A quick point, if I may: You know how Jeremy Corbyn is now 20 points ahead of his rivals, and some people are urging the lesser candidates to consolidate behind a single Anyone-But-Jeremy candidate?
That’s stupid and wrong.
Its stupid because the election is being conducted on an Alternative Vote system. The electors rank the candidates in order of preference. The candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and their votes are divided up amongst the remaining candidates. That process is repeated until one candidate has a majoirty.
Mathematically, that is exactly the same as if the lesser candidates had pulled out… but with one important exception: its more democratic.
The ‘drop out’ suggestion is also morally wrong. With the AV system, each elector gets to express a preference for who drops out and in what order. That’s far better approach than a candidate being peer-pressured or media-pressured into dropping out mid-campaign, which is anti-democratic and makes the entire contest a hostage to bad opinion polling.
The fact that people are calling for the poorly polling candidates shows that they are stuck in a First Past The Post mentality, even though the election is being run with more sophisticated and fairer rules.
Category: Diary (Page 59 of 301)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
How irritating. I had drafted a short, blistering blog about how the NHS, the sacred cow of British politics, is a massive socialist project. “If the NHS did not exist”, I would have said, “none of the Labour leadership candidates but Jeremy Corbyn would dare suggest we invent it”… And when he did, everyone (other candidates, the Tories, the media and yes, much of the British public) would have accused him of being a bonkers socialist, happy to squander billions of pounds of taxpayers money. Continue reading
More banter from the political past today as John Prescott criticised Tony Blair’s “get a transplant” jibe.
Meanwhile, Margaret Beckett has somehow branded herself a ‘moron’ because she was one of Jeremy Corbyn’s sponsors, nominating-but-not supporting him so the Labour Party could have a debate.
Well, a debate is being had. A wider range of policies are being debated and the other candidates have found they are unable to triangulate their way to a victory on points. The contest is going to be far more interesting than any that has gone before and—here’s a radical thought—it could be that this moment of public disunity and ill-tempered argument could end up strengthening the eventual winner. Survival Of The Fittest, Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, &cetera.
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Tony Blair gave a speech today, warning the post-defeat Labour Party of a lurch to the left. Meanwhile, the most left wing of the four Labour Party leadership candidates, Jeremy Corbyn, is apparently leading the polls.
I find the pragmatism of the centrists in the Labour Party to be enticing. If you want to win power and achieve social justice, they say, there is no point in positioning yourself too far away from the electorate. To place Jeremy Corbyn at the top of the Labour Party is to distance the party from the rest of Britain. And that means further election defeats. Instead, the answer is to be more centrist, more Blairite, because at least that is where the rest of the country sits. Continue reading
I am rather shocked by the realisation that the discussion I chaired with authors Cory Doctorow and China Mieville was exactly five years ago today.
I recall that a couple of short excerpts from the event were included in a podcast at the time, but the entire discussion was never posted anywhere for people who could not attend. Happily, yrstrly took a recording of the discussion on my phone and I post it here (and on Soundcloud) for posterity.
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