral Reform Society, Unlock Democracy and / or Make Votes Matter, all of which are campaigning in different ways and with different emphases to improve our political system. It's £24 p.a. (or less for concessions) to join the ERS and Unlock Democracy, and free (though again donations welcome) to join Make Votes Matter.

3. Join the Liberal Democrats. I know we're far from perfect. We too have floundered in the white light of accountability. But we are the only political party in the UK which stands fundamentally and explicitly for the liberal principles I have discussed above. If you'd like to know more about what we think we stand for, read the preamble to our constitution. The final paragraph (beginning "Our responsibility for justice and liberty cannot be confined by national boundaries...") explains why we have always been, and will always remain, committed to collaborative international organisations like the EU.

4. Join any other political party. Yes, even UKIP (though I hope you'll prefer not to). Because the more people in this country are members of political parties, the smaller the gulf and the better the dialogue between politicians and the electorate.

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strange_complex: (ITV digital Monkey popcorn)
I saw both of these with [livejournal.com profile] ms_siobhan as a New Year's Eve double-bill at the Hyde Park Picture House yesterday, from our favourite seats on the left-hand side of the balcony.


45. Some Like It Hot (1959), dir. Billy Wilder

First of all, it does have to be acknowledged that this one particular film probably bears about 90% of the responsibility for the transphobic myth that trans women are really just straight dudes who want to infiltrate women-only spaces and ogle cis women. It didn't invent that idea, and nor is it now necessarily the direct cause of most people absorbing it, but it is a major theme of the film, and must surely have given it a very big cultural boost. So I think it's important to say that whenever talking about this film, as a small way of helping to chip away at the real-world potency of that very damaging myth. On a similar note, I also found the scenes in which Tony Curtis' character, in persona as Shell Oil Junior, coerces Sugar into sex by pretending to be sexually unresponsive and in need of 'help' to fix him pretty gross as well. I get that disguise and deceit are ancient staples of romantic comedies, and never more so than in this one, but she was totally into his Shell Oil Junior character anyway. She would very obviously have willingly and enthusiastically have had sex with him without that extra layer of lies and manipulation, so to me they broke through the romantic comedy genre conventions and out into some distinctly rapey territory.

But I am perfectly capable of separating out those things from the rest of the film in my mind, and seeing it for the of-its-time romantic musical comedy it is meant to be. As a star vehicle for Monroe it is magnificent, with her performance of "I Wanna Be Loved By You" capturing her appeal perfectly. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are perfectly paired as the two protagonists, the Chicago gangsters are brilliant, the music is great, the physical farce fantastic and the witty dialogue to die for. Plus, for all my reservations above, I also think that by showing male characters experiencing male treatment of women at first hand, and by including scenes with strong homosexual overtones (both lesbian ones between Sugar and Curtis-as-Josephine and the famous "Well, nobody's perfect" ending between Osgood and Lemmon-as-Jerry), it probably helped to achieve some social steps forwards as well as backwards. So, if the movie isn't perfect either, that doesn't mean it isn't still a great watch.


46. The Apartment (1960), dir. Billy Wilder

Part two of the double-bill was the next year's follow-up movie from the same production team, which brought back Jack Lemmon as the leading man. It's still a comedy, and starts out looking for all the world like a farce, but it has a dark undertone from the beginning, because of the way it portrays sleazy executives laughing it up together as they coldly conduct affairs in Lemmon's character's apartment, and him conniving in it for the sake of material promotion, while at the same time being very obviously strung along and exploited himself. Then, half-way through, the darkness bursts violently to the surface when one executive's to-him-casual (but to her serious) fling attempts suicide in the apartment. The overall arc is actually very moralistic - Lemmon discovers his moral compass and is rewarded with True Love, the chief sleazy executive gets his come-uppance, and the young lady (Miss Kubelik) rediscovers her sense of self-worth. But gosh, you do get put through the wringer along the way.

This made it a good second film for the double-bill, though. It felt a little more 'cerebral' than Some Like It Hot (if that's quite the right word), which worked well for its early evening slot once you'd been warmed up by the comedy first. It was certainly more moving, anyway - I found myself sniffing back tears as the end credits rolled, which you just wouldn't get from Some Like It Hot (unless, of course, Chicago mobsters had killed your grandmother, you insensitive clod). But it has in common with the other film all those classic qualities of slick pacing, seemingly effortless photography and of course a brilliant cast. Though his character isn't very nice, I actually thought Fred MacMurray was absolutely brilliant as Sleazy Executive Mr. Sheldrake, hitting that perfect note between oiliness and plausible charm which seems to be so characteristic of American Presidents (Nixon and Regan particularly spring to mind). It is essential to the whole plot that we should be able to believe Miss Kubelik might attempt suicide over him while simultaneously being able to see that he's a schmuck, so MacMurray had an important job to do there, and did it really well. I'd like to see more stuff with him in now on that basis. I also loved both the characterisation and the performances for the two Jewish neighbours, Dr. and Mrs. Dreyfuss - relatively small roles (especially hers), but ones which felt very human and three-dimensional al the same.

While Some Like It Hot has fun playing up the glamour of the 1920s jazz age, The Apartment is now just as fascinating for being set in its contemporary present day. I particularly enjoyed seeing how large-scale corporate office culture might have operated in 1960s America, complete with lobbies, elevators, desk diaries, rotary card index files, calculating machines and telephone exchanges. And I liked the insights into Lemmon's bachelor life-style as well, which was so close to and yet not quite the same as its equivalent today - frozen meals for heating up in the oven rather than microwave meals, a TV remote-control unit with a dial on it fixed to his table, and of course the time-honoured pokey apartment for one. In less cheery news from the 1960s, though, I was disquieted to realise that Miss Kubelik is obviously at risk of getting into trouble with the law for having attempted suicide, so that the whole thing has to be hushed up. We have moved beyond that, suicide-wise, in both the US and UK since, but that is still exactly where we are with drugs, leaving addicts unable to seek help for fear of punishment (not to mention at risk from unregulated products), and it's about damned time we sorted that out.

Back to The Apartment(!), it also turned out to be a Christmas / New Year film, which I guess was yet another reason (on top of release-date chronology and the tonal move from pure comedy to black comedy) why it needed to be the second half of the double bill. Miss Kubelik makes her suicide attempt on Christmas Eve, spends a few days recovering at Jack Lemmon's apartment, and then finally dumps her Sleazy Executive in favour of him on New Year's Eve. Not quite the Christmas-to-New-Year experience I would wish on anyone in reality, but still in its own way something to get us in the mood for our own NYE celebrations which followed.

Films watched 2014 round-up )

And now I believe it is time to get started on my films watched in 2015. :-)

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strange_complex: (Me Yes to Fairer Votes)
So I assume we all know by now that Tory party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas has been caught out by the Sunday Times offering businesses direct personal access to David Cameron for a minimum donation of £100,000. This BBC news article has the video if you haven't seen it. And just to be absolutely clear that this is not simply a matter of a few hand-shakes and photo-ops, let's take particular notice of this phrase from Cruddas' sales-pitch:
"If you're unhappy about something, we will listen to you and put it into the policy committee at number 10 - we feed all feedback to the policy committee."

Lobbying is a perfectly normal part of a functional and healthy democracy. It's what you do when you write to your MP, what campaign groups like Equal Marriage do when they organise petitions, and what business leaders do when they arrange meetings with ministers to express their concerns about current government policy. The problem with cases like the current Peter Cruddas scandal is that access to policy-makers is being arranged behind closed doors and being used as a money-making exercise which excludes those who can't afford to pay for it from the process.

This is why a full, robust and transparent lobbying register is needed, so that we can all see who exactly is talking to ministers, how much they are paying for the privilege and what they are saying.

As it happens, prompted by previous scandals of this nature, the government has recently published proposals for such a register. But their proposals represent a poor shadow of what's actually needed for real transparency, covering only lobbying done by agencies (roughly a quarter of the industry) and not directly by firms' in-house lobbyists (the other three-quarters), and recording only the minimum level of information about their meetings. This is why Unlock Democracy are currently campaigning for a full and effective lobbying register to be introduced, rather than the sop which is currently on the table.

If you'd like to lend your voice to that campaign, please take two minutes to sign Unlock Democracy's letter calling for a full lobbying register here.

You can also read more about their campaign, including details on how to contribute directly to the public consultation on lobbying, here.

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strange_complex: (Girly love Tadé Styka)
In favour of equal civil marriages? Then it's ACTION TIME! The government's consultation on introducing them opens today, and it's very important for positive voices to be heard. This is not a foregone conclusion, and if we want it, we need to say so loudly and clearly.

It's About Time gives information on the consultation, tips on what sorts of things supporters might say, and a link to where to go to say them (click on 'Take Part'). Please take the time to speak up if you support this proposal. This is not just another online petition, but a direct government consultation where you can really have an influence.

strange_complex: (Me Yes to Fairer Votes)
Tomorrow is the day of the AV referendum, and I know some people are still making up their minds how to vote. I've explained my own reasons for supporting AV in a previous post. But if you're still unsure today, allow me to put the case for the Alternative Vote in the clearest way I can.

Basically, First Past The Post is fine for binary decisions: e.g. Cake or Death? But if Chocolate is offered too, the 'We just want to live!' vote may be split, allowing Death to win. (Unlikely, of course, but who knows? There may be a lot of suicidal people living in your constituency.)

In the real world, FPTP was fine in the 1950s, when most voters were making a binary choice. In 1951, 97% of people voted either Conservative or Labour – so most MPs (94%, to be precise) were able to win a clear majority of support in their constituency. But in 2010, only 65% of people voted Conservative or Labour. Our votes are now spread across a wider range of parties – and the result is that two-thirds of MPs in the House of Commons today hold less than 50% of the total vote in their constituency. They've secured the largest minority, but do they have the support of the majority? We don't know, because FPTP doesn't check that.

At its worst, FPTP has allowed BNP candidates to be elected in some council seats because the majority non-BNP vote was split. Someone on Facebook posted this image of the results from Coalville ward in Leicestershire:



But it's not the only case of its kind. See also Mixenden in Calderdale, Mill Hill in Blackburn, or Fenside in Boston, Lincolnshire.

The extremist nature of the BNP means it isn't hard to imagine that the majority of the voters in these wards did not actually want a BNP councillor. But because the non-BNP-supporting majority spread their votes across a variety of other candidates, that's what they got.

The wider point about FPTP is that any candidate who wins on less than 50% of the vote may be just as loathed by the majority of their constituents as (we can guess that) these BNP councillors were. But FPTP doesn't check up on this by probing the views of the split majority. AV resolves this problem by eliminating trailing candidates one at a time, bringing split votes for similar candidates back together, and identifying a majority consensus. Put simply, it is a way of double-checking that the result which we would have had under FPTP really reflects what the majority want.

Further discussion for politics geeks of what the BNP examples reveal about the problems with tactical voting under FPTP )

So if you want a system which:
  • Ensures that each constituency elects an MP whom the majority of the voters there really support.
  • Prevents widely hated candidates from winning because the majority vote against them was split.
  • Allows people to express their preferences honestly, without having to make (imperfect) guesses about how other people will vote.
  • Deals with those preferences systematically and in the best interests of the individual voter, no matter what other voters do.
...please say Yes to AV this Thursday.

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strange_complex: (Me Yes to Fairer Votes)
This is an assessment of all the main possible methods for electing national governments, written by a lecturer at the University of Reading with the explicit aim of making "the findings of research on electoral systems available to a wider audience ahead of the referendum in the UK planned for May 2011." A fellow Yes campaigner recommended it to me at the beginning of this year as a balanced, rigorous and accessible guide to the main strengths and weaknesses of both First Past the Post and the Alternative Vote, so that I'd be equipped to argue about both intelligently in the course of the referendum campaign - and it has certainly provided that extremely effectively. Not only that, but the timing of the publication means that the author wrote it in the full knowledge that a referendum on the issue was going to be taking place, so that he was able to draw on up-to-date material such as the outcome of the 2010 General Election and comment on up-to-date issues such as the planned constituency boundary changes. So although the book actually goes beyond simply FPTP vs. AV, it is particularly well-geared to the current debate between the two, and examines them with the specific circumstances of the referendum in mind.

Overall structure and approach )

First Past The Post )

The Alternative Vote )

Simple Proportional Representation and Mixed electoral systems )

The Single Transferable Vote )

Obviously, it would probably have been helpful if I'd got round to reviewing this book a little earlier than 10 days before the referendum, so that anyone interested in reading Renwick's views for themselves could have had time to buy their own copy and read it before putting their cross on the ballot paper. But thankfully, Renwick's views on AV specifically are readily available online in the form of this briefing paper produced for the Political Studies Association. I can recommend it very highly to anyone wanting a properly balanced account of the arguments. Like the book, his assessment of the various strengths and weaknesses of AV as compared to FPTP in the paper is balanced, nuanced and objective. But the fairly clear conclusion to me is that AV is a small but measurable improvement on FPTP - and therefore worth having.

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strange_complex: (Me Yes to Fairer Votes)
Now that my conference paper is done and I am less ludicrously busy, I'm turning my attention firmly back towards the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign. I've written a fair bit on this journal about my involvement with the campaign, but I haven't yet said very much about why I'm so convinced that a change to AV is worthwhile. I did use the example of the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election back in January to explain why I think AV enhances the dialogue between voters and prospective candidates, which is certainly one good reason for making the change. But there is much more to say than that alone.

I could, of course, write a long rambling post which attempted to cover all of the reasons why I am supporting a change to AV - not to mention the many, many things which are wrong with FPTP (not all of which AV will fix), or with the No to AV campaign. Believe me, there are plenty of arguments to go into, and I've used most of them during the 1000 or more phone-calls which I've now made for the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign. But many of them have also been rehearsed elsewhere. In the more personal context of my own journal, I've decided instead to whittle things down to the single strongest argument which is convincing me to support a change to AV, and focus on writing about that.

So, are you ready for this?

The most straightforward, truthful and accurate statement of why I am campaigning for a Yes vote in the May 5th referendum?

OK - here we go:
The Alternative Vote is better than First Past the Post at identifying the Condorcet winner in each constituency election contest

That really is my genuine, number one reason for supporting the change. To me, it's the most persuasive argument. Unfortunately, it also isn't an argument I can use when campaigning. That small percentage of the population who have read up on the subject and know what the Condorcet criterion is might well nod sagely and agree with me - and believe me, I've been hanging out with a lot of those sorts of people in the context of the campaign! But most people would just greet me with a blank look. Should you wish to know more, however, read on... )

So that's me, and those are my real reasons for voting Yes to AV. As I've said, they aren't necessarily the reasons which are most effective in an actual debate. For most people, saying that I prefer AV because it is better at FPTP at identifying the Condorcet winner in each constituency is meaningless. And even if they're prepared to listen to me explaining it, I still have to acknowledge that that will only achieve a relatively modest improvement in the electoral system, and that AV isn't perfect at identifying the Condorcet winner itself anyway. But nonetheless, that is an honest statement of what is convincing me.

What's really important when I debate the issue with people on the phone is that my own core of conviction is solidly in place. From there, I can leave all talk of Condorcet winners behind, and concentrate on the arguments which are actually accessible and persuasive. It's nothing like as difficult as this post might make it appear. :-)

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strange_complex: (Clegg checks the omens)
I've just got back from a weekend in Sheffield, where I went to attend my first proper LibDem party conference )

Policy making )

What I actually attended )

Meeting people )

Anyway, there's lots more I could say about it all, but it's bed-time now, and I'll be back into full-on mega-busy mode at work again tomorrow. So I guess I will leave it there. Definitely an experience I'm glad I made time for, though, and I hope I'll get to do it again before too long.

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strange_complex: (C J Cregg)
Well, this election aftermath story is certainly throwing up some surprises, isn't it? I was a bit downcast about it all on Friday afternoon. I didn't think the LibDems had a strong enough hand to make electoral reform a central tenet of a coalition with either of the other parties. And if that couldn't be achieved, I couldn't really see how any of the three most likely outcomes (Con-Lib coalition, Lab-Lib coalition or Tory minority government) would ultimately do anything much else other than damage the Liberal Democrats in the long term - and hence damage the prospects of them having any serious input into the formation of government policy in the future. Like a lot of people, too, my immediate instinctive reaction to the idea of a Con-Lib coalition was "ugh!".

But I clearly underestimated Nick Clegg and his negotiating team )

What will actually happen is still anyone's guess )

Not everyone is happy with the outcome of this election )

I've got to say that I'm not seeing horror and betrayal in my corner of the internet )

Personally, I'm pretty OK with Con-Lib if it's going to achieve the implementation of as many of the LibDems' key manifesto commitments as it looks like it might. It's not going to be 'Torygeddon' - that wasn't the outcome of the election, and it's not how the Tory party would be able to behave while held on a tight leash by the LibDems in the context of a formal coalition. I'm not sure Lab-Lib is as workable - but if it can be made to work, I'd be perfectly happy with that too on the same grounds. It's a pity that the particular type of electoral reform that's being talked about by both Labour and the Tories at the moment is alternative vote, when single transferable vote is a lot fairer - see [livejournal.com profile] innerbrat's excellent discussion for details. But that any kind of electoral reform is being seriously offered at all is amazing - never mind all the other issues surrounding the economy, taxation and education which are all clearly going to end up being resolved in ways that are much more to my taste than either the Tories or Labour could have managed alone.

Everything could still fall apart, of course, without any of us really getting anything we want - no matter what we voted for. But one thing is for sure. Between the outcome of this election, the priorities of the Liberal Democrat party, and the activities of groups such as the Take Back Parliament coalition, the issue of electoral reform has become a central part of the political discourse. People are talking about it all over the internet, and yesterday evening the BBC News channel provided a detailed outline of the differences between FPTP voting, AV and STV. It feels to me as though this issue won't just fade away again now. And that is one of the main reasons why I voted LibDem in the first place.

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Polling night

Friday, 7 May 2010 05:04
strange_complex: (Tick my box)
Well, it's nearly five a.m., well over half of the seats have declared now, and so far it's a pretty depressing picture. There have been a few surprising results, but no sense of a big swing of popular opinion; no big shocks or iconic defining moments. Just a slow but steady trickle of seats of all sorts falling to the Conservatives.

Far more depressing, of course, is the spectacle of thousands of voters being deprived of the chance to cast their votes at all because of an inexplicable failure on the part of polling stations across the country to predict that they might want to. I'm particularly bothered to note that most of the places where the polling stations ran out of ballot papers or didn't have time to process everyone who wanted to vote before 10pm were urban constituencies - that is, exactly the places that are most crucial to both Labour and the LibDems.

My silver linings about this are two. One - it has already clearly produced widespread rage, and we have been promised a thorough enquiry by the Electoral Commission into exactly what happened. Some results may be declared invalid, and if the overall situation is a hung parliament, it may be yet another argument for basically have a re-run of the entire election in the very near future. Two - this issue, along with high voter turn-out in general and large numbers of postal votes, seems to be contributing to delayed counts in a lot of the seats where it happened. As I've said, they are generally the types of seats which are most likely to come out as Labour or LibDem. So as their results do come out, they may start to show that the real Tory lead is actually smaller than it currently looks like it is going to be - at least if they are held to be valid, anyway.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for my current constituency, Leeds North West, to declare. I note with pleasure that Bristol West, where I lived in 1997 and cast my first vote, has seen an increased LibDem majority. But that pleasure is distinctly tarnished for me by the news that my more recent former constituency, Oxford West, has fallen to the Tories, causing the wonderful Dr. Evan Harris to lose his seat.

Elsewhere, it's a pretty depressing night for the LibDems. They've lost a few here, gained a few there, but generally look on track to do what the exit poll predicted, which is retain more or less the number of seats in parliament which they already had. I'd like to know what their overall share of the vote nationwide is - has that gone up? I hope so, as it will strengthen their ability to claim that they should be able to have a decisive input into whatever happens in the wake of this election. But it's disappointing after the support they've been enjoying lately, and far short of what I'd hoped for them.

Ooh, this just in, though - Charles Clarke loses out to a LibDem candidate, and has a face like a slapped arse! That was fun.

Anyway, dawn is breaking, and David Dimbleby is sounding pretty tired and fed up now. I guess most of us feel much the same. I'm not too tired myself, as I have been deliberately time-shifting myself over the past week in anticipation of this evening - as the time-stamps on my last few posts will make clear. This is still rather later than even I'm used to staying up, but I can do another hour or so. If you're still up too, or even getting up early to check in on LJ before you go to work, drop me a comment and let me know you're out there!

ETA (05:30): excellent! Leeds North West holds, with an increased LibDem majority! Now why couldn't that have been repeated nationwide, hmm? I could go to bed now, especially since it will still clearly be a good 24 hours before we really have the slightest clue what this result will actually mean. But I'm still anxious to hear what has happened in Sheffield Hallam (Nick Clegg's seat, and clearly badly affected by polling station problems).

ETA the second (06:40): Clegg's seat now declared, and I'm very impressed by his speech emphasising the utter unacceptability of people being deprived of their votes first, and then saying we shouldn't rush into anything without taking time to think it through. Sensible man. Apparently the Queen is a sensible woman, too - she said early on that she wouldn't see anybody before 1pm. This seems to me like advice for life; and besides I don't think she's in much danger of being disturbed today at all. I could go to bed now, but still don't feel much like it. I will pay for this later.

ETA the third (09:00): OK, the BBC are closing down their election night coverage, it's still not completely certain that the Tories won't win an outright majority but it's pretty likely, and now I think I really am going to have to go to bed. Annoyed that the LibDem's share of the vote seems to have gone up slightly overall, but their number of seats has gone down. FPTP the post is clearly never going to work for them - so here's hoping that there is enough willingness now for them to push successfully for electoral reform.

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strange_complex: (C J Cregg)
So, here we stand on the eve of what is clearly going to be one of the most ground-shaking elections in living memory. I believe the closest I've seen to this level of excitement and sense of change before was in 1997, when Labour overthrew an eighteen-year-old Tory government to begin what has turned out to be a thirteen-year stint in power.

I actually voted last week, because I choose to have a postal ballot for the sake of convenience. Unlike a lot of people in this country (even still at the time of writing), I was never in any real doubt about how I was going to vote in this election, so didn't see any point in delaying the process. I'm certainly never going to vote Tory, so that wasn't an issue. Labour have, in all fairness, done some pretty good things since 1997 - for example, the minimum wage, granting control over interest rates to the Bank of England, and civil partnerships. But they've done some pretty shitty things, too - tuition fees, illegal wars, the campaign for ID cards, and of course lately cutting HEFCE funding so badly that my subject and my own job are now under threat. So there's no way I am going to vote for them either.

Anyway, I never really was. Ever since the first election I was eligible to vote in (which was in fact the 1997 one), I have consistently voted Liberal Democrat. Well - apart from the 2005 election, that is, in which I was disenfranchised because a letter I didn't know I was meant to be expecting got lost in the post. THAT was upsetting, and one hell of a strong reminder of what a precious possession the right to vote actually is.

Why I vote LibDem )

Why I don't vote tactically )

What I think / hope will happen at this election )

Anyway, tomorrow night I shall be having a few friends round to watch the results as they come in. It's fun to play drinking games involving sips of appropriately-coloured boozes as each seat is declared, of course - but that's also a strategy liable to cause you to cease caring and slide underneath the coffee-table before the night has advanced very far. Some might say that that would be for the best this time - but given that I do actually want to know what is happening, I have chosen an alternative, sugary method of marking the results. After extensive research in town on Tuesday, I concluded that M&Ms offered the best balance of good, strong primary colours, reasonable price and relatively minimal wastage. So I purchased five large packets of them and spent a happy quarter of an hour today sorting them out into their respective colours, like the roadie in Wayne's World.

If the contents of the packets are any indication of the election result, I can report that there will actually be a surprise Labour majority with the LibDems in second place by a narrow margin over the Tories:


If that's how it turns out, just remember folks - you heard it here first!

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strange_complex: (C J Cregg)
This only works if people are prepared to tell a stranger's data-collection gizmo how they intend to vote at the election - but if you're happy enough to do that, it's fun to see how your friends are lining up.


Help purple_pen and get your own badge!
(The Livejournal Electioniser was made by robhu)


The spread there so far is no particular surprise to me - but it could do with more data! Apparently, the graphs get updated periodically, so you can still change how mine looks by submitting your voting intentions.

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strange_complex: (Girly love Alma Tadema)
With thanks to [livejournal.com profile] diffrentcolours:

I'd just like to promote a new campaign by Nick Clegg and LGBT Lib Dems calling for Marriage Without Borders - removing the gender restrictions on marriages and civil partnerships, and improving international recognition of same-sex relationships.

Please sign the petition; if you're on Facebook you can become a fan, but do make sure you sign as well - and pimp it to your friends! Get HTML code to copy and paste!

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