Hillhead: A legendary by-election

Image by Kake Pugh, By-NC-SASadly it was legendary for all the wrong reasons, for observers and psephologists the most interesting thing was that it had a 13% turnout. The campaign itself all rather failed to set the heather alight, even before weather that would have done for a reasonable lump of thermite. For the electorate (and certainly for the activists) the most remarkable thing was probably the rain that never ended.

This had once, in the dim and distant pre-STV days, been a Tory ward and with the inclusion of places such as Dowanhill in the enlarged ward and the on-going Lib Dem Apocalypse they were likely to benefit, particularly given the rather unconservative candidate they ran in the pro-drug-reform Ewan “Cavonia” Hoyle – a perfectly sensible policy but perhaps a rather brave decision here, minister. The Greens did well, as you’d expect in their strongest ward in the city, Stewart Leckie comfortably consolidating the 2nd that the well respected Martha Wardrop achieved in 2007. The SNP had an effective ground campaign and a solid candidate in Ken Andrew, Labour ran them close with the redoubtable Martin McElroy but didn’t quite manage to overhaul the 2007 1st the SNP had in a single seat election.

Afterwards, the SNP rather predictably claimed holding onto 1st in a ward they’d won was a sign of Glasgow being “anxious for change” and equally predictably Labour pointed out that a 13% turnout was no basis on which to do much analysis and it was very wet after all. I think it’s fairly safe to assume that, had the votes fallen the other way, similar claims of “stopping the SNP bulldozer” and turnout would still have been made with the roles reversed. All so very yawnsome.

Probably the most interesting things happened in the “other” category – there was a continuity-BNP candidate, Charlie Ballie, running under the Brittanica banner who was frequently out and about around Byres Road with his “security” and Neil Craig running for UKIP, who had previously stood as the Independent “9% grow party” and blogs here.

And so, to the count itself, and more importantly the transfer pattern which is interesting if you’re me and if it’s not I’d probably go find something else to read.

Still here? Then let the psephological minutiae begin!

Round 1: Britannica  got 11 votes,  of which 2 didn’t transfer and of the remaining 9 2 went to the Tories, 3 went to the Lib Dems and the SNP, Greens, UKIP and Labour got 1 each. Which struck me as odd.

The next couple of rounds were predictable,  redistributing the UKIP votes to no-one or the Tories, half the Lib Dems vote went to the Greens or didn’t transfer, most of the Tory vote didn’t transfer what did split SNP/Green/Labour in that order and then we’re down to splitting up the Green vote.

That went more or less evenly 3 ways – 208 didn’t transfer, 212 went to the SNP and 219 went to Labour, which I thought was interesting but not really sure what to draw from it. It’d be interesting (would it, Aidan? Would it really?) to see if the Green votes that didn’t transfer were the Lib Dem / Tory transfers in.

Cash for Campaigning

For a woman who’s yet to be convinced by the merits of independence, I am oddly delighted Chris and Colin Weir have chosen to donate £1 million of their tremendous £161 million EuroMillions win to the SNP, to swell the coffers of the independence campaign together with the incredibly generous bequest of £918,000 left by Edwin Morgan.

While it does make me scrabble around in my mind for who would be on the rather blank list of prospects who might be willing to make a similar donation to the unionist campaign, I still feel delight. Why? Simply, I’m a great fan of philanthropy. It pleases me to see money donated by ordinary people (albeit made extraordinary by luck) being spent for a cause instead of just sitting gathering interest in a bank account.

This week should see the final report published by the Committee on Standards in Public Life into party political finance. This review – like all of the others into political funding before it – has been extensively leaked and already rubbished by the three main Westminster parties.

Nonetheless, it is rumoured to put forward a case for extra state funding – a provision already dismissed by Nick Clegg as untenable during a period of austerity – and proposes to cap individual donations at £10,000, panicking Tory City grandees and Labour trade union bigwigs alike.

I would hate to see individual donations capped at one-hundredth of what Mr and Mrs Weir have chosen to give, for any party. I would equally hate to see political parties gain more funding from the state and taxpayers. This is because I believe parties and the causes they stand for should stand or fall based on what support from voters, and therefore donors, they can garner.

Political parties are certainly not charities. But in a way similar to charities, if they can’t fundraise to keep themselves afloat and keep fighting for their cause, then they deserve to go under. After all, just like a charity, each political party was founded to put right a supposed wrong.

If you’ve got a cause and you’ve got someone – an individual, a community, a company, a trade union – who wants to donate to further that cause, then most times you should be able to take that money.

There should of course still be conditions and there should certainly be more transparency – some being individual donors should not be able to give anonymously or through third-parties, and they must be registered to vote, or, for companies, registered to pay tax in the UK.  Political parties, overseen by the independent Electoral Commission, should conduct fit and proper person tests and not take donations if they come from a source that could damage the party’s reputation or unduly influence its work – raising eyebrows over whether Ecclestone and Souter’s gifts should’ve been accepted by their respective beneficiaries, and inhibiting funding by loans and speculation.  And in the same way charities take on state contracts, there’s still scope for some short money funding to ensure effective opposition, in recognition of its importance to democracy.

Does it give too much power over our democracy to the wealthy? Only if you aren’t willing to embrace either new forms of fundraising like crowdsourcing, as Obama has done so successfully, or indeed accept the unions and the political levy donations of the millions of working people they encompass, purposefully designed to take on the rich behemoths of society through the trade unions’ political wing of the Labour Party. (Or at least that’s the theory.)

But building on the crowdsouring idea a little more: right now all political parties spend all their time talking to target voters, and ignoring the great masses of the unaligned or the uninterested. If they had to talk to more people, and to make a case not just to get them to vote, but to get them to give as well, just think how much better political discourse in every constituency would have to be.

But whether it’s a jumble sale or a gala dinner, political parties should be responsible for raising their own money from their supporters. It should be more open, but it shouldn’t be inhibited by caps on spending, and the majority of it certainly shouldn’t be funded by the state. After all, if you care enough about a cause, or are persuaded to care about it, you’ve got to be able to give it what you want, be it time, action or cash.

A storm in a tea shop

The Fortnum 145, for those not in the know, is not a cheap version of the Fortune 500 but a group of people who were arrested for a sit-in protest at Fortnum & Mason, a posh shop which, the protesters allege, has not paid its fair share of tax charges recently.

By most accounts, this 12 squared plus 1 of socialist die-hards conducted themselves with respect for the owners and even elicited compliments from the police. Indeed, given its politeness and tweeness, it was the Fortnum & Mason of protests in more ways than one.

The Fortnum 145 claim boldly on their webpage that ‘Demonstrating is not a crime’. Well, it is at best hazy as to whether legal peaceful protest extends to disrupting the trade of a private entity.

The rights or wrongs of the protesters’ arguments are neither here nor there, much as it was with Dale Farm and much as it may well prove to be with the Occupy protests at St Paul’s Cathedral and elsewhere. I might have disagreed with sections of the Gaddafi family ordering the killing of their own people to cling onto power but that doesn’t mean I can get away with heading round to Highgate and smashing up their dynastic London home.

That may be a drastic example to prove my point but the 145 were charged with aggravated trespass which is:

if he trespasses on another’s land and carries out any act with the intention of disrupting a lawful activity being carried out on or adjacent to that land.

It sounds like an open and shut case to me I’m afraid and so one has to wonder about the overall wisdom of the venture when FOI requests and pressure on MPs and Ministers may bear more fruitful rewards, legally so into the bargain.

It all reminds me of the old Mark Thomas ruse when he realised he could make some poor PC’s life hell and highlight a silly law (in a silly way) by arranging hundreds of individuals to hold hundreds of separate protests at the same place on the same day. Mark was so pleased with himself, and many of Mark’s devotees think it’s genius, but what point was being made and what was achieved? It all sounds like a silly waste of time to me.

And that’s the problem these days, there’s relatively little to fight for so we inflate our heads with a sense of self-righteousness over the smallest of things and believe we are beyond reproach, whether it’s illegally naming a footballer, making a right pigsty of London’s main tourist attraction or gathering a full 144 of your mates and distracting old ladies from buying new stocks of lovely tea.

It’s not on really. Many readers here may not want to be the full British shilling but I think they’d largely agree that rules are rules and we have a perfectly open and decent democratic process to air, share and blare your views for all to see and vote on.

The Fortnum 145 should have known they were taking a risk when they took their protest onto private property and should realise that there are no shortcuts in a true democracy, whatever an individual believes. If you believe in something then Parliament through the political process is the place to take it. That might sound considerably more dull than camping out on a shop floor, occupying a stock exchange (a patch of gravel round the corner from it at least) or winding up ‘the man’ but it’s the only realistic path to change and it comes with the added bonus of keeping one out of prison. Mostly.

Community values

The word “community” is widely misused. Nowadays it is taken to mean “any group of people who have a common interest”, from a professional interest in health and safety to a sexual preference to a love of model railways. Local geographical areas are regularly assumed to be communities by definition, even though modern urban social systems tend to work very differently. A friend once described city life as overlapping anarchist villages – you choose your community, and they rarely live next door. I’ve done village life too, and one powerful community value appeared to be a dislike of city folk. So that worked well for me.

But, and I hope you’ll forgive an unusually personal post, the strongest community I know is meeting this weekend. When I was at university in St Andrews a friend there was doing a year abroad from Trinity, a small New England liberal arts college (actually a pretty conservative university, but there we go).

She told me about her support network at home: Cleo Literary Society. It’s not exactly what the name suggests. Until recent memory it was the AX chapter of the national American fraternity network called DKE (pronounced Deke – both Presidents Bush were Deke brothers, incidentally). In the late 1960s it went all anti-Vietnam and very counterculture, and the men decided women should be allowed to join as equal members, including sending a female rep to a national gathering. That’s the kind of thing that tends to mean you have to leave national fraternity networks.

So I went over and joined, a decision which has changed my life and one which rubs up hard against my desire to live a low carbon lifestyle. I was studying anthropology at the time, and when I joined we’d just looked at initiation ceremonies. It’s the only formal ceremony I’ve ever been an active part of (on both sides), and despite a good working knowledge of the effect of liminal periods, it had the bonding effects the ethnographers had described, and I still count many many Cleo siblings as amongst my dearest friends (thank goodness for the internet). It also wasn’t an easy process to go through. As a neophyte you spend more than 72 hours in the hands of the active members, going through a mentally and physically demanding experience, albeit one which doesn’t include any forced intoxication or any hint of the humiliation beloved of many actual fraternities and sororities. I could tell you more, but I would have to kill you, of course.

I spent a day back at the house in September meeting the current crop of kids, and was made to feel instantly more than welcome. And I wasn’t the only “alum” there, or even the oldest – there were four of us, just stopping in for meeting and to say hello. At one initiation I was at back in the 1990s, the oldest member present graduated in 1951, and he told epic tales involving motorbikes and bb guns. The other houses don’t have this effect, typically – people come back a year or two after they graduate, then it all fades away.

Cleo’s a support network, it’s a social structure, it’s a physical space for creative use, and it’s the truest community I know, albeit one with pretty fluid and loose values. The house sifts each year’s intake of new students ruthlessly for the creative, for the idiosyncratic, and ironically for the non-joiners. There are an awful lot of negatives around traditional community – the Royston Vasey effect – but we’ve also lost a lot with the transition to modernity. I’m not advocating initiations for all, of course, and I know others find a similar unity in a platoon or a band or a place of worship, or even in their village, but if it hadn’t been for Cleo I’d never have had it, nor would I have really known what I was missing.

From everyone who wants to be at initiation this weekend and can’t be, to all those that are: we love you.

In defence of technocracy

There has been a lot of handwringing around the democratic deficit implicit in a ‘technocratic’ Government running a country with a PM at the helm that has not been elected into place. Setting aside what a technocrat actually is (I think they just like the word because it sounds cold and statist) and also setting aside the democratically sound sequence of events where politicians allowed these people to take over because they, you know, know what they’re doing, I can’t help but think that it is precisely technocrats at the helm that is required to solve the Euro crisis.

Let’s consider what we can expect otherwise with the politicians at the helm:

The David Cameron solution – the big bazooka approach of allowing the European Central Bank to print as many Euros as we need to bail out Italy, Spain, Greece and, heck, why not France too while we’re at it. Yes, yields would go down, yes the stock market would go up, but this is not real money that is being produced here, we’d be fighting debt with debt and I bet that wouldn’t work. It is more than a little bit convenient that this proposed solution effectively firewalls the United Kingdom from the fallout.

The Angela Merkel solution – With German patience with European neighbours wearing wafer thin, the idea of a Berlin bailout is all but dead. The problem child countries in the Eurozone need to feel pain, and need to be seen to be feeling pain, for Chancellor Merkel being seen to have done her job properly. I don’t know what the German word for schadenfreude is, but I bet the Germans are feeling it when they see those yields hit 7%. Insolvency and falling out of the Euro seems to be the general direction here.

The Nicolas Sarkozy solution – A financial transactions tax basically, a Robin Hood tax that takes from London and goes straight through the EU and out the other side to France via the Common Agricultural Policy rebates. Merci beaucoup my British chums, one might say, but there is no chance that Cameron will accept this, let alone his Eurosceptic backbenchers.

The Greek/Italian solution – Get the technocrats banking experts to find the solution that is a mix of the above and politically unpleasant for all.

Banking’s a tough old beast. The issue at hand here is basically the mother of all intercompany reconciliations that needs to be lanced and wound down to zero across a continent (and no doubt beyond). As someone who has had to audit and complete numerous relatively straightforward but nonetheless hideously ghastly intercompany recs in my time, I can be sure that we have a 99.9%/0.01% situation at play here. (that is, despite the millions of column inches, only the 0.01% know what they’re talking about. And you can probably add a few zeroes after that decimal point).

We need troubleshooters who can look beyond the next budget, who can look beyond the elections that are around the corner and can objectively take the difficult decisions while all about them people are losing their heads.

Those people are boring, those people wear brown suits and black shoes, those people can see eight, nine steps ahead, those people gobble Excel spreadsheets for breakfast, those people are honest brokers and cut through the crap.

For want of a better word, those people are technocrats and their time is now.