AV 6: AV again, a Personal Explanation

Sigh.

I had planned to do just one more AV post, but a friendly Troll has claimed that I haven't really tendered any arguments as to why AV is better than FPTP, or responded to any points on why it is flawed. I guess this means he hasn't been reading these posts, but still, in small words, here goes.

Firstly, in emulation of one of my friends, but at greater length, why have I become so convinced on the need for voting reform here?

 

 

March 2005

Back on my old blog I wrote in March 2005:

'... in this de facto two-party system, lots of people perceive votes for any party other than Labour and the Tories to be squandered.

It always strikes me as funny that in the supposed interests of "electoral reform", Labour have tinkered with the House of Lords. Surely a more honest interest in reform would involve changing the electoral system so that the composition of the Commons more accurately reflected the will of the people.

 

I mean seriously, think about it. In 2001, Labour got 40.7% of the popular vote, the Tories managed 31.7%, the Lid Dems earned 18.3%, and the rest garnered 9.3%. You might expect then that the Commons should break down, more or less, along the general lines of: Labour 268 seats, the Tories 209, the Lib Dems 120, and the others 61.

 

But no, despite only having 40.7% of the popular vote, thanks to the 'First Past the Post' system, Labour took 412 out 659 seats. That's 62.5%, a huge majority. In other words, the country is run according to the wishes of two-fifths of the country's voters. And 2001 was no fluke, in that regard. As a rule, all you need is around 40% of the vote and the right geographic spread to be guaranteed to rule the country despite three-fifths of the population having voted against you. Take a look at the previous few elections -

• 1997 - Labour get 63.6% majority, with just 43.2% of the vote
• 1992 - Tories get 51.6% mahority, with just 41.9% of the vote
• 1987 - Tories get 57.9% majority, with just 42.2% of the vote
• 1983 - Tories get 61.1% majority, with just 42.4% of the vote
• 1979 - Tories get 53.4% majority, with just 43.9% of the vote
• 1974 - Labour get 50.2% majority, with just 39.2% of the vote

Um, and earlier in 1974 Labour managed a minority government with 47.4% of seats, slightly more than the Tories, despite having wangled, at 37.1% of the vote, a smaller share of the vote than the Tories.

 

I'm not going to get into issues of turn-out, since with only 59.4% of eligible votes having cast their votes last time, you could argue that Labour are in government with the support of only 24% of the population. That argument has no ending, and if people don't show up when decisions are being made then they have to live with the consequences.

 

On the other hand, maybe if the U.K. adopted some kind of a Proportional Representation system, people might be more willing to vote. After all, there might be more of an incentive to vote if they thought their votes actually meant something.'

The whole thing bothered me. But what happened a couple of months later bothered me more.

May 2005

I voted Labour in the general election that year -- or rather, I voted for Gerald Kaufman, who I like, and who was most definitely no Blairite. He won comfortably in Manchester Gorton, getting 53.2% of the meagre vote there. However, as I blogged in the immediate aftermath of the election, I wasn't happy with the national picture.

'Well, it seems as though the election's gone according to predictions, with Labour's 35.2 per cent getting them 365 seats, the Tories' 32.3 per cent earning them 197 seats, and the Lib Dems' 22 per cent only fetching them a mere 62 seats. It's the best result they've had since the 1920s, but still, it's a bit naff really.

 

But then, that's what happens when you've single-seat constuencies and a first-past-the-post system. Labour's 35.2 per cent of the vote somehow translates into almost 57 per cent of parliamentary seats, the Tories' 32.3 per cent manifested itself as just over 30 per cent of seats, while the Lib Dems' healthy 22 per cent converted into less than 10 per cent of seats in the Commons. It's democracy, folks, Jim, But not as we know it.

 

Of course, I've talked about this before. I find it funny, looking at these figures, to think of all those pundits claiming that the British people have spoken to the effect that what they wanted was Labour to stay in power, but with a greatly reduced majority. Er, really? It does seem to me that only slightly more than a third of them actually wanted a Labour government enough to vote for Labour. After all, Blair has somehow manage to get a far healthier majority than John Major did in 1992, albeit with a much smaller share of the vote.'

I grimly decided that the only way I could vote in conscience after this was in favour of the Liberal Democrats. It wasn't that I was a Lib Dem: it was simply that I believe they were the only party that would deliver voting reform. I didn't care in the least about the purity of their motives. I just didn't want my team to win because the rules of the game were rigged in their favour.

Electoral Reform in Britain

One of the things that fascinated me was how new the current British system, where each voter has only one vote and is linked to just one MP, really only dates back to 1948. Sure, the guts of the system had been in place since 1884, but even so, plural voting -- where people linked with universities or owning property could vote in more than one constituency -- was only abolished in 1948, and not once since then had any government been elected with the support of a majority of voters. Indeed, there'd been a few weird results, like 1951 when more people voted Labour than voted Conservative and yet the Conservatives won more seats, or February 1974 when more people voted Conservative than voted Labour yet Labour won more seats, or 1983 when Labour and the Liberals got 53% of the vote and little more than 35% of the seats... It really looked as though 2005 was no anomaly.

Indeed, it seemed you had to go back to 1931 to see an occasion when any single party had received a majority of the votes cast. The Conservatives that year received 55% of the votes and were thus awarded a whopping 76.4% of the seats.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they took advantage of the situation and killed a bill that had been working its way through Parliament. In February 1931, the Commons had voted by 295 to 230 to replace the FPTP voting system with a system of transferable preferential voting, called Alternate Voting, or AV. A Royal Commission carried out a couple of decades earlier had recognised that FPTP was not fit for purpose in a system where there was more than two political parties, and had recommended that AV be introduced instead. Of course, these things take time, but eventually the 1931 bill had got bogged down in the Lords, but had looked set to become law when the government fell. Of course, knowing it might harm them, and determined to maintain their position in charge of Britain, the Conservatives knocked that bill on the head.

This was, of course, the context of Churchill's oft-quoted line about AV being a system determined by

"the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates".

This was back in the inter-war period when he was in favour of machine-gunning striking workers, gassing rebellious Arabs, and admiring Hitler's patriotic achievements. Not the greatest phase in his life, the inter-war period. For all that, though, back when the Royal Commission was doing its work, Churchill had openly recognised the failings of FPTP, saying,

"the present system has clearly broken down. The results produced are not fair to any party, nor to any section of the community . . . All they secure is fluke representation, freak representation, capricious representation."

Perhaps the most telling point was that he recognised that the problem was that the system as it stood was not fair to any section of the community. That was the issue. Parties have no standing in the British constitution, but the British people do. We shouldn't care in the least about what's fair for Labour, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, the Greens, or whoever. But we should care about what's fair for British people, because they all have to live with the consequences of whatever their elected representatives decide.

Once in government in 1997, Labour commissioned the Jenkins Report into electoral reform, which recognised -- as had the Plant Report of a decade or so earlier and as had the Royal Commission of 1910 -- just how unrepresentative the current system was. Whereas the Royal Commission and the Plant Report had both recommended the relatively minor change to an AV system, Jenkins advocated a change to AV+, which would have entailed most MPs being elected by AV, with some -- perhaps a hundred or so -- being elected from a single national constituency on a proportional basis. The Liberal fantasy of a fully proportional system was dismissed as impractical if the constituency link between citizens and representatives was to be maintained.

A Technical Problem

Democracy is a lot of things, but one of them is, at least in theory, a political system where the people have power. Not a few people, not the best people, not the worst people, not the richest people, not the cleverest people, and not one person. The people.

Our polities being as large as they are, it's just not practical for us to legislate directly, so our democracy is an indirect one, of a sort that might be more accurately termed a representative oligarchy. So be it. The challenge for us is how best to choose our representatives. There's no right system, and no wrong one, but that doesn't mean that some might be better or worse than others.

General elections allow us to choose our representative assemblies, and it is, I think, reasonable to assume that these assemblies be as representative as possible. In this respect, the current British system is spectacularly unsuccessful, as it regularly allows minorities to rule the majority.

Yes, I realise that British system doesn't work around a single national constituency, instead being based on hundreds of constituencies, to such an extent that a general election is really just lots of simultaneous local elections. It works that way in Ireland too, so that by this stage I've voted eleven times in Parliamentary elections, using four different systems to send representatives to Dublin, London, and Brussels-Strasbourg.

So the British system allows minorities to rule as though they have a popular mandate, and to do so despite sometimes having nothing of the sort. Indeed, the British system is such that most people in Britain vote for a candidate who loses. This wasn't the way back in the 1950s, when pretty much everybody voted Conservative or Labour, and it wasn't the way back in the 1880s, when Ireland aside pretty much everybody voted Conservative or Liberal.

  

But it's the way things have been for the last thirty years, just as it was between 1918 and 1931. More people vote for candidates who lose than for candidates who win. Most people don't vote for the people who represent them.

This, I would think all fair-minded people should agree, is not a good situation. Elections aren't about winners and losers: they're about choosing parliaments, those parliaments being representative of the nation. There should only be one winner in a general election, that being the people as a whole, and the people only win if their voice is accurately represented.

As things stand, huge numbers of British voters go unheard. Lots more don't even bother to vote, and given the way things are, I don't blame them. The game is rigged; why should they play?

 

May 2010

Obviously, I voted Lib Dem in the last election. Not because I am a Lib Dem, despite my housemate's teasing, but just because I believed they were the only party really willing to reform the system. I was convinced the system was utterly bankrupt. I'd voted in elections under four different systems -- FPTP, PR-STV, AV, and PR-D'Hondt -- and never once felt as disempowered as under First Past The Post. In 2005 there wasn't much point in voting, as I was rightly confident the Labour candidate I supported would be elected, and in 2010 there wasn't much point in voting as I was rightly confident the Conservative candidate I most definitely didn't support would be elected; given that in both occasions the incumbents had had majorities of more than 11,000 votes in the previous election, you can probably grasp my thinking.

The 2010 election led to the kind of result one would expect: a parliament in which no one party had a majority, which was at least reflective of the popular will, but the Conservatives and Labour getting a rather higher share of the Parliamentary seats than they had received of the national vote, and the Liberals, despite getting their highest share of the vote in decades, actually losing seats. The system, of course, didn't work, and so the haggling began.

The Lib Dems' price for coalition with either of the bigger parties was obviously going to be voting reform, and they wanted PR. I think we can confidently assume they said this in whatever negotiations they engaged in. Labour, which was hardly in a position to lead a rainbow coalition government anyway, offered a referendum on replacing FPTP with AV. As this was already in Labour's manifesto, and didn't reflect any movement on the part of Labour, this was dismissed by the Lib Dems as a miserable little compromise; only movement to the halfway house of AV+ would have been a real compromise. The Conservatives offered a similar referendum to the Lib Dems, and recognising this as an apparently genuine compromise, a movement from their previous position of FPTP, the Lib Dems accepted this.

I was happy enough with that myself at the time. The Conservatives would vote for the Referendum in Parliament, but when the referendum came around they'd be free to campaign on an individual basis against any change. Such, at least, was the impression we were given. There was no suggestion that the Conservative party would campaign, as a party, against the very referendum it had agreed to legislate for.

Of course, this was before the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Foreign Secretary all publicly condemned the proposals, of course. This was before the Lib Dem leader's comment on Labour's negotiating stance was publicly misconstrued as being his opinion of AV. This was before local branch after local branch of the Conservative Party across the land began campaigning against change. This was before the Conservative Party's homepage would feature in pride of place huge banners saying that AV was un-British and should be rejected. This was before a host of Conservative Party donors, keen to keep their party in power, poured money into the NO2AV Campaign, to an extent where everyone with a brain in his or her head can see that it is no more than a Conservative front, bolstered by a few old Blairites and the BNP.

An Imperfect Solution?

I don't think AV is perfect. I'd like to see a PR-STV system here, but I think Jenkins was right; it'd probably be unwieldy. Given that, then, I'd most like to see AV+ introduced, but as that may be a while off, I'd be happy with AV. It'd be a huge improvement.

It might not change the overall results. It might not make MPs work harder. I might not get rid of safe seats. It might not destroy the traditional binary dominance of the Tories and Labour. But it might do these things.

It'd do more than that, though.

It would force candidates to reach out to gain the support of the majority of the people they'd represent. As things stand, there are constituencies where MPs are elected with the support of fewer than a third of voters. This is hardly surprising when there are constituencies with four credible candidates. Frankly, a quarter of the vote would do the trick. What would happen if there were more than that? If there were ten credible candidates, it'd be easy to imagine a candidate elected with a tenth of the vote. FPTP allows that to happen. AV doesn't. In AV a candidate isn't deemed elected unless he or she has the support of half or more voters in the final decisive count.

(It's basically like a Conservative leadership election in that regard: there are several counts with everybody's vote being counted each time, the weakest candidates are elected in sequence so that their supporters are given an opportunity of shifting their support to another candidate, and the candidates who gets the most first-preference votes isn't necessarily the winner, as noted here. And yet they argue it's too complex to understand. I wonder why.)

In short, it'd mean that most people would have voted for winning candidates than for losing ones. This'd be a huge improvement. And yes, I know that plenty of candidates would have depended on people's second choices and maybe even some third choices to get elected, but do you really think that's any different to now? After all, plenty of people nowadays would like to vote for a candidate that they know doesn't have a hope, and, rather than cast a Quixotic vote, instead vote for their second-choice candidate. Or their third-choice one. Very few people, after all, treat political parties like football teams, to be cheered on at all times, with all other parties being equally scorned. Most people recognise a spectrum of political options.

AV would allow people to vote honestly and openly, without feeling obliged to second-guess the outcome and instead to vote for somebody they don't support most. It would allow Eurosceptic Conservatives to express a primary preference for UKIP candidates in the confidence that their vote would return, unwasted, into the Tory fold. It would allow Scottish Conservatives to have a meaningful say in Scottish elections, so that they could express their Conservativism and then do whatever was necessary to stop the candidate or party they most deeply opposed. It would allow Liberal voters to vote Lib Dem without fearing they'd be splitting the progressive vote and letting a reactionary candidate in. It would allow all manner of people to express a preference for the Greens, to show the bigger parties that environmental issues need to be accounted for.

With voting being more meaningful than under the charade FPTP has become, it might encourage people to vote who have basically given up on the system as it stands.

Finally, the introduction of AV could lead to a decommissioning of mindsets, so that people realise that voting systems aren't sancrosancy, and can be adjusted and fine-tuned, depending on what end we have in mind. If people liked it, they could keep it. If they liked it and felt it could be improved, they could introduce AV+ or PR-STV. If people didn't like it, they could always go back to FPTP. This isn't a bed we make and have to lie in. This is a bed we can make as often as we like.

Five Key Reasons

There you go, so. Five reasons, in the end, in declining order of importance:

1. AV would ensure elected representatives represent most of the people they represent.
2. AV would allow people to vote honestly and transparently, without wasting their votes.
3. AV might boost voting turnout, thereby giving new life to a moribund system.
4. AV might lead to fresh thinking in how people approach politics.
5. AV might perhaps lead MPs to work harder, get rid of safe seats, and break the traditional duopoly of power.

It's a simple system, really, one that I learned in one English class in school when I was fifteen. Most Irish elections are held under a PR-STV system, but whenever there's just one position at stake -- a single parliamentary seat, say, or the national Presidency -- then we use AV. It's very simple. Our second preferences are meaningful, and our third ones are too, and if we're really bloody-minded about things, we know how to use our votes to utterly gut parties we dislike a lot. We did it to Fianna Fail a couple of months ago. If you wanted, in Britain, you could keep the BNP down for as long as you wanted. No wonder they're opposed to AV -- they're basically the definition of transfer-repellant.

After I've voted, I shall grumble about how the referendum's almost certainly been vitiated by the conduct of the No campaigners. But that's for tomorrow.

 

For now, if you still think it all sounds complicated, let Dan Snow explain it:

AV 5: AV - An Almost Penultimate Rant, wondering about one of the biggest lies in the No Campaign

Some weeks back, Bec told me that if I went beyond ten posts on the AV Referendum we'd have to have words. By that point, of course, I'd written four notes on the subject, more if you go back further.

I'm afraid I've not posted since, instead being busy and occasionally watching in dismay as the whole referendum process was being corrupted by the No2AV campaign. I really think the outcome has almost certainly been vitiated at this point, and that the whole idea of referendums in this country has been hugely discredited by the conduct of the No2AV campaign.

I started to write a note once, about a recent study for a Tory Think Tank, trumpeted on Conservative Home*, claiming that the version of AV being proposed here is so strange and obtuse it's only ever used in local elections in New South Wales and Queensland. The study carried on to reach conclusions based on the last two elections there, as though that was a valid sample, oblivious to the fact that these aren't the only places in the world where Optional Preference Voting is used.

A Mysterious Silence

Yes, it's used in Ireland. We use it in Presidential elections and in parliamentary elections where there's only one seat at stake in a constituency:

Why on earth do you think the No2AV campaign is so keen to suppress the fact that AV is used in the only country in the world which you don't have to cross a sea to get to from the UK? Why do you think the No2AV people hush up the fact that AV is used in the only country you can walk to from the UK? Why do you think that the No2AV people hide the fact that AV is used in the country in which almost a million of Britain's current residents were born, a country which -- Britain aside -- was the birthplace of more residents of Britain than any other, every single one of whom is eligible to be on the British electoral register and to vote in this referendum?

• Do you think it's because the No2AV campaigners are ignorant and don't realise this? It's possible, I suppose. Certainly, given how George Osborne was claiming just four years ago that the British economy should be run on Irish lines, it does seem that the Tory high command aren't very clued in on political and economic realities outside their front doors...
• Or do you think it's because they're stupid and don't understand what transferable voting actually is? Certainly, I know someone who's been ardently opposed to AV ever since he was told to be -- you can watch him in the background of the No2AV mob here -- but who had to ask me the other week what AV had to do with transferable voting...
• Or do you think it might just be because they know full well that if British people realised that Irish people are very familiar with transferable voting, not least the version of it technically called Optional Preference Voting but known here as Alternative Voting, then they'd be able to seek the opinions of the many people here who actually know how the system works in practice, rather than relying on Tory fantasies of 'can you imagine what would happen?'

 We don't need to imagine. We can talk to people who are used to this in reality, and we can look at the facts of election campaigns -- I happen to think the Irish 1997 Presidential Election Campaign would be a pretty close template for how a typical British constituency vote would go under an AV system. I wish I'd written a post on that, but I fear that bird has flown. Still, you can look it up on Wikipedia. 

Another Irishman's View

Jason O'Mahony, a one-time unsuccessful Progressive Democrat -- that's economically centre-right, for British readers -- electoral candidate at home, wrote on this to good effect the other week, advising that British people should actually listen to people who've used transferable voting before deciding whether they approve of it or not.

Much more gifted as a pundit than he was successful as a politician, O'Mahony's been following the debate here in, frankly, complete disbelief. He's written at least five posts on the topic, all of which would definitely repay reading, for any of you who's not yet made up your mind on AV or for any of you who have but are even notionally open to the possibility that you might be wrong.

1. For my British readers: AV is the voting system for non-fanatics

2. Some Tories and Labour would honestly prefer each other in government to AV? Really?

3. Before you vote on AV, ask someone who has used it

4. AV: Tories and Eurosceptics are people too

5. For my British readers: AV lets you choose from the whole menu

The first of the posts, for instance, comments on how surreal he finds the debate here, drily observes the weakness of the argument that First Past the Post should be retained as it's the only way the Conservatives can thwart the will of the British people, notes how the No side seem to be shutting down their brain functions in this debate and convincing themselves that transferable voting is terribly complicated, and makes one very perceptive point about the nature of the debate.

'One thing that has struck me has been that one’s attitude to AV is shaped by one’s attitude to politics, and I don’t mean left wing or right wing.

...

There’s a common theme running through the anti-AV campaign, and it’s this: You are only allowed think about politics the way professional politicians thinkabout it. You should love one party unconditionally, and hate every other party vociferously.

Of course, that’s not how most people think. Most people have a tendency towards one party over others, but also don’t mind some other parties, have no opinion on others and really dislike one or two. UKIP voters feel differently about the Conservatives than they do about the Lib Dems. Even Conservative and Labour voters, the two traditional enemies, probably are more well-disposed, generally, towards each other than the BNP. It’s like going into a restuarant. If they don’t have your favourite dish, you make a second choice. You don’t storm out and go hungry. Yet that is how anti-AV people seem to think.

In Ireland we use AV in presidential and by-elections. We don’t need special voting machines, we don’t have mass panic trying to understand the ballot paper or voting or counting. Our parliament is elected under a different system that uses the exact same ballot paper, and people vote in the same way. Is there chaos and confusion? No.

There is, however, one difference between British and Irish politics, or at least it appears that way to me.

In Ireland, our politicians, elected under a preferential voting system, seem to be much more afraid of us, the voters, than British politicians are afraid of British voters. Personally, I think that’s a good thing. But I can understand why the professional politicians opposed to AV would think otherwise.'

You should read what he has to say. And then you should vote Yes, unless you like your country being ruled by a minority. To be fair, you might like that, of course. Because, you know, maybe you think that real democracy is government of the people, by some of the people, for a few of the people. And if so, you should vote to keep the current system, even though more than a hundred years have passed since a Royal Commission on Electoral Reform found that it was no longer fit for purpose and should be replaced with AV.

_________________________________

* This post if you're interested. You shouldn't be. The guy who did the 'research' should be sacked.

AV 4: AV yet again, Or Counting's Not Hard: A Simple Real-World Example

It seems pretty clear that there are lots of people out there who, even if they can grasp the mechanics of voting in AV, nonetheless have issues with how the counting system works.

AV Voting is pretty simple, of course: instead of the current British system where you put an X for the only person you want to represent you, and let's use the word 'want' loosely, leaving aside issues of second-guessing and tactical voting, in AV you put a '1' next to the candidate you'd most like to see represent you, and if you so wish, a '2' next to the one you'd next most like, and so on. It's the same process that says 'I'd like a ginger beer, please, but if that's not possible I'd like an orange juice.'

What of counting? People seem to think it's horribly complicated, even though the Irish and the Australians find it fairly straightforward. Well, let's take a simple real-world example of AV in action, and look at the 1990 Irish Presidential election*, as that's about as simple an instance of AV as you're ever likely to see. I was in school at the time, and we did a mock class election to learn how this worked. I've understood the system since.

There were three candidates. Fianna Fáil's Brian Lenihan -- the deputy prime minister -- and Fine Gael's Austin Currie both ran as centrist figures, put forward by the two traditional centrist parties. Mary Robinson, an independent, ran with the support of the Labour Party; anything but a bland centrist, Robinson was an eminent liberal, who had campaigned back in the seventies for the legal availability of artificial contraception and who worked as a legal advisor for the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform. She was about as polarising a character as one could get in Irish politics back in 1990.**

When the election was held, Lenihan received the highest share of first preferences, with 44.1%, Robinson coming second with 38.8%, and Currie coming third with 17%.

Now, the problem with this is that all three candidates received a minority of votes. Not one of them had received a direct and explicit mandate from the majority of voters.

Currie, as the recipient of the fewest votes, was eliminated so that his votes could be redistributed. It turned out that while a few Currie voters had expressed a secondary preference for Lenihan, and about half that number had taken the view that it was Currie or nothing, the vast majority of people who had voted for Currie had expressed a secondary preference for Robinson.

The end result of this was that Robinson won in the decisive final count, with 51.93% of the poll, Lenihan coming second with 46.44%.

Like I've said, this is basically how I learned how transferable voting works. We held a mock election in English class, of all places, with us being asked who we wanted to win, and with the class roughly breaking down along what would be the national line: three minorities, with Lenihan supporters being the largest minority and Currie ones being the smallest, and then almost all of the Currie voters switching their allegiance to Robinson.

Before you ask, yes, I was a schoolboy would-be Currie voter. And I was one of the ones who switched to Robinson. Was she my first choice? No. Was I happy with her? Yes.

If you're good, I'll talk about the 1997 Presidential election soon. That's a little bit more complex, with more candidates, and probably a better guide for how AV would be likely to play in a typical British parliamentary constituency. But still, the principle's the same.

___________________________________________________________

* Yes, Ireland. Because despite the lies that even the Guardian seems to be swallowing, AV isn't something that's only used in Australia, Fiji, and Papua-New Guinea.

** Because preferential voting systems don't inevitably lead to bland centrists getting elected, despite what you'll read in the Spectator, the Mail, the Telegraph, and on ConHome.

AV 3: AV yet again, or why archers should practice on live targets rather than straw men

Sigh.

There's a piece on Conservative Home which a friend of mine rather extravagantly pointed to yesterday, billing it as 'a comprehensive case against the introduction of AV by statistician Graeme Archer PhD'.

It's a  slightly different approach to the three standard ones for opponents of voting reform, those being, of course:

• I'm opposed to voting reform for a whole host of reasons all which are demonstrably false, such as lies about which countries use AV or lies about people having more than one vote under AV or lies about the cost of introducing AV.
• I'm opposed to voting reform because only first past the post produces strong candidates rather than bland ones, though it's best not to ask why my party doesn't use first past the post in its internal selection processes.
• I'm opposed to voting reform as the current system is good for my party and is therefore, by implication, good for the country.

The second point is, I think, the only anti-AV argument that has any real merit, being capable of being maintained sincerely and without cynicism, but I think it ignores real-world evidence and invites some very serious questions. This point rears its head in Archer's article, but his argument is somewhat different. Instead he goes for smoke and mirrors, wheeling out some of the more absurd and unusual claims people have sometimes made for voting reform, and then attacking them as though they're the main arguments.

Before loosing his volley against his artfully-arranged battalion of straw men, Archer starts his article with the ostensibly reasonable observation that:

'The likely anti-Conservative outcome of an AV election wouldn't matter, of course, if the AV algorithm were capable of delivering a fair outcome.'

Why does everyone automatically assume that an AV election would lead to an anti-Conservative result? It might, sure, but given that the Lib Dems, not long ago regarded as the most left-wing of the major parties, are in government the Conservatives, doesn't it rather look as though anything might be possible? Why assume everyone hates the Conservatives? Or course, if everybody does then they probably shouldn't be in government, because I don't think democracy is about allowing a minority to dictate to a majority. Still, I think the basic thesis is wrong.

  

Straw Man No. 1: AV will end safe seats

Archer says it won't, because around a third of seats can be called 'safe', and will continue to be so under any reasonable electoral algorithm. I presume he's talking about the fact that a third of MPs are elected with the support of most of their constituents, and that this is unlikely to change. I'm inclined to agree, albeit with the proviso that nobody knows for certain. After all, in such 'safe' seats, people who might be inclined to vote against incumbents may nowadays simply not vote, thinking there's no point in their voting: AV may actually encourage them to vote.

The key issue, which Archer should be aiming at if he was interested in, well, accuracy, would be that AV would end precarious seats. You know, like Brighton Pavilion and Norwich South, where MPs can be elected with less than a third of the vote. Where more than twice as many people vote for losing candidates than for winning ones. It's odd that he doesn't address this, and given that he doesn't do so, I don't really think he can be said to be comprehensively addressing anything.

  

Straw Man No. 2: AV will make candidates work harder...

Archer doesn't so much demolish this claim as rephrase it, saying 'a candidate will have to appeal to people who don't want to vote for him', and then fail to refute it at all. Indeed, all he manages to do here is basically to say 'imagine what would happen under AV - nobody would say controversial stuff in case it might scare off transfers'. It's disappointing that he just relies on imagination here, rather than looks at real-world evidence for how politicians appeal for transfers in countries with electoral systems based on transferable votes.

He could just look as far as Ireland, say, and ask whether of the current crop of new TDs -- let's just say Gerry Adams, Shane Ross, Luke 'Ming' Flanagan, Richard Boyd Barrett, or Stephen Donnelly-- are really examples of candidates smoothing out their message to get transfers? Could any of them be described as a bland non-entity? Just google them to find out what they're like. Or Joe Higgins, say, who I remember running and coming very close to winning in an AV race in my constituency once upon a time...

Straw Man No. 3: ... by aiming for 50% of the vote

I don't think the issue is that AV requires candidates to aim for 50% of the vote; rather, it requires them to get 50% of the vote, or more precisely 50% of the vote in the only decisive round of counting. The important thing is that it's not about what candidates aim for, so much as what they need. Archer misses the mark on this, again.

He goes on to insist that 50% is meaningless, anyway, and that it's an arbitrary target, which it is, if we treat it as a number, but if we translate it into English, it makes more sense: AV requires elected representatives to have the support of most of the people they're representing. Is this really a made-up fetish?

  

Straw Man No. 4: AV will end the expenses scandal.

According to Archer, this is something that Nick Clegg believes, and to support this claim, he links to a scanty London Standard article written the day before Clegg gave a speech, reporting on what it expected Clegg to say.

Look, I don't care one way or another about Nick Clegg or what he thinks, but Archer's citing on that Standard article rather gives the game away regarding the level of research he's done. He could have linked to the speech itself -- http://www.newstatesman.com/2011/02/vote-mps-means-post-past -- in which case he'd have learned that Clegg certainly saw a link between MPs abusing the system and MPs feeling invulnerable in their seats, and envisaged a whole package of reforms to help sort out Britain's broken political system, but never simplistically claimed that AV would end the expenses scandal.

He could have done that. He didn't. Instead he just misrepresented Clegg. He could have done research and checked his facts, but instead he just made stuff up. Sure, why not? If lying about AV is good enough for the Prime Minister, why not for an ordinary party hack? The fish stinks from the head, as they say.

Straw Man No. 5: AV will help minor parties flourish.

This, Archer says, is obvious rubbish, but rubbish which lots of centre-right readers are inclined to believe.

The reality, of course, that this is another thing that people just don't know about. Nobody knows. It'll all depend firstly on whether people who currently don't see a point in voting start to exercise their right and do so to support parties other than the established if declining big two, and secondly on whether people who currently and reluctantly vote for the big two will feel it's worthwhile to express their honest opinions, even if that comes down to 'I really want the UKIP candidate to represent me, but if that's not possible then I'd be happy with a Conservative'.

In the short term, I'd expect this to mean that the smaller parties would get a boost in their share of the first-preference vote, but without any significant boost in seats, so that the end result isn't radically different. In the longer term... who knows?

  

Straw Man No. 6: AV is fair.

Not many people say AV is fair. They just tend to say it's fairer than First Past the Post, which it is, irrespective of what formulae Archer waves around to impress the easily impressed.

In 1992, the Liberal Democrat Russell Johnston was elected MP for Inverness, Nairn, and Lochaber, with just 26% of the vote. That'd not be possible under AV. What's more, imagine if that'd happened in every single constituency in the country, with the Lib Dems topping the poll with just 26% of the vote. That'd be 650 seats being awarded to a party with just 26% of the vote. Would that be possible under AV? No. Is it possible under FPTP? Yes. Yes it would be.

I know, that sounds crazy, but given that the current system is such that a party can get 76% of seats with just 55% of the vote, or 55% of the seats with just 35% of the vote, I don't think it's all too fanciful to imagine a party getting an absolute landslide with the support of just a quarter of the voting population. It'd be unlikely, sure, but it'd be far from impossible.

Look, it's very simple. General elections are about electing parliaments. Parliaments are representative assemblies. Representative assemblies should be representative of whoever of whatever it is they represent. Parliament, therefore, should be the United Kingdom writ small. The challenge is to create a parliament as representative of the people as possible. As things stand, under the current system more people vote for losing candidates than for winning ones. AV is a very slight change -- one that was recommended by Royal Commission as far back as 1910 -- which goes a small way towards correcting the current imbalance.

  

Archer's witterings are based on what he assumes AV would be like. Well, I've participated in AV elections in Ireland to pick a member of parliament and head of state, and I can assure you, he's wrong. The fact that he doesn't draw on any evidence from, well, anywhere that uses transferable voting, rather shows that far from being a comprehensive argument, it's just another piece of dishonest fluff.

I really think the Electoral Commission wouldn't need to spend half as much money educating people about AV if they weren't obliged to counter the constant stream of lies from the opponents of AV.

AV 2: AV Again, OR If you have to lie to make your case, then it probably isn't a good case...

See, here we go again. Have a look at this article and especially the three quotes from David Cameron. Every single one of them is a lie. It seems as though he has no respect for the truth, the British people, or the integrity of the referendum process.

"It is a system so undemocratic that your vote for a mainstream party counts once, while someone can support a fringe party like the BNP and get their vote counted several times."

Leaving aside how in a quarter of UK constituencies, the Conservatives are at best a third party, this is nonsense. In AV your vote is ultimately only counted once. However many rounds of counting there may be, there's only one decisive round, and in that round everybody's vote is counted just once. Not several times. Once.

"It's a system so obscure that it is only used by three countries in the whole world: Australia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. I'm not making it up, three countries in the whole world. Our system is used by half of the world."

Leaving aside how its just an accident of history that lots of countries have inherited First Past the Post -- with there being no shortage of ones that have abandoned or rejected it -- this just isn't true. I've voted twice in AV elections in Ireland, as we use AV for presidential elections and parliamentary elections when there's only one seat at stake, and India uses AV for presidential elections.

"Just think forward to the Olympics. Usain Bolt powers home in the hundred metres but when it comes to handing out the gold medals they give it to the person who comes third. You wouldn't do it in the Olympics, we shouldn't do it in politics, we've got to vote no to this crazy system."

These are the same Olympics that'll be held in a city where the Mayor is elected by instant run-off voting? And not by FPTP? Just making sure...

Look, the metaphor's wrong for starters, as an athletic contest has a clear finishing line, which AV has and First Past the Post, despite its ironic name, lacks: AV basically requires a winner to be supported by half of the voters, whereas FPTP just requires the winning candidate to be supported by one more voter than the next guy. Depending on how many credible candidates there are, that figure can be pretty low. That's why the Liberal Democrat Simon Wright is in Parliament with just 29.36% of the Norwich South vote and why the Greens' Caroline Lucas is there with just 31.33% of the Brighton Pavilion vote. Neither of them even needed 29%.

That aside, Cameron obviously doesn't believe this. If he did, he'd favour using First Past the Post when selecting Conservative leaders and candidates. Granted, that'd have meant that Ken Clarke would have won in 1997, Michael Portillo would have won in 2001, and David Davis would have beaten Cameron himself in 2005. The Conservative system is, after all, a sensible one: a series of preliminary rounds of voting is used to winnow the field of candidates down to two, those two then being decisively voted on. AV does exactly the same thing, except that preferences are all stated at the outset, which is why it's also known as Instant Run-Off Voting.

And none of this nonsense about run-off voting being okay for choosing individual candidates, leaders, presidents, or whatever, but not for choosing parliaments. Given the British system of single-seater constituencies, a general election is just a load of individual elections happening at the same time.

No, Cameron obviously opposes AV because the undemocratic advantage the Conservatives enjoy in the current system might be cancelled out under AV. Might. The fact is that nobody knows what the effect of AV will be. The only thing we can be certain of is that it will allow people to express honest preferences, without fearing that doing so could mean that their vote will be wasted.

I have a fair idea of what the broad effect of the change will be, in the short term, but I'll save that for another day. Back to work, methinks.

AV 1: AV and the Silent People

The AV Referendum's more than a month away, and I'm already tired of it.

I'm tired of the lies, and the misinformation, and the hypocrisy. I'm tired of the ignorance, and the stupidity, and the confusion. I'm tired of people masking vested interests beneath a veneer of principle, and of good people standing shoulder-to-shoulder with liars and making liars of themselves.

I'm sure that the British people -- or whatever fragment of them bothers to vote next month -- are going to reject voting reform. I'm certain of it. But why? What would a no vote mean?

Would it mean that if Nick Clegg wants Alternative Voting then you don't?

Great. Cut your electoral noses off to spite your Lib Dem faces, why don't you? Presumably you've already stopped eating Spanish food and Hob Nob biscuits, because, y'know, Clegg likes them.

Would it mean that you're rejecting AV because it's not PR and that's what you most want? You know, the David Owen approach?

Wonderful. Make the perfect the enemy of the good, why don't you? You know full well that your 'no' to AV will be read as a 'yes' for the status quo. You don't think the government are planning on doing a survey, like in Ireland after Lisbon I, to find out why people voted against the government's proposal, do you? No, they'll interpret it to suit their own purposes.

Would it mean that you think people should only ever be allowed vote once?

Come on, surely you're not thick enough to fall for that. As the pro-AV crowd keep saying, the thinking behind AV is simple: it's the same thinking that says, 'If you're going to the shops, I'll have a ginger beer, but if they've none, I'll have an orange juice'. In AV systems, every individual's vote only counts once at the the sole decisive stage. That's why political parties are happy to use run-off systems when selecting candidates and leaders. Nobody claims that William Hague only became Conservative party leader ahead of Ken Clarke back in 1997 because Michael Howard supporters were allowed to vote three times!

Would it mean that you think the country's in dire straits and can't afford £250 million to be spent on AV?

That's what the No2AV crowd are saying, after all, that around £130 million will be needed to pay for vote-counting machines, and that over £100 million will be spent on the referendum  and educating people about AV. Well, the referendum money's spent anyway, and the Conservatives who are backing the dishonest No2AV campaign agreed last year that they were going to spend that. As for the voting machines, well, aside from the fact there aren't any plans to buy such machines...Australia doesn't use counting machines, and neither does Ireland, with a more complex system, so do you think the British are uniquely dim and incapable of counting? Is that your problem? That you think the British are too stupid for any system more grown-up than the current one?

Would it mean that you think AV is a discredited system, used only in three countries in the world?

Why would you think that? Is it because the No2AV people keep telling you this? They keep saying only Australia, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea use AV, but India elects its President with AV, and I've voted twice in AV elections in Ireland. They're lying to you. Again. And here's the thing: all British political parties elect their leaders along AV lines. They select their candidates the same way. If it's good enough for them, why isn't it good enough for you?

Would it mean that you're convinced AV is a recipe for chaos, whereas First Past the Post guarantees stability?

Have you done any research into this at all, or have you just listened to the No campaign's lies? I don't think Australia's doing too badly, is it? It's certainly had no more hung parliaments over the last century or so than Britain has. Meanwhile Canada, with its First Past the Post system, has had three hung parliaments in a row.

Would it mean that you want to stop minority parties like the BNP from getting into parliament?

Assuming you think it's okay to rig the system to block those whose views you dislike from having a say in how their country is run, this makes sense, I suppose. I'm not even sure how we define parties as fringe or minority parties, though. In a quarter of UK constituencies, the Conservatives are at best a third party; should their voters be thought of as the kind of extremists who should be made to keep their mouths shut? All else aside, though, it seems odd for the BNP to be opposed to AV if AV would help them gain power. Maybe they think it's not British...

Would it mean that you believe First Past the Post is a British system and part of your cherished heritage?

Well, ignoring the fact that none of your political parties use First Past the Post when choosing leaders or candidates, I suppose this makes a kind of sense. After all, of the nearly forty democracies in Europe, only Britain is still hanging on to this way of doing things, which I suppose is a good thing: somebody needs to stand up for how things were done in the nineteenth century. Of course, a Royal Commission recommended as long ago as 1910 that you should ditch First Past the Post in favour of AV, recognising that First Past the Post doesn't really work when there are more than two parties, but maybe the time's still not quite right...

Would it mean that you like the current system because it means that your favourite political party sometimes gets to rule as though it has a national mandate even when scarcely one in three voters have backed them?

This, at least, would be honest. I'm pretty sure this is why most Tory and Labour MPs who oppose reform are taking the approach they're taking. Turkeys rarely vote for Christmas, after all. It just leaves me wondering why they don't insist on this system being used within their parties too.

I can't see AV getting passed. I think that through a mixture of laziness, hypocrisy, and stupidity, the British people are going to vote to keep the current system. You know, that current wonderful system which a Royal Commissions as long ago as 1910 found outdated and inadequate, and where since then...

• No party has won a popular majority since 1931, when some people could vote more than once.
• In 1951, the Conservatives won more seats than Labour despite getting fewer votes.
• In 1974, Labour won more seats than the Conservatives despite getting fewer votes.
• In 2005, Labour won a big parliamentary majority with hardly more than a third of the vote.
• In 2010, more people didn't vote than voted for losing candidates, and more people voted for losing candidates than for winning ones.

I don't believe the current system is either sacrosanct or fit for purpose anymore, and I don't believe the de facto disenfranchisement of most of the British population is a good thing, so I think reform is needed.

Sure, I don’t think AV is the best possible voting system, but I think it's a far better one than First Past the Post.  I've elected representatives under four voting systems, including both Alternative Vote and First Past the Post, and have never felt voting so pointless as in the First Past the Post elections. It's the system where I've felt least empowered.

I think we should be wary of making the perfect an enemy of the good. While not perfect, I believe AV to be more likely to return a more representative parliament than the current British system, and I also believe that changing the system, even in so mild a way, could help change mindsets, so that people might be more willing to countenance other changes without fearing the apocalypse.

That won't happen, though. They say people get the politicians they deserve, and it looks as though they're determined to keep the electoral system they deserve too. Chesterton once wrote of the English as a silent people, who have not spoken yet. I fear that in a month's time they'll vote to continue their silence.

Conservative Dishonesty?

I know, 'dishonesty' may be too strong a word. Maybe 'stupidity' is the right one, though given how certain things work in their favour...

I'm talking about AV, of course. The Conservatives, in the main, don't want it. They are willing, under pressure, to seek the people's opinion on the matter, but they're not inclined to encourage them to vote for it. They must like systems where they might potentially get to govern despite not having received a majority of the popular vote since 1931.

The thing is, they know that First Past The Post is rubbish. How can we tell? Well, consider how they pick their leaders: sure, they give the members a straight choice between two candidates, but how do they pick those candidates when more than two people want the leadership? They ask the MPs, of course, and the MPs don't vote in a First Past The Post system. No, they use a slightly clunkier version of AV.

The candidates stand and the parliamentary party votes, and the least popular candidate is eliminated, and then the remaining candidates stand and the MPs vote again, and the weakest of these is eliminated, and so on, until they reach a point where there are only two candidates left. And only then, at the point where First Past The Post actually works, do they ask the ordinary party members to choose between the last two candidates.

Which, of course, is what happens in an AV system, except more quickly. It's an instant run-off, a streamlined version of the Conservative Party's own system for picking leaders. And this does matter.

Take 1997, for instance, where on the first count, Ken Clarke got 29.9% of the vote, making him the most popular candidate, but as we all know, this meant that the vast majority of members of the Parliamentary party voted for somebody else, so Michael Howard, the least popular candidate, was eliminated and Peter Lilley withdrew. On the second count, then, after transfers, Clarke was still the leading candidate, with 39% of the vote, but the fact was that more people had still voted for somebody else than voted for Clarke, and so a third count was needed. That headbanger Redwood was eliminated, then, and it wound up as a straight contest between Clarke and William Hague, and this time, although Clarke increased his share of the vote to 44.2%, Hague outstripped him and got 55.2%, so that he became leader.

Now. 

Leaving aside how that went, what we can say is that if this had been a straight First Past The Post count, then Clarke would have been leader, rather than Hague. I don't think there's any value in claiming that people would have voted differently had the system been First Past The Post: I think we have to assume that people's votes actually mean what they're meant to mean, which is that you give your vote to the person you think best fitted to the job, transferring to the person you regard as next best if your ideal candidate is ruled out, all the way down in order of preference.

The Tories changed their system in 1998, to allow ordinary members to choose at the final stage, once the MPs had used this runoff system to winnow the candidates down to two. In other words, it was still a runoff system, albeit with the final stage being based on a much larger pool of voters.

Along comes 2001, then, with the new system being deployed. Michael Portillo was leader in the first count, with 30.1% of the vote, though he was eliminated on the next count, in which Ken Clarke took the lead, with 35.5%. With the candidate pool winnowed down to two, again, it became a straight vote between Clarke and Iain Duncan Smith, which Duncan Smith won.

So, yet again we see that if the Conservatives used First Past The Post in their own internal elections, they'd have picked Michael Portillo as leader in 2001. But they don't. Because they know it's unrepresentative and results in people getting elected by a minority of voters.

Michael Howard, he of the least support in 1997, was anointed as leader in 2003, without any opposition, and then things get interesting again in 2005. With 31.3%, David Davis got more votes than any other candidate in the first round, though the elimination the least popular candidate, Ken Clarke, shook things up in the second round, as the MPs who had voted for Clarke in the main decided that if Clarke couldn't be leader, then they could accept David Cameron, so he became the frontrunner for the final face-off, with the whole party voting. He won in that round, of course, by a long way, but the fact remains that based on the initial vote, David Davis got more votes than him.

Ultimately, this is effectively the same system used in selecting individual candidates at constituency level. It's a run-off system, not a crude First Past The Post charade, where there isn't even a post to pass. Basically, the Conservatives obviously like run-off voting systems, as that's what they use for all their own elections, but when they have to compete for votes against people who have slightly different viewpoints, well, then things change, and unrepresentative crudeness becomes regarded as a virtue:

The fact is, FPTP is simple to understand and gives a clear result most of the time, which is true. As indeed does picking a name from a hat. Or throwing a dart at a dartboard. In fact, if you put names in a hat in direct proportion to the votes people got, picking the name from the hat would in all probability be fairer than FPTP.

It's sad, really. Look, I don't think AV is a great solution. I think AV+, as recommended by Parliamentary Commissions, would be far better. And I actually think the system we use in Ireland would work far better in the UK than it does at home, as every polity has its vices and our system nurtures ours. But still, I think AV would be a far fairer system than what the UK has currently got, where only a third of MPs are elected with the support of most of their voting constituents, where more people vote for defeated candidates than victorious ones, and where the Conservatives can get 47% of the seats with just 36% of the vote. 

And then complain that the system is set up against them.

Fifteen Movies

My friend Denise has done one of those Facebook meme things, where you list 'fifteen movies that have influenced you and that will always stick with you', challenging her mates to do likewise. It didn't take me long to hammer out a list of my own, resisting the urge merely to list my favourite films, but having done that I felt an urge to say why I picked these. I did a similar thing last year with books. So, here goes...

1. Seven Samurai

My favourite film, bar none. It's intelligent and beautiful and humane, and there's not a wasted frame in it. I couldn't come close to picking a favourite moment - that opening silhouette of the horses against the sky, the shot of the village from above, old Gisaku's grimacing face, Kambei's haircut, Gorobei's chuckling, Kyuzo's duel, the flower, Kikuchiyo at the waterwheel, the horse in the rain... It's surely no coincidence that my favourite film as a child was, for a while, The Magnificent Seven, or that even now I'm a big fan of A Bug's Life. This was also, as it happens, the first subtitled film that I ever watched from beginning to end.

2. Star Wars: A New Hope

Look, I'm a bloke, what do you expect? I'm not sure any film has ever brought me as much joy. Unlike 'Seven Samurai', this isn't a film that could ever be on a pedestal; it has faults galore, and I can see them all, and I still love it. Sure, it'd be a better film without them, but it'd be a different one. I love it as it is. Sometimes our cracks are part of who we are. And I still think its opening sequence is superb.

3. Casablanca

Like 'Star Wars', the cliches really do have a ball in this film, and Pauline Kael had a point when she said that this is the classic instance of how entertaining a bad film can be. Still, it's sparklingly witty, has perhaps the most exhilarating scene in the history of cinema, and for me stands out as the classic modern take on the Arthurian love triangle. And, of course, it underpins both When Harry Met Sally and Deep Space Nine. Of course.

4. The Maltese Falcon

I like quest stories, and I especially like futile quests. John Huston did them better than anyone, whether in Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Man Who Would Be King, or in this early masterpiece. I'm not convinced that the film's quite as deliciously dark as Hammett's novel, but it has the great Peter Lorre in it, which more than makes up for that, and there's something awe-inspiring about how Sidney Greenstreet fills the screen!

5. Scaramouche

Yeah, I can't defend this. Even hardcore swashbuckler lovers get embarrassed by this one. So what? My younger brother has said that my love for even ropey swashbucklers is my curse, but I don't care. Scaramouche may not be The Adventures of Robin Hood or The Mark of Zorro, but I've loved it since I was a small boy, and I love it now. The colours are gorgeous, the dialogue is hilarious, Janet Leigh is stunning, the long swordfight is breathtaking, and the final scene is wonderful if you don't think about it for too

6. The Birds

Sure, it's not Hitchcock's best film, or even my favourite of his films - that'd surely be either Rear Window or Vertigo - but it was the gateway drug for me, to a point where I now have almost two dozen Hitchcock gilms on my shelves! I saw it when I was about ten, and to this day find it one of the most weirdly unnerving films I've ever seen.

7. The Silence of the Lambs

This was the first film I ever saw in the cinema more than once, and the first time I saw it my knees hurt for hours afterwards, as they'd been tensed so tightly during the film. I've since read and loved the book, and think this well deserved its Oscar Royal Flush; as adaptations go, it rivals To Kill a Mockingbird, and though this film lacks an Atticus Finch, it does at least have a Clarice Starling. For all that Hopkins gets the plaudits for this one, and for all that I've ruined the film for others by reading Agony Aunt columns in his voice, I still think this is Jodie Foster's film.

8. Reservoir Dogs

I saw 'Silence of the Lambs' more than once in the cinema, but the following year I saw 'Reservoir Dogs' four times. I've not seen it in years, and it's a conspicuous gap in my dvd collection, and it's not even one I'm in a hurry to fill, but its impact on me at the time was undeniable. The dialogue astounded me, the claustrophobic staginess of it thrilled me, and above all I was fascinated by the fact that the film was almost - though not quite - in real time. Real-time films like High Noon and Before Sunset have delighted me ever since.

9. Beauty and the Beast

Yes, I know it might seem odd picking this ahead of the Cocteau masterpiece, but let's face it, for all the silvery magic of the 1946 classic (and wasn't that a great year for fantasy films, with A Matter of Life and Death and It's a Wonderful Life all appearing at the same time?), it doesn't have a sleazy candlestick with a comedy French accent, or that expression the Beast pulls when Belle unreasonably refuses to join him for dinner. I love redemption stories anyway, and I have always liked this story of how a thing must be loved before it is able to love. And, of course, it's about an intelligent, sensitive, beautiful girl who loves a clumsy, hairy, awkward man with a lot of books. One can always hope.

10. Stand by Me

It's probably not even Rob Reiner's best film, but Stephen King is a master of conveying small town American life - or so it has always seemed, anyway - and Reiner brought King's strengths to the screen perfectly here. It's funny and thrilling and gross and sad, and is deathly serious when it needs to be. What's more, as a study in boyhood friendship, it's pretty much perfect.

11. Dead Poets Society

For all that he can be too sentimental and twee, I like Robin Williams in this one, and I've come to like Ethan Hawke too. I still cherish watching it in Dave's living room, and at Nayra's going away night, and in Becky's room in halls. Its carpei diem motto still resounds with me, and I always picture the film's final scenes when I hear the story of Laura and Rose and the microphone. Thank you, girls.

12. The Searchers

Its iconic images of Monument Valley, of Wayne's Ethan Edwards silhouetted in the doorway, and of the burning homestead are part of cinema history, of course, but the film has layers and layers below and beyond its visual magnificence. Astonishingly beautiful and painfully bleak, The Searchers is, aside from being probably the finest western ever, a profoundly mythic study in how frighteningly lonely and psychologically insupportable it would be to be the type of man that John Wayne plays in so many of his films. Even the comic scenes, which can look like a frivolous distraction, serve, like the Olympus episodes in the Iliad, to heighten the darkness in Wayne's own character.

13. Dangerous Liaisons

If Beauty and the Beast and the Star Wars films are stories of how a man becomes a monster and then finds himself again, Dangerous Liaisons shows us a monster who realises he is becoming a man and who destroys the only person he loves in an attempt to remain otherwise. Devastatingly intelligent, there's nothing about this film that I don't like. The script, based on Christopher Hampton's play, is as brilliant and cold as the hardest of diamonds, as good an adaptation of Laclos' novel as one might hope for, and the cast is exactly right. Even young Keanu Reeves is good as the gormless Danceny, though he's nothing to Uma Thurman, let alone John Malkovich, Glenn Close, and the luminous Michelle Pfeiffer.

14. Magnolia

I like non-linear storytelling a lot. Citizen Kane is great, Pulp Fiction fascinated me for years, and Short Cuts, when I saw it back in the day, was a revelation. Of all these complex cinematic tapestries, though, Magnolia, for me,  is the one I'm most likely to think of. I know: it's messy, and it's often ugly, and not all of the characters are particularly likeable, but for all the horror it shows us, for all the loneliness, and inadequacy, and guilt, and shame, it's ultimate a deeply compassionate and hopeful film, as profound as it is profane, drinking from the same thematic wells as Krzysztof Kieślowski's tripartite study of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but doing so in an intoxicatingly different and utterly inspiring way. I'm a sucker for films about redemption, and they don't come much better than this.

15. Withnail and I

You know what Paul McGann does when faced with the bull? That works. A friend of mine did a few months back, when he and his wife were confronted with an angry one. You can talk about the poignancy and the quotability of this film all you like, but me, I have two friends who escaped being violently gored thanks to having watched this.

Stop Projecting Your Euro Neurosis, Revisited

Will Hutton, in today's Observer, utterly nails the Irish issue, rightly pointing out how the British narrative of Ireland's financial meltdown is a caricature, determined wholly by Britain's own issues, rather than the reality of what has happened in Ireland over the last decade:

But in Britain the vast inflation of Ireland's public sector wage bill, the fecklessness of its bankers who allowed lending to balloon to four times Irish GDP, largely on the expectation of never-ending property price increases, and the grubby corruption of its political elite are all pushed to one side. Voices on right and left insist that what is happening in Ireland is the fault of the EU and the euro. If Irish interest rates could have been a fraction higher, they argue, like those in Britain, Ireland would not have had a property and credit boom.

The British narrative ignores Ireland's insane public sector pay bill, the fact that the economy had become addictively dependent on the construction industry and rising property prices, reckless bankers, and corruption, cowardice, and a lack of imagination among the governing parties and the opposition which lacked the nerve to challenge them on economic grounds. It blames everything on Ireland's membership of the Euro and sees the events of the last week as a grand Franco-German plan to take over Ireland.

Nonsense, of course, not least because Ireland's no prize nowadays and because given her debt, Britain could quite easily wind up in as bad a situation:

A second financial crisis would confront Britain with Irish-style dilemmas despite the independence of the pound. We have proportionally more bank lending in relation to our GDP than even the Irish, some £7 trillion or five times GDP.

Yes, Britain has worse debt levels than Ireland does, and it managed this without being 'trapped' in a catch-all interest zone, which is how the Eurozone keeps being scorned as. The Euro, as Hutton points out, isn't the problem here. It might, however, be part of the solution.

I'm not sure the Pope has said anything new here...

Back in September, when the Pope came to Britain, one of the things I wore myself out telling people was how rubbish the media are when it comes to religion; at this point I pretty much only ever trust John Allen, of America's National Catholic Reporter, when it comes to any news about the Vatican, say. This shouldn't be surprising, of course. There's an enormous amount of shoddy journalism out there, and when it comes to, say, science journalism, Ben Goldacre has had a field day pointing out how misleading it is. So, given this, I was rather startled to read today headlines like 'Pope says Condoms can be used in Fight Against AIDS'.

The story relates to some extracts that have been leaked from Peter Seewald's forthcoming book-length interview with the Pope, his third such; I've read the other two, and their 1985 predecessor, The Ratzinger Report, where the then Cardinal Ratzinger was interviewed at length by Vittorio Messori.

In this interview the subject of AIDS in Africa inevitably comes up, with Seewald asking about the impact of Church policy on the crisis. The Pope's answer is being leapt on by an ignorant -- and it must be said, hopeful -- media as the Vatican having changed its official stance on condom use. Here's the relevant passage from the book:

PS: On the occasion of your trip to Africa in March 2009, the Vatican’s policy on AIDs once again became the target of media criticism.Twenty-five percent of all AIDs victims around the world today are treated in Catholic facilities. In some countries, such as Lesotho, for example, the statistic is 40 percent. In Africa you stated that the Church’s traditional teaching has proven to be the only sure way to stop the spread of HIV. Critics, including critics from the Church’s own ranks, object that it is madness to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms.

B16: The media coverage completely ignored the rest of the trip to Africa on account of a single statement. Someone had asked me why the Catholic Church adopts an unrealistic and ineffective position on AIDs. At that point, I really felt that I was being provoked, because the Church does more than anyone else. And I stand by that claim. Because she is the only institution that assists people up close and concretely, with prevention, education, help, counsel, and accompaniment. And because she is second to none in treating so many AIDs victims, especially children with AIDs.

I had the chance to visit one of these wards and to speak with the patients. That was the real answer: The Church does more than anyone else, because she does not speak from the tribunal of the newspapers, but helps her brothers and sisters where they are actually suffering. In my remarks I was not making a general statement about the condom issue, but merely said, and this is what caused such great offense, that we cannot solve the problem by distributing condoms. Much more needs to be done. We must stand close to the people, we must guide and help them; and we must do this both before and after they contract the disease.

As a matter of fact, you know, people can get condoms when they want them anyway. But this just goes to show that condoms alone do not resolve the question itself. More needs to happen. Meanwhile, the secular realm itself has developed the so-called ABC Theory: Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom, where the condom is understood only as a last resort, when the other two points fail to work. This means that the sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.

PS: Are you saying, then, that the Catholic Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?

B16: She of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality.

The first thing to note about this is that Benedict wasn't teaching here as 'The Pope'; this shouldn't be construed as an official stance of any sort. Rather it is a personal opinion, not to be understood as the Vatican's formal position, let alone an infallible doctrinal teaching. Elsewhere in the interview, Benedict is quite frank about the fact that popes can be wrong, and indeed he felt the need to preface his recent Jesus of Nazareth with the caveat that the book represents his personal thoughts, and shouldn't be misunderstood as something anyway binding on Catholics.

Secondly, what is he actually saying? He's saying that condoms aren't a practical solution to the problem, a position for which there certainly seems to be scientific support. He's also saying that condoms aren't a moral solution to the problem, in that they represent a banalization of sexuality; while you might disagree with that, it's certainly orthodox Church teaching. And finally he's saying that in cases where people are already ignoring of disobeying Church teaching, then use of condoms might represent a step in the right direction, a realisation that actions can have consequences and an attempt to limit harm.

This is commentary, not guidance. And it's not particularly earth-shaking guidance, either. Back in September I pointed out to friends that

'[...] the Pope has never said that condoms shouldn't be used when having sex outside of marriage. Not a word. All of his comments on the matter have concerned contraception within marriage. Why? Well, the Church regards sex as being exclusively for marriage - it is the act of marital communion, for want of a better way of putting it - and regards all extramarital sex as intrinsically wrong. Whether you agree with that is, in this context, neither here nor there. What matters is that the Church isn't in the business of advising people on how to mitigate things it regards as sins. It says, with God, "thou shalt not commit adultery" It doesn't say, "we'd rather you didn't commit adultery, but if you must cheat on your wife with some random skank, for whatever reason, well, it might be prudent to wear one of these things."'

Is he saying now that it would be prudent? As a theologian or an ordinary Catholic expressing his opinion, he is certainly saying that it might be better, that it might represent a step in the right direction. He's not saying that it would, just that it might. But as the Pope, the successor to Peter and custodian of the keys to the kingdom, charged with feeding and tending Jesus' flock, no, he's by no means teaching that condoms should be used. All he's saying is that for people who are inclined to ignore him anyway, a decision to use a condom could indicate a growing sense of moral responsibility.

Jimmy Akin sensibly analyses the interview fragment, and how it's been and is being presented, here.