Proportional Representation

I have been seeing a substantial amount of discussion on social media lately regarding proportional representation, particularly in the wake of the general election result which most people in my social circles found most unsatisfactory. This got shared around a lot:

To this it should be added that the Liberal Democrats, with 2.4 million votes, gained only 8 seats. But it is in the percentages that the discrepancy becomes most obvious: the biggest winner is the SNP, with an astonishing 83% more seats than it would have under proportional representation, thanks to having been such a widespread phenomenon across Scotland and so highly regionalised within it. The Conservatives got 38% more seats than their share of votes, but Labour was still also overrepresented by 17%; but it is the underrepresentations which are the most dumbfounding. The Liberal Democrats would have had 6.5 times more than their 8, the Greens 25 times more than their 1, but the biggest loser by far was UKIP: under proportional representation, UKIP would have won more than 80 times more seats than its solitary one, putting it in a very strong third place.

	Share of national vote	Share of seats	Proportional Representation
Conservatives	36.9% (11.3M)	50.9% (331/650)	239/650
Labour	30.4% (9.3M)	35.7% (232/650)	197/650
SNP	4.7% (1.5M)	8.6% (56/650)	30/650
Liberal Democrats	7.9% (2.4M)	1.2% (8/650)	51/650
UKIP	12.6% (3.9M)	0.15% (1/650)	81/650
Greens	3.8% (1.2M)	0.15% (1/650)	24/650

The only real similarity here is that overall the Conservatives and Labour were still the two largest parties, and the Conservatives still beat Labour. There would be some very big differences with how lawmaking was done; we may well imagine that overall majorities would be exceedingly rare, and coalitions would have to become the norm. In this scenario, we might have seen a Conservative/UKIP block as the dominant force - however, just short of an overall majority even between them, all legislation would have had to be much more multi-partisan. What is more, the relatively poor showing of the Greens relative to the levels at which they had been polling may suggest that many people might have voted differently had they expected their vote to really count. What this table shows is that nearly a quarter of the electorate has been effectively disenfranchised - left, right and centre...

It is very easy to criticise; but there must be something to be said for the current "first past the post" system. Many would perhaps be deeply uncomfortable with potentially according such prominence to parties which might be viewed as dangerous extremists, namely UKIP and the Greens; a system based on one MP for a particular locally-defined constituency is generally an effective way of ensuring that minority parties are underrepresented. In addition, the contrast between the outrageous underrepresentation of the Liberal Democrats and the unfathomable underrepresentation of UKIP and the Greens might suggest that centrist parties with relatively conventional rhetoric are still better at breaking through: in other words, "first past the post" might be a good way of disenfranchising extremist views, albeit at the expense of all minority views, however widespread they are across the country. (Of course, this argument will not appeal very much if you fervently believe that the system must be more susceptible to change under the influence of insurgent parties.) Another defence which might be made is that while it may come very naturally to those who are cut off from their communities to look at nationwide statistics and forget the local constituency picture, on a constituency-by-constituency basis it is still the candidate with the most votes in each local area who wins. That is clearly a kind of democracy. Finally, on a practical note, subsidising the biggest parties with extra seats might perhaps be a good way of ensuring not just an effective government (with a system biased towards handing over a majority to a single party), but an effective single-party opposition as well.

For my part I am not remotely satisfied that the current major parties are offering much of an alternative to voters; but I am not very enthused by any of the minor parties vindicated at this election either, which perhaps sometimes offer too alternative a view. For example, I am very much in two minds over the question of EU membership (although desire for secession can hardly be called anything other than mainstream any more) - but is it right to obstruct democracy for one view of what is better or safer for the country? The whole matter may lose all but historical interest in a couple of years' time - it will be the topic of a future post.

Great Britain: socialism and union

Subject: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/manchester-set-to-become-part-of-scotland-10250453.html

Trending in the news today was a petition seeking that the North of England should break away from the rest of the UK and join Scotland. Irrespective of the proportions of the overall local population that would actually support this move, as opposed to the findings of one poll in one paper, the immediate context for this is the wake of the Conservative general election victory and the fact that Manchester is one of the British "Left's" most steadfast strongholds.
 
Of course the irony is, the SNP originated as a nationalist party, not a socialist party; and there is probably no single answer over which of those aspects is more fundamental to it even now. It seems clear to me that what the poll indicates is not a deep desire in Manchester and other places to free  themselves from foreign tyrants, but reflects a deep problem in the traditional regionalisation of British politics, of late more than ever threatening to fundamentally destabilise the country. What is lacking in England and Great Britain is a real "left-wing" party, a credible alternative, to Labour. Meanwhile the dominant discourse in the currently leaderless Labour Party in England seems to be that it needs to be more pro-business, to become more Blairite and even less left-wing.

I think that the real impetus behind Scotland's resurgent separatist movement is not nationalism, but a desire to live in a more socialist country. The SNP's momentum in its independence campaign last year is best explained as stemming from its equation of the Union with Conservative rule imposed from England against the wishes of Scotland; and the party's resounding vindication in the general election earlier this month should certainly be read in that light. They were decidedly not campaigning on an independence platform (although perhaps we might say they were campaigning in the context of an independence platform). But the exploitation of socialist malcontent at the Conservative government by Scottish nationalists in order to break up the country is, I think, disingenuous; because, obviously, this malcontent is far from restricted to Scotland. I think it is probably not too much exaggeration to say that in this country, whether England or Britain, opinions on the Conservatives are largely binary: they are generally either loved or hated, with relatively little middle ground - although it was undoubtedly that middle ground that decided the election.

I do find it somewhat frustrating that people find cutting themselves off from a problem such an attractive solution. I consider it no solution at all; it does not make the problem go away, it is tantamount to giving up the fight. I accept that that may be a reasonable solution; an independent Scotland might potentially have managed to be quite a lot of the utopia the SNP claimed and hoped and planned that it could, and its example may indeed even have been a positive influence and inspiration for would-be leftist parties in the rUK. I personally have come to consider the island of Britain a much more natural idea of a country: I do not wish to go back to medieval-era borders, and having studied post-Roman and early medieval history and archaeology and the origins of the different national identities of Britain makes it all seem very artificial. To me, separatism in this context, even for the most progressive reasons, seems backwards: British sounds much more modern than English, Scottish or Welsh (even though incidentally it derives from one of the earliest attested ethnonyms of the island). It sounds like an island that used to be many different nation-states, that has put historical national grievances aside and is working to be something newer, something progressive and forward-looking.

Britain needs a new, credible, populist Left to either replace or thoroughly rewrite Labour to provide a real alternative for a populace long starved of real functioning modern socialism south of the Tweed. It probably shouldn't be unionist and probably should work with the SNP; but whatever you think of Leftist politics, it probably would put the union on a much firmer footing for the future.

Agnosticism: the trouble with belief

There exists a basic difference between knowledge and belief. If you had certain knowledge about your religious beliefs, that is, that you knew that they were true, then 'faith', which we might define as holding a position without the support of evidence, would have no merit. This point is made quite transparently in the New Testament story of Thomas the doubter: "blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed" (John 20:29). You are in fact supposed to believe without evidence. Indeed there can be no evidence, and the evangelist, or whoever spoke those words, knew it.


I was raised a Catholic and went to Catholic religion classes at school. I grappled with doubt in my early adolescence and eventually made the decision to renounce my faith; but of course there are plenty of people who still hold that faith, or indeed more extreme strains of it than that with which I grew up. Surely these people, many of whom are very intelligent, have had the same doubts: what these people must be doing therefore is ignoring or suppressing those doubts: making the choice to place their faith first. This at any rate is how I tried to deal with my own doubts when I was young. I confess that sometimes I have little patience for this approach; but because I was raised to believe, and raised to believe that (baselessly) believing in this context is good, I can understand how tenacious religion can be. In that one little idea that earned Thomas his nickname, Christianity made for itself a very effective self-sustaining mechanism.

As an alternative to this, one can trust one's intelligence over one's upbringing or dogma, and follow it through to its logical conclusion: to accept that there is insufficient evidence to form a conclusion one way or the other about the existence of any god; to accept that we just do not, or perhaps cannot, know. In fact of course there's no real epistemological basis by which one can say anything at all about the universe, or for believing in the external existence of anything at all in particular (although in practical terms we perhaps have little choice when it comes to carrying on our lives as if the external world existed more or less as we think we perceive it). Personally, I place epistemology, the study of knowledge and what can be known, above personal habit or familiarity with a particular religion or cultural tradition; and in general I would like to encourage others to at least consider doing so in this matter.


That there might well be some kind of ultimate design to the universe is in my view a perfectly rational position, and it certainly cannot be disproved. However, one should not confuse being inclined to think that there is (or was) some sort of conscious creator with all the other things that a religion, such as Christianity, claims about that creator, based on a book of Iron Age folk-tales from Palestine. Even if there is some superhuman consciousness which created or designed or planned the universe (which there could be, as far as any human can tell), what one cannot do, as all religions do, is say anything about Its intentions.

Obviously you may do as you please! By all means identify as a Christian (for example) if you wish. But I must say that suspecting that deism (the belief in the existence of some sort of god or gods) might offer the best explanation for the universe is not the same as believing in the fundamentals of the Christian faith (i.e. that there is a creator-god and Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead and carried his message - let alone all that other stuff in the Creed). I believe that a fair number of Christians continue to call themselves Christian for little more reason than this. But I suggest that there is little truth in calling oneself a believer in Christianity if one does not actually believe its key tenets, just because it is the religion one is used to and one thinks there probably was some sort of designer of the universe.


If you particularly want to continue calling yourself a Christian despite much of this ringing true, it may be worth trying to interrogate your reasons for doing so - I do not think that honestly examining your own doubts commits you to abandoning your faith by any means.