Let be AV-ing you

 It's day of the local elections and I'm not voting.

But - UKIP tweeps and others out there concerned about my lack of civic engagement take note -  I am going down the polling station today - to have my say in the UK's referendum on adopting the Alternative Vote electoral system (or not).

The consequences, advantages or disadvantages depending on your point of view and what you think democracy should deliver, are fairly and clearly summed up in a briefing paper by the Political Studies Association.  On my reading, AV is not a big deal, preserving the basic, highly disproportional majoirtarian logic of first-past-the-post and (as far as simulations can tell) excluding smaller parties but boosting the Liberal Democrats.

So, not something you would really want to vote for unless you were a dyed-in-the-wool LibDem; felt reallocating preferences to many voters' second or third choice candidate to generate a diminished 50%+ majority for the winning canidate really was a major democratic improvement ;or are convinced that politically AV will be a first step to further  electoral reform along more proportional lines, or that the Liberal Democrats will  revert to their imagined role of the 1990s and became natural and easy coalition partners for Labour in a 'progressive pact'.

Personally, I'm not, I don't and (on both of the last two counts) I severely doubt it.

So -  after doing some short-term partisan guesswork about what might most damage the cohesion of a coalition government I really don't support - I'll be voting No.

I'm a little surprised to have ended up with this decision - although I repeatedly come back to  - and good citizen that I am (honest) I've tried to tune in to the debate. But the rival campaigns, low profile and mostly confined to the TV and radio studios and internet have, frankly, both been been pretty dire. Both have tended to present AV as if it were a proportional system ('fair votes' for the Yes campaign, a entree to parliament for the BNP for the No side), although both have touched on preference reallocation mechanism, the proposed new system's only truly innovative feature. The Yes campaign argue that it ensures genuine majorities (see rather witty beet v graphic below), the No campaign that preference re-allocation it is complicated, doesn't eliminate tactical voting and can generate equally perverse results. Some invoke Arrow's paradoxes

Interestingly, figures from the Party Labour  - now the most likely recipient of my vote if they had a candidate around to around to vote for -  lined up on both sides of the campaign, but, oddly, have lacked any very distinct or clear message. for or against Those in the desperately worthy Yes campaign repeated the rather tired Fair Votes ,some-reform-better than-none mantras, while those on the more brutal, kick-ass No side have recycled the equally tired pro- first-past-the-post arguments (the best of which centre on the ability to 'kick out the bums')  in ways indistinguishable from those campaign's mainly Tory backers.

Left-wing blogger (and author of a soon to be published UCL PhD on the concept of Chavs) Owen Jones, however, advances a more interesting argument  distinctly of the left opposing AV

 "... because I think it will institutionalise mushy centrist politics. I think that’s exactly the aim of many of its staunchest supporters, because they are ... mushy centrists and want an electoral system most likely to ensure their ideology dominates."

and more concretely because he sees it as faciltating the type of LibDem-Labour alliance that some people are as mentioned, actually, still hoping for and which  this left-wing take on things sees as an important (if never realised) element of the New Labour project.

The obvious objection is that AV would have delivered Tony Blair a bigger landslide in 1997 that FTTP, although I guess it could be argued that a weakened Blairite forces couldn't repeat this trick on the same scale

Here, however, as it often does, my mind veers off to Czech(oslovak) politics and, concretely, to the AV-like electoral system promoted in 1990-1 by President Václav Havel in preference to list PR, which he (rather accurately as it turned out) would empower political parties and produce a core of legislators with little connection with localities (the fabled 'constituency link' as it is called in British debates). However, Havel also favoured it because it felt it would promoted centrist candidates, who would benefit disportionately from second preferences, and prevent ideological polarisation.

He also hoped it would help prevent well organised parties with concentrated support from overcoming divided liberals - the scenario the beer versus coffee poster outlines, although a daft ine for most reasonably developed democracies where pro-beer forces would be consolidated into a  Friends of Beer Party  that would romp home easily under FTPP (perhaps on a public crawl programme).

Like much of what Havel advocated,  his electoral reform project - actually a  form of the Supplementary Vote (asking for first and second preferences only)* - never really stood a chance and was quickly voted down  by the country's emerging parties - although, in a certain, it lives on in the two-round, first-past-the-post system used for the Czech Senate, whose logic loosely parallels the 'instant runover' in SV). 

In the Czech context, Havel was in hindsight was probably right: there are no deep class cleavages  in Czech society and  perhaps because of that the country's ideologically strident but depressingly corrupt parties have continually struggled to generate clear, stable majority of left or right, resulting  centrist politics by default. 

But, as Carsten Schneider's excellent heavy-duty political science book on democratic consolidation argues, what matters most is the democratic fit of electoral system to a particular society. British (or perhaps, anticipating the de facto detachment or independence of the other nations, should I say English society is not the Czech society and perhaps a more polarised politics between loose blocs of left and right is a better fit. 

Perhaps the real issue is not electoral reform - even the kind of elegant mixed system that I might turn out to vote for - but decentralise political power to locally elected bodies and  to loosen up party structures, which seem as closed and narrow as anything Havel feared.

* Note Havel's proposal was technically a mixed system - I guess we might call it  a kind of SV+ - as they also contained a rather elegant proposal for proportional 'top-up' seats for votes in constituencies where combined first and second preferences did help elect winning candidates in individual member constituencies. My old notes suggest that under Havel's proposal fall voter's first and second preferences were simply to be added together (giving everyone a second vote), rather than re-allocating the votes of all except the two leading canidates.

It was twenty two years ago today...

That student demonstration in London against the Tory government that turned violent?

I was there. Quite close to where it all kicked off, in fact, although by accident and I missed the more dramatic bits that got on the telly.

But don't worry,  I wasn't bloke with the fire extinguisher. And actually,  I didn't leven leave the house today. And did nothing more violent that scrawl some red lines on a draft of someone's PhD.  You see it, was all more than 20 years ago...

On 24 November 1988 along with with several coach loads of Leeds University students went down to London for the biggest student protest of the decade. It was  a nationwide National Union of Students demonstration to protest against (shock horror) the abolition of student maintenance grants and their replacement with loans.  We were genuinely outraged and waves of mobilization - added to the prospect of a good day out with out mates- even reached the rather apolitical, but very friendly Russian Department. As I recall coach tickets were about £3 or £4. It was quite a warm day, as I remember, and we all got quick a kick out of marching through the streets and chanting - sense of empowerment or identify incentives, I guess I would call it today - and there was a real buzz to being in large, like-minded crowd of people just like us.

Then for some reason we ended up in a milling crowd in a dead end somewhere near the Houses of Parliament. We were by Westminster Bridge and we couldn't go anywhere. We all got quite bored and fed up and the crowd probably thinned out slightly, giving it a slightly more militant and political composition. There were certainly an impressive variety of far-left and Trotskyist newspaper sellers, which - being interested in theories of state capitalism and the like in those days - I could probably have ticked off trainspotter style. I'm not quite sure what happened next. The mood was, I suppose, probably getting uglier. I remember a police inspector walking ineffectually through the milling crowd with a megaphone telling us to disperse and everyone conspicouously ignoring him, although I don't think we had any very militant intentions. We just didn't want to day to be over. In the end my friend, now I believe a successful lawyer in California although we lost touch year ago, suggested that call it a day and find a pub.

This was a pretty convincing argument even during the days of High Thatcherism. We didn't find a pub and, with anti-Zellig like precision, we missed the "Battle of Westminster" A few minutes later mounted police  spectacularly charged through the milling crowd at the end of the bridge and brought the impasse to an end. The university's more militant student revolutinaries, I was told, had cunningly taken the tube over the river, but been arrested. Back on the coach, we booed as the radio news reported that students had rained missiles down on police and cheered when we learned that the Queen Mother had been stuck in the traffic chaos we had caused.

'Major conflict': The young Dr Sean woz 'ere (almost)

Back on our early morning Russian grammar class the next day - present participles, I think it was ( I was rather good at them) - we wondered what had happened. Clearly, we hadn't been manipulated by sinister Trotskyists, although we couldn't vouch that they hadn't led the march somewhere it shouldn't have gone by packing the front ranks. Perhaps we wouldn't have cared if we had known. At least, we thought  they saved from being stuck in some park listening to some dull as ditchwater speech the then National Union of Students President, Maeve Sherlock (now Baroness Sherlock).

Like a lot (but not all) protest in the 1980s, it all came to nothing - and I suspect deep down  we inwardly knew that at the time -  and the system of student loans duly  came in in my final year. On graduation, having been pretty frugal, I owed the state-back Student Loans Company the princely sum of £300.

This is, of course, all history. The Battle of Westminster - or perhaps we should say, Brief But Somewhat Violent Police Charge of Westminster is now the subject of a much cited academic article about social identity and crowd psychology: it is  quite right that it was cock-up rather conspiracy han and that , yes, as Social Identity Analysis suggested we were slightly been radical and less law-abding after the event than before, but we didn't all rush to join the Socialist Workers Party.

It was, of course, a different age then. No internet, no mobiles, no Twitter, no Facebook.  Approximately, half the student numbers of today (although the queues for the banks of photcopiers in hte Library were horrendous( None of us would have understood the 'tuition fees'. And I would have no more believed that communism would collapse than that men from Mars would land outside Leeds Town Hall.

And in hindsight, it all seems rather than cosy and innocent, although after Mrs Thatcher's third election victory in 1987, the papers were full of predictions that a Maoist-style free market Cultural Revolution was about the be unleashed. Perhaps it was and I never noticed.

So having a break for coffee I watch Guardian online footage of the London Day of Action with marchers trooping past UCL. How does it all compare? The atmosphere, placards and slogans seem curiously the same - has no one thought of a catchier slogan than "They Say Cutback, We Say Fightback" in two decades -  and the numbers (around 50,000) are similar too, although the current protest seem slightly bigger and to have a momentum missing im 1988. The Twitter feed of the demo - not something available in 1988 (my reporter friend from Leeds Student tasked to track Maeve Sherlock quickly lost his story in the unfolding chaos) - suggests today's students are about as witty as we were when it comes to doing homemade placards, although the stakes today are (for some people, at least) bigger and humour blacker.  Organizational confusion and resulting breakawy leading to a headline-grabbing clash  around a symbolic centre of power (then Westminster, today Millbank), is spookily similar - as are the debates about whether it has done the student cause a favour by crashing onto the headlines and registering  anger or just played into the hands of a hostile media. There are also the predictable accusations that the whole thing was staged by extremists (then the Socialist Workers Party, this time round anarchists).

What seems different (at least judging by the Guardian footage) is that today's marchers are a damn sight more socially and ethnically diverse - and younger , including FE and college students- than the crowd I was in 1988: the proposed changes of 2010 seem a much bigger deal than those of 1988 and also much more of a class issue, like to see some denied big opportunities and others.In truth, however, I suspect, what has happened is that proposals have thrown into sharp relief the already class-ridden  and unequal character of higher education.

My own feelings about  events are surprisingly mixed. I am fascinated by (what might be) an unfolding social movement, but a mixture of middle age and being one of the 'Thatcher's Children' generation that saw most protest lead to naught leaves me with an engrained scepticism. I also doubt that the interests of university staff and students are as closely aligned as trade union and student union leaders would have us believe. 

The new movement is inevitably overhyped. A blog post written by one of the students occupying  UCL's Jeremy Bentham Room - a nice, undisruptive target used mainly for social events and conferences- claims student protests are inventing a new organizational model.  Actually, he seems to be re-discover the idea of the social movement in the age of Facebook and blogging  and splashing about an awful political science jargon. There's a pleasingly in-your-face quality to all this and if this is the beginning of a the kind of multiform 'alliance of resistance' some trade unionists have started to image - a sort of angry-as-hell Tea Party movement  of the public sector- capable of real national impact, rather than a replay of the damp squib student protest of 1980s, then I guess that's OK and a few pieces of schlock political science analysis are a small price to pay.


After all, who knows, maybe we are all in it together?

Czech history lessons?

Lack of time and lack of expertise means I don't take more than a passing interest in academic history, but I note with interest the apparent outrage caused by a paper presented by French historian Muriel Blaive at a recent symposium held in London to mark the 70th anniversary of the creation of Czechoslovak and Poland governments in exile Has the Czech Republic fully come to terms with the memory of the Second World War? The memory in question, the paper says, is the (so far unresearched) extent of Czech collaboration and passivity underNazi occupation and, specifically, with the implementation of the Holocaust. This theme, it is suggested, would violate established national narrative of Czechs as a liberal European nation, who were heroes or (more commonly) victims of a grim totalitarian double-whammy of Nazism and communism, and, in particular, undermine Czech moral credit in debates over post-war treatment and eventual mass 'transfer' of the Sudeten Germans.

There is well established set of arguments that (large sections) Czech society bears a certain responsibility for communism - enthusiatically backing the statist national democratic project of the Communist 1945 and falling too readily for reform communist illusions in the 1960s. Indeed, Muriel Blaive's earlier book (published in different versions in Czech and French) added to by suggesting that when Hungarians and Poles were taking to the streets in 1956, Czech society was unreactive not because deep democratic and anti-communist instincts were repressed, but because it was passive, inwardly and bought off by being (relatively speaking) well off. However, any suggestion that the Czechs were anything other victims of Nazism was, perhaps not surprisingly, moc silný kafe. Another implication, which you might take from the paper (although this is not explicitly given - merely mine) is that the agonised intellectual and historical debates over Czechs and (Sudeten) Germans which go back to the underground samizdat discussions of 1980s - including the self-searchingly self-critical ones - has obscured the need for one over wider Czech complicity

What should a political scientist make of all this? There is an interesting line of argument in the paper about the conversion and re-use of police and intelligence structures by successive regimes (democratic/Nazi/communist), which could feed interestingly into research on the nature of regime change state, especially given the current strong historical turn in the discipline. After all, wasn't one of the biggest mistakes the American made in Iraq the decision not to convert Baathist state structures?). And there clearly are some thoughts to be had about history, democractic quality, the partisan use of decommunization, the politicization of academic reseach institutions. At bottom, in a democratic society, there should, be no historical taboos - which in the Czech Republic clearly there still are - and historians clearly have a job to do, and that job includes looking at all the skelteons in all the cupboards. And there is a well rehearsed argument that openness and honestly about the past make for society better able to face up, discuss and solve its current problems.

On the other hand, you wonder quite what the Czech politicians and public are actually supposed to believe about themselves and their past? And especially, what if anything, they should feel positive about? Sure, Czech politics is animated by crude national-democratic myth, but - as the warm bath of nostalgic feel good documentaries about the Blitz and the Battle of Britain currently airing on British television shows - this isn't exactly unique. Admittedly, revisionist programming seeps uncontroversially into the schedules: watch the whole crop of WWII history and you can learn there was rampant crime and corruption during the Blitz; that British Blitz of German cities later in the war was more savage than than meted out by the Luftwaffe in 1940-1; that the Battle of Britain was won partly due to German incompetence in photo reconnaisance; that our military effort was buttressed by imperialism and racism and so on.

And, it would, of course be nice if British historical memory really wasn't dominated by the early years of the Second World war: WWI and WWII it is the only bit of modern history that most primary schools touch on, so it is no small wonder we are rapidly eurosceptic and have inflated sense of national importance. On the other hand, the use of academic history for endless repetitive masochistic, self-lacerating national self-criticism which some parts of the Czech intelligentsia delight in seems more likely a recipe for cynicism and anomie, rather than democratic renewal.

Perhaps, realistically, in what Phippe Schmitter once rather nicely termed really Existing Democracies, a safe disconnect between academic and popular history is all you should wish for.

Update:  Madelaine Albright's keynote address to the symposium can be seen in video here. It's a rather eloquent and well delivered presentation making  a well argued - if ultimately not totally convincing - case for traditional view of strong, if naturally imperfect, Czech democratic tradition derailed by geopolitical circumstance. A politician's rather than a historian's speech, but then as I say above that has its place.

New old politics

The unfolding drama of coalition formation, although in a more lucid moment I had inadvertantly predicted it, left me non-plussed and not very happy: partly because I didn't like the outcome and because, not for the first time, political events I thought I had handle on left me flat footed. I had basically expected the Lib Dems to go no further than a confidence and supply deal with the possibility of playing both big parties off against each other to some extent, but underestimated the Lib Dem thirst for office and the extent to which the right-wing Orange Book group of economic liberals (which includes Nick Clegg himself) had come to dominate the party's leadership. In our local public library the next day I chanced upon a biography of the party's previous leader (until 2005) Charlie Kennedy and flicked through to see if - as the instant political history in the papers claimed - he had really been forced out for political reasons (too left-wing), rather than because he was an alcoholic.

The answer though seems to be that the booze that did for him and that he was a walking political liability for years, although as everyone in the party - right down to an ex-student intern I interviewed for a place at UCL - knew for years he was often too drunk or hungover to function, the timing of his downfall (months after David Cameron and the Tory modernisers came on the scene) was to say the least interesting.

All this doesn't, however, help my post-election hangover and bright-new-dawn 'new politics' rhetoric and reformspeak of the Cameron-Clegg doublt act - echoed by newspaper pundits across the political spectrum - leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

Most bitter and disorienting of all is the way that constitutional and electoral reform - a high minded preoccuption of liberal-minded intellectual folk since 1980s - and the main concession the Lib Dems have supposedly wrested from the Tories seems suddenly degraded like some rare radioactive isotope into a series of political fixes to shore up the new coalition: the 55% supermajority reqirement to dissolbe parliament conjured out of the air (the type of rule that would be consitutionally entrenched in countries with a written constitution) and the realisation that the alternative vote (AV) system we will be asked to vote is unlikely to the first step to some more rational and balance electoral system, but simply a means (if it passes) of boosting Lib Dem representation by steering lots of 2nd and 3rd preferences towards them, while keeping the system majoritarian enough to block small challenger parties like the Greens, whose minor miracle in winning Brighton Pavilion in a three-way fight is unlikely to be easily repeated elsewhere. Indeed, Václav Havel once advocated AV for Czechoslovakia precisely for this reason - because he thought it would favour the political centre, although I suspect that Lib-Cons (see how easily that phrase starts to trip of the tongue) will increasingly form a bloc and with the two parties' voters tending to second preference each others' candidate.

Frankly, a French or Hungarian style second-round run-off election would be more transparent. - and more fun (I like elections) If we do get AV, I'm sure the Lib-Dems will quickly discover its virtues and forget about Single Transferable Vote and any other form of PR or decide that that they would like it only for the House of Lords or local government.

There is little real discussion of the democratic merits or likely effects of AV in the press. Ironically, it seems, however electoral reform (any electoral reform) is seen - as in Romania and Bulgaria - as a kind of magic bullet, which will automatically and of itself bring in a host of desirable changes. I am sceptical. Indeed, so sceptical that I think I will vote 'no' in that referendum. I've never changed my mind about any key issue so decisively in such a short space of time. Perhaps two party (or two bloc) politics is what fits in this country- this is, after all, not Holland or Norway with a of multiple crosscutting historical and cultural cleavages to accomodate - and, in somewhat, new and re-invented form two bloc is what we will probably what we will end up with. A new old politics.

Election diary

I tried very hard not to be interested in the election campaign, avoiding the historic TV debates and most of the day-to-day media flim flam - although 'Bigotgate' offered a grim confirmation that politicians are exactly has depicted in the TV satire In The Thick Of It. In the end, however, the apparent Lib Dem surge, sheer uncertainly of the result and intriguing possibilities of hung parliament hooked me and pulled me and there I was on election night mug of coffee in hand up till 4am watching the TV results, pausing only to switch off the sound and dip into a Swedish crime novel when politicans and pundits came on to fill in a temoorary lack of any news. I, like they, could not work if it was a hung parliament, a Tory majority or another variant of hung parliament we were in until just before dawn the patter (or patterns) became clear: huge Tory gains against Labour in the South and Midlands, largely gains elsewhere, no gains in Scotland,; no Lib Dem surge, but a successful defence, with the odd exception, of seats held against Conservative challengers.

The oddest exception, of course, was North Irish-Estonian Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik, whose celebrity status on the chat show circuit and pop star Cheeky Girl girlfriend seemed no longer to endear him to Welsh voters he represented and he was overhauled by well established local Tory, who probably paid more serious attention to bread and butter issues. My colleague Allan Sikk mischeviously suggests that Opik could add a splash of colour Estonian politics by entering the race for the Estonian parliament in 2011 (party to be confirmed). Indeed, there is even a Facebook Group urging Lembit to enliven the political life ancestoral homeland with his own brand of eccentric liberal reformism. So far, however, it hasn't exactly gone viral (supporters 3 including me). There is always an issue as to whether Lembit's Estonian is as a good as Nick Clegg's perfect Dutch.

A couple of days before the election I answered a journalist's questions about the differences between British and UK parties for a mini-interview for the Czech financial freesheet E15. It wasn't the first time I had chewed such things over but it was an interesting exercise. My thoughts? There is less more of an ideological divide in Czech politics, although not the gulf you would think from Czech parties in-your-face campaigning, and the UK has a post-Thatcherite consensus on certain fundamentals; the Czech Social Democrats' high profile campaign defence of the welfare state and avoidance of the issue of how and when not if to make cuts makes it a very different political animal from the British Labour Party - although not necessarily less genuinely social democratic; the closest CEE equivalents to Blairite New Labopur were probably the market friendly ex-Communist parties of Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, but in the end they all got electorally roasted; if there is no Czech or Central European Nick Clegg is it probably because swathes of CEE voters tend to recognise themselves more in blunt spoken pugnacious strongmen like Orbán, Fico, Paroubek or even Topolánek than the role of clean cut middle class everyman (and, of course, it's always a man) that British politicians seek to play - and English voters to go for. Interestingly, explaining the Liberal Democrats through a Czech prism is a convoluted and difficult exercise.

At 8 o'clock in the morning of 6 May, I walked down to polling station with my daughter before school, past a mass of Lib Dem hoarding that seems mysteriously to grow in size every day - perhaps a side effect of 'Cleggmania' - still wondering who to vote for. If there is a rising Lib Dem tide there is, the Guardian's online poll-and-seat calculator suggests, an outside chance of this fairly solid Conservative seat changing hands.

There are no queues and I cast my vote, but instantly have h a vague presentiment that I had not quite done the right thing.

Polls together

The Guardian has thoughfully offered all its ICM/Guarduan opinion polling figures for last 26 years in downloadable form for readers to mash up. So in the spirit of do-it-yourself quantitaive analysis, I decided to look at the 1984-2010 six month moving average. It offers some interesting historical perspective and a reminder (above) of how party fortunes fluctuate: the Lib Dems real high point in terms of support comes in the mid-1980s in the wake of the 1983 election when they are over 30% before crashing badly in the late 1980s following disappointing 1987 election results and a botched merger with the Social Democratic Party. The Lib Dems then recovered to 20-25 per cent, which has chararacterised their supprt up until the current election campaign. The moral? Perhaps that the Lib Dems are more likely in the current to be beneficiaries of protest vote and vague desire for change and reform rooted in David Cameron's apparent failure to 'seal the deal'.

The same moving average for 'other' parties (below) shows a more regular pattern of relentless increase in minor party support over the last quarter century driven - interestingly - but European elections- the peaks in the graph. This seems true before the introduction of PR, when he Greens got 15% (the first big spike)

Golden Brown: How Gordon might have pulled it off?

And here's a UK election result you won't see this Thursday - again courtesy of the Prime Minister Forever 2010 computer simulation game: Labour and the Tories tied for the popular vote on 30% with Labour gaining 300 seats and Cameron's Conservatives way behind on 230, and also marginally behind in terms of popular vote. The Lib Dem advances proves - as in real life and the last simulation I played - hard to stop, but this result is in terms of political consequencs the mirror image of the previous simulation: Lib-Lab co-operation with electoral reform in weak form on Labour's terms.

The trick? Intensive debate practice for Gordon (he and Nick Clegg drew all three - Cameron as in two of the three real life ones ineffectives - and, of course, keep him away from the voters and stick to set piece events; coupled with a strategy concentrating on attacking the Tories in big cities and the electoral battlegrounds of the North West and Midlandss, more or less sacrificing Labout MPs in the South East and East, who were duly decimated at the hands of the Tories., so their colleagues in London and Birmingham could hand on against the odds. The upside of this from the Labour point of view was also that the low Labour vote in the South allowed the Lib Dems to win a few seats unexpectedly off the Tories - including, wonder of wonders, Mid-Sussex. The Greens, again, picked up Brighton Pavilion.

Virtually Nick Clegg

I didn't go to Westminster school, can't ski, don't speak Dutch and may not vote Liberal Democrat, but in a very real sense for about an hour last night I was Nick Clegg and, what's more, I see the 2010 election results come in seat-by-seat and I can tell you all about them. The Lib Dems achieved the electoral breakthrough all the polls have been forecasting on a impressive scale with105 seats - very much at the upper end of what the pundits were saying. Unfortunately, however, the Tories also put in a much better than anticipated performance winning 296 seats, coming close to a majority and, giving a good moral claim to be PM. I

t looks like some kind of Lib-Con pact is on the cards, probably centring on electoral reform, but the Lib Dem hand isn't as strong as it might of been if Dave can buy off the Scottish and Welsh Nats - who hold a total of 12 seats and the Democratic Unionists. Things look very bad for Gordon Brown - Labour was outpolled by the Lib Dems (26: 25 per cent) and Labour has just over 200 seats. Minor parties did better than anticipated though: Caroline Lucas came through the middle to take Brighton Pavilion, as did Salma Yaqcoob for the Respect party in Birmingham Hall Green. The BNP polled a scary 21% in Barking.

OK, I admit it, I haven't had an out of body experience, slipped through a time warp, Nor has my wife been sllipping pyschotropic substances into my Nescafe. I was playing Theory Spark's excellent - if rather belated - update of election simulation game Prime Minister Forever 2010. The game is based on their very successful President Forever game, which simulates US presidential contests (including primaries - it's incredibly hard to win as Obama, by the way, and boy is Iowa crucial). For computer game buffs, I should say it's essentially a resource management game with no very flashy graphics and you need to play experimentally a couple of time to get the hang of it, but there's not too much to keep track of and enough real strategy there to make it intriging challenge for anyone with a serious-ish interest in electoral politics, who fancies themselves an armchair election general.

My strategy as the virtual Nick Clegg was to try to match what has actually happened over the last weeks cencentrating on winning TV debates and building momentum for third party breakthrough, campaigning mainly in marginal seats South and West of England and relying on the Big Mo to secure Lib Dem seats elsewhere, especially Scotland. It was tough: Gordon Brown did unexpectedly well in the first debate, but with better preparation I achieved the same kind of breakthrough the real life Clegg did in debate 1, only in virtual PC debates 2 and 3. Indeed, astonishingly my political timing was, I think, rather better than that of the real Clegg Cleggmania took hold a bit later than it has in real life eaving the Tories little time to bounce back. Gordon's early momentum burned itself out, you will be unsurprised to hear.

My mistake though was not to campaign in the Midlands, where the Lib Dem electoral surge tended to open the way to the Tories, tranforming them into three-way marginals. The result was a distinctly Pyrrhic victory.

The Straight Choice online UK election leaflet archive

I came across a very interesting website mapping UK election leaflets - The Straight Choice | The election leaflet project. Voters are invited to photo or scan election material that comes through their letterbox. Interesting, as it picks on variation in party organization and strategies characteristic of Single Member Distrcit contests and as a do-it-yourself, networkde way of building up an archive of historical material. Surprising, that no research institute thought of asking people to do this. And, of course, it would be an interesting exercise for other countries, CEE states included. Pity, I binned all the leaflets a week ago as part of my general UK-election-campaign-ophobia.

UK Tories to send gay MP to quell Polish social conservatives

Conservative party to send gay MP to quell EU extremists reports The Guardian. The story? Nick Herbert, Conservative MP for Arundel and South Downs, Tory spokesperson for the environment and one of several openly gay Conservative MPs has drawn the short straw and has agreed to go to Poland to attend a gay pride event in Warsaw in July (so far, so straightfoward) and also held the Tories' highly socially conservative ally, Law and Justice (PiS) embark on a 'journey' to modernize its negative views on homosexuality. Possibly a tall order. One of the founders of the PiS, Poland's late President Lech Kaczynski banned such events when mayor of the Polish capital. You have to feel sorry for Mr Herbert. He seems a nice guy. He met my mum when canvassing and was quite charming when she told he she was a dyed-in-the-wool social democrat, would like Gordon Brown as PM and a would not vote conservative if her life depended on it. I wonder if he will get on as well with Catholic social conservative in Warsaw as social democrats in Mid-Sussex.

Easter Holiday diary

It's family holiday time in the Czech Republic. The neighbouring out-of-town high rise estates where my in-laws have improved slightly in some respects as some grey brutalist communist-era towersblocks have been insulated and refaced with a splash of pastel colours in the years following EU membership, althhough such refurbishment now seems to have slowed. There is also a very nice 'muti-generational playground' with a pirate theme just near the local football pitch, which - innovatbively - even has an exercise corner for seniors although there were no pensioners in evidence and precious few kids around on the cold Sunday morning we were there. The local mayor is a leading light on the Greens regional list for the forthcoming eletions, I was interested to discover. She doesn't seem to be have been able to have done much about the ubiquitous graffiti on every available wall and dogshit on every availablle grass verge though. What's the Czech for pooper scooper?

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Traipsing between tower blocks is no fun, so we quickly drive off to country. Having invested a 40 minutes being passed from queue to queue and counter to counter in the local post-office to buy a 10 day motorway vignette, we take full advantage of the empty, new motorway to Kroměřiž - part of slow, corrupt and not-likely-to-be-completed-any-time-somm road expansion and upgrading programme. The proverbial road to nowhere.

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The kids eat ice cream sundae in spa town of Luhačovice. I have backache and want to buy some ibuprofen. This means locating the local pharmacy, as the idea that so much as an aspirin on sale anywhere is anathama. Eventually, I get there and get a packet for three times the price they would cost at my local Tesco in England. Frustrating? Not half. With the collapsing pound, the Czech Republic is expensive as well as rather overregulated by British standards. Apparantly, Czech pharmacies have fought an effective rearguard lobbying action to hang on to their retail monpoly. On the other hand, perhaps I am too quick to think it is a basic human right to buy anything at knock down prices at the nearesr hypermarket.

My holiday reading, The Spirit Level, does a good job of popularizing academic finding that more equal market democracies have a better quality of life and fewer social and health problems - although I am less convinced by some of the evolutionary pyschology about status anxiety used to fillin the blanks and policy recommendations are the end some fairly tired and unimginative social democratic prescriptions like employer share ownership, co-operatives and municipal enterprises- worthy and probably quite effective, but frankly the political equivalent of a dose of ibuprofen.

Time was I knew the bookshops of Brno like the back of my hand. These days, however, I hardly ever stick my nose over the threshold of a knihkupectví, but instead spend a lot of time at zoos, children's theatre and riding the city's public transport system with my tram-crazy offspring. Today, we head to the Divadlo Polarka to see a performace of the classic Czech (well, izvinytye actually Russian) children's favourite Mrazík. The theatre foyer is packed with surpisingly unruly school groups, who make up the children's theatre's clientele, supervised by an implausibly small number of teachers, who are good deal less fierce and imposing than the dragon remembered by wife from the 1970s when kids had to say 'Yes, comrade' instead of 'Yes miss' in class. Coincidently, Czech news magazine Respekt reports that Czech parenting has become considerly more liberal since the mid-1990s, leaving schools struggling to cope with more loud and assertive generatio ns of kids, who are a whole lot less cowed by authority.

Eventually, we get a seat - although it is 10am in the morning and the second performance of the day - the Polarka's actors put in a fantastic performance with perfectly co-ordinated music, acrobatics, rapid scene changes and great story telling that knocks the average English panto into a cocked hat.

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Brno zoo is a bit of a disappointment, but the new refurbished Anthropological museum Anthropos with its papier mache cave people and life-sized model mammoth is a much more interesting proposition.

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Traces of nuts may be detectable

The mildy controversial article Tim Bale, Aleks Szczerbiak and I wrote for Political Quarterly about the British Tories and their East European allies in the new European Conseravtives and Reformers Group (ECR) European Parliament has just appeared - interested readers based in universities with an institutional subscription to PQ might like to click through here. Otherwise, friends and colleagues, please feel free to drop me an email to ask for an electronic offprint.

The new ECR group, however, looks a bit more shaky than it might have done a few months ago, if the recent interview with Civic Democrat faction leader in the EP Miroslav Ouzký, who pulls no punches in telling Czech news magazine Respekt that the leaving the European People's Party was a bad move, depriving his party of political clout and was the brainchild of arch-eurosceptic and one time Klaus protege, Jan Zahradil (now the Vice-Chair of ECR). The ECR's dependence on small one MEP parties, Ouzký says - as we too argued in the article (seealso an East European oriented presentation I did on the subject last year fwith some figures) leaves it vulnerable to collapse.

My co-author, Tim Bale, is also author of new book on the British Tories, which he describes here in a podcast on the Bookhugger site. I had a small enabling role here, as it was recording in my office: a fact obvious by default for anyone who knows it in that Tim is seated in front of the only area not cluttered with untidy piles of books, papers and coffee cups: the space-age window-cum-porthole which sometimes leaves me feeling more like Major Tom than Dr Sean.

Fractured alliance

Tim Bale's brief on the Parliamentary Affairs website trails some of the arguments and analysis about the new European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament that Tim, Aleks Szczerbiak and I have been working on.

BNP on Question Time: Kilroy wasn't here

I sat in the front of the TV with one eye on a sheaf of article from the Czech press and one eye on BBC TV's widely billed, controversial edition of Question Time, it flagship panel discussion programme featuring British National Party leader Nick Griffin: the first time the far-right has been accorded the accolade of such recognition, although the BNP has had relatively easy access to the airwaves with its representatives regularly being interviewed on the radio. And, of course, British far-right parties have regularly been exposed and infiltrated by TV documentary makers since 1970s.

To make up for the howls of protest, the programme makers decided to make Nick Griffin's appearence on their programme the central issue, so the format largely shifted from multiple current affairs questions and familiar party ding-dong to a series of critical uestions about the BNP and its leader: specifically were its views whacky, extreme and racist and its leader someone who cannot explain away his earlier public record as neo-fascist and Holocaust denier.

The answer, of course, is that they were and he couldn't. All in all, it was reassuringly unimpressive performance by the BNP leaders, lacking not only any credible answers but also professionalism, poise or personal charm. I remember once watching Jean Marie Le Pen comprehensively outmanoeuvre a left-wing opponent on TV discussion with a mixture of sure footing cunning and avuncular bluster on French TV in the 1980s. Happily, the BNP leader clearly wasn't in this league.

I was just about to turn back to Prague municipal politics, however, when suddenly I caught flash of the kind of leader the British radical populist far-right probably does need and the kind of politician we probably should fear: it was Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrats' spokesperson for home affairs - up to that point a grey and totally forgettable presence on the panel, - launching into an eloquent tirade about how Britain should have closed its borders to citizens of new (that is predominantly, East European) EU member states for as long as possible and wasn't it awful that the government that the government didn't do this and lots of them came over here... Open borders in an opern liberal Europe. What a disaster.

For a fleeting moment, I though Mr Huhne, an unsuccessful contender for his party's leadership in 2007, was making a pitch for the BNP leadership, which to judge from his poor performance Nick Griffin might soon be vacating. Then I realised, of course, that, having slipped out of anti-fascist mode, he was simply illustrating the well established truth that immigrant-bashing and playing up to the public xenophobia is OK provided you are a respectable person from a resepctable mainstream party. And, Mr Huhne, - public school, Oxford, the City, economist and financial journalist, long-serving MEP, policy expert - is certainly that.

And then it struck me that, here - not necessarily in the person of Mr Huhne - but some of some ambitious, well educated, well spoken, reasonably well known figure public figure gone maverick that the real threat of more articulate, credible and dangerous far-right lies. No of burden of neo-fascist pedigree or a penchant for anti-semitism tor seeing the positive side of Hitler that, fortunately for us, encumbers Nick Griffin (and later held back Le Pen and Joerg Haider). Political or media skills already honed. Stock of political respectability already laid in.

Such figures seem to be media personalities with a certain political-cum-academic commentators (Pym Fortyn, Robert Kilroy-Silk) or frustrated members of existing parties, who turn maverick or decide to air views on race, minorities or immigration they have previously kept to themselves. Interestingly, Liberal parties, typically often under electtoral pressure from bigger competitors of left and right, whose identity is often a rather unstable mix of anti-establishment, pro-market, pro-market and pro-little person/geographical periphery appeals, seem especially vulnerable to such occasionally odd mutations: Haider's Austrian Freedom Party was originally a liberal grouping, controversial anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders was once an MP for Holland's Liberals the VVD; Germany's FDP was hit by accusations of anti-semitism in 2002-3 because of statements of one its then rising stars, the late Jurgen Molleman; in the mid-1990s factions in the FDP associated with the nationalist Neue Rechte intellectual (unsuccessfully) sought a Haider-style transformation of the party.

I don't, of course, expect to see Mr Huhne leading the BNP or indeed some populist confection (although I'm sure he'd do an excellent job if he did), but as the comedian Alan Davies pointedly pnoted on the This Week programme that followed Question Time's BNP-fest, Griffin's party are not a hugely successful or professional outfit and don't deserve high profile controverst treatment and still less the back-handed compliment of being banned from Question Time.

The real threats lie elsewhere. We clearly had a lucky escape when ex-Labour MP and chat show host Robert Kilroy-Silk proved too maladroit and egomaniacal to take over the UK Independence Party in 2004. Celebrity populists and mavericks peeling away from already opportunistic mainstream seem a potentially far more potent force than the wafer thin veneer of respectability and normality of a welfare chauvinist niche party that can't escape its neo-fascist roots like the BNP.

Grey politics in England's wild West

A regional website in the South West of England carries a short report about the English Pensioners' Party, which is based in this region where it polled a-not-altogether-awful 2.4% in the recent Euro-elections. It didn't field candidates in any other regions, presumably due to cash shortage as the article is mainly about efforts by the party's founder to raise cash. If they had it, it the nascent English Greys might be on the theshold of becoming a viable minor party - roughly,where the populist English Democrats are today (Is English nationalism perhaps an up-and-coming political force of the next few decades, if and when Scottish independence comes into view). On the other hand, the English West Country does seem a rather unusual kind of place politically and something of a minor party shangri-la: a historic bastion of the Liberals and the UK Indepedence Party where the Greens polled well and the Cornish nationalists managed to beat the Labour Party in their home county/country.

I can't believe I just did that...

I can't believe I just did that...

Secluded in the polling booth, pencil poised over ballot papers for local and European elections, on impulse I voted for a despised minor party. I mean I should have known better. All that 'British Jobs For British Workers' stuff was obviously rubbish and, yes, the party's leadership is a bit thuggish. But, you know how it is , mainstream media vilification does push some poeple into protest voting for fringe parties - and I was truly fed up with both the big parties locally.

For the first time in 21 years, I voted Labour.

Leaflety surburbs

I've been leafing throught the combined pile of Euro- and local election leaflets slowly building up on the windowsill. Perhaps on the back of early poliing, the Greens seem to be nervous about losing their one Euro MP in the South East of England, although the latest polling suggests a surge in their vote on the back of public disgust about mainstream parties' MPs' dubious expenses claims.

The leaflet of the pro-withdrawal from the EU UK Independence Party - now predicted to repeat their impressive 16% national poll share in 2004 and seemingly the second party in this part of the world - features Winston Churchill, as does a UKIP billboard outside the local hypermarket. Odd, as Churchill was an early advocate of European union. The far right British National Party goes for a similar leitmotif. Its leaflet has with a picture of a Spitfire and some stuff about a new Battle of Britain and a bloke dressed in a doctor's white coat telling us that immigrants are wrecking the National Health Service. Again odd, as the NHS is more or less kept afloat with immigrant label and the BNP's leaders all cut their political teeth of neo-Nazism and would probably have been locked up during the real Battle of Britain. This, of course, doesn't matter a jot, as they they are tapping into something else: a Churchillianism' that less historical fact is a distinct brand English/British nationalism that permeates the national culture - ably analysed by Anthony Barnett way back in the 1980s in Iron Britannia.

However, the BNP leaflet does have a certain political sophistication, recycling Gordon Brown's ill considered 'British jobs, for British workers' tag and - in trying to project the party as a 'normal' party just like the others - going in for some classic 'dog whistle' politics. Everyone knows the the party is xenophobic and racist, so there's absolutely no need to upset us by to mentioning it, is there?

This alas eludes the Liberal Democrat leaflet for the local elections which follows a mind numbing and predictable 'pavement politics formula, which is almost a parody of itself: a dodgy bat chart claiming the Lib Dems are breathing down the necks of the Tories plus some photos of local Lib Dem candidates posing various parts of the town to convince us they have been campaigning on every conceivable issue and project in the community backed up by some scepticism-inspiring claims to have personally brought about every minor bit of tree planting and road resurfacing in the locality that has gone on in the last six months.

The local Tories deliver an almost identical leaflet the next day which is in colour and ever so slightly more convincing as they do actually run the council. Indeed, sensationally, I am canvassed by the local Tories the next day when putting out the recycling , having mistaken their balding clipboard-in-hand activist for a gas meter reader and not ducked into the house and returned to my exam marking quickly enough. I tell him I never vote Conservative. "That's fine" he says amiably and ticks me off his list.

Ill again... with Euro election fever

It's a sure sign of middle age, but I'll admit it. I am interested in the upcoming elections, to the European Parliament. And not just in the UK or the Czech Republic, but pretty much everywhere. I guess it must have been that bump on the head (the doctor did ask me if I had been behaving out of character) or perhaps it's just the broad comparative panorama of of the EU 27. Over the last two days, when not marking essays or reading PhD drafts, I've been glued to the Predict EU site compiiled by Simon Hix and colleague at LSE, which runs polling data from the 27 member states through a predictive statistical model. The overall picture, as ever, is not much change. Shifts to the left in one country tending to be cancelled out by shifts to the right in another. Green and the Communist/Green Left, however, seem set to do badly: the UK Greens, for example, are predicted to lose both of their seats, although the Czech Greens (bearing up surprisingly well in the polls despite internicine internal party warfare) are predicted to gain one.

Britain's far-right BNP is also predicted to gain one MEP, which would be its first elected representative above sub-national level. The Euro-election prospects of the BNP - surely the most over-reported minor party in Britain - are analysed in detail by an excellent Radio 4 documentary, which comes to broadly similar conclusions.


I also discovered the EUProfiler website, which like a range of similar sites quizzes you about your views on the issues and plots your position in two dimension political space. The difference here is that you can plot yourself in relation to parties from one or all EU states to guide your choice for the upcoming EU elections. I emerge as a social liberal or social democrat with mildly pro-EU leanings. In UK terms, the site tells me, this means I should vote for the UK's Liberal Democrats, advice I will ignore, and in Czech terms that I am more or less in the liberal centre of Czech politics, although. I ran the other EU 25 states to see if there is a party in some other countries that reflects my views exactly. The Dutch and Swedish social democrats come close, but, as it turns, out there's only party for me: Estonia's Greens. Vale Euroopale roheline tee!

I don't know what that means, but if I did, I'm sure I'd believe it.

British politics: Leaked membership lists highlights surban far-right

I am (briefly) back in the UK. The papers are full stories about the far-right British National Party, prompted by the leaking and posting online of a list of the party's 12,000 members. There's a lot a hand wringing about data protection and privacy, although I kind of wonder whether there is actually an argument for Estonian style total transparency about party membership. There they are all legally online.

Although the original site has been taken down, I found the list easily via Wikileaks and looked through to see if anyone I knew was listed (no) and how many BNP members there were in our town (ten - of whom five seemed to using an accomodation address). More interesting politically is the geographical mapping of the party's membership, which show a large concentration of members not only in London and major conurbations in the North and Midlands, but also in more prosperous and monoethnic suburban and retirement towns along the South Coast.

Path of at least some resistance

A few months ago I discovered that the leafy local footpath to our town centre was due to be closed because it crosses the grounds of a local secondary school and the headmaster reckoned the path was a source of crime and disorder. Quite a few others reckoned it was some of his students, who were the main source of disorder. But backed by our local county councillor, who is also a governor of the school, it was all quickly signed and sealed behind-closed-doors 'consultation' helped by a tailor made section of the Highways Act allowing local rights of way to be closed in the interests of preventing crime and disorder. There is with a special provision for public footpaths passing near schools to get the chop. A very New Labour mix of social authoritarianism and simple kneejerk approach to prioritizing education.

Venting my frustration, I wrote a Disgusted-of-Mid-Sussex letter to the local newspaper and when they printed it (local newspapers will print anything) and forgot about it. Some time latter got a call from the local representative of the Ramblers' Association, who lives in a neighbouring town. At about 600 metres, the path 's not exactly a hiking route, but the Council in their wisdom - while not telling the locals about on, they did inform the RA as a standard bit of consultation. The key thing he tells me is keep a eye on the Official Notices section hidden away at the back of the local paper and send off a letter of objection in time when the Extinguishment Order is officially published. It finally appears in August as he anticipates- so as a few people as possible will see it - and I duly send off my letter. The RA man, out councillor on the District Council and 'other interested local organizations' also meet and distribute a Friends of Footpath leaflet to our and nearby streets. They will, he tells me, be a lot of objections and hopefully forcing the County Council to hold a local public enquiry. They could have spared themselves the expense, if they had

The RA man tells me that as well as the headmaster, Conservative councillors and the Director of Children's Services are pushing to close the footpath. It is a kind of test case. The first time in the county that a footpath would have been closed under the crime and disorder clause. The Tories, he tells me are ideologically opposed to footpaths, crossing any kind of private property and instinctively like closing them. I am capable of believing pretty much anything bad about the Tories, but , in fact, I discover both the anti-footpath county councillor and the pro-footpath district councillor are actually Liberal Democrats.

All this rather reinforces my view that local politics is very much a closed game played by councillors, officials and a small cadre of worthy older people who are 'active in the community'. Fortunately, however, there are some differences within this small pond of political participation, so it will be a while before the somewhat misnamed local Community College gets to fence itself off from the local community.