Foreign Perspectives

Although the polling stations are open from 7am to 10pm in reality most people vote after work so it’s only the four hours from 6pm that really matter which, as it turns out this time, can be a problem if there’s a particularly high turnout. And, of course, if one party hits the panic button after hearing the earliest predictions and starts knocking on doors and generally drumming up voters.

The question is which of these two alternatives is closer to the truth this time around. The “early results panic” seemed to be the problem an election or two ago and made those early predictions depart radically from reality. Whilst it might not seem good for democracy to have people unable to vote, if this turns out to be the reason it’s better that they don’t as it would merely serve to distort the “real” result were they to be able to cast their votes.

On t’other hand, if there’s been a particularly high turnout in some areas it’s a sign that the polling stations are closing rather early than suits people these days. That also seems to be quite likely in some areas. For example, in an area predominantly made up of commuters it could be likely that people wouldn’t get home ’til relatively late thus making that notional four hour window more like two hours which seems rather a short period of time unless there are a LOT of easily accessible polling stations.

So what is the real cause? Probably a bit of a mixture of both in reality and something that will definitely require some research by the electoral officers once the dust settles on this election.

One of the things that has become increasingly clear as the leader debates have been going on is that Labour have been going all-out to manipulate how they and their ideas are presented.

At a simple level is the body language. Almost always when David Cameron is speaking about some policy, Brown is shaking his head. You don’t see that so often on the TV but it’s aimed primarily at manipulating the audience in the studio. Simple, but quite effective. Notably, the other two leaders don’t stoop to this level in response.

As I write this, the big push is on tax credits during the latest Brown interview (this time with wife in tow to emphasise the family friendly aspect). First off, they aren’t “tax credits”: they are a benefit payment. That status is a problem for a number of reasons including the administrative difficulty of implementing benefit payments compared to true tax credit systems, then there’s the whole business of having such a large proportion of the population on benefits which in turn means a sizeable number of civil servants required to handle the administration. However, the main issue that Brown raises is that he wants everyone to get these regardless of circumstances: that’s how some people have ended up getting over £40,000 (yes, forty thousand) pounds a year on benefits. The Conservative “elimination” of this benefit would only kick in for those getting more than £50,000 or so income.

It’s amazing at how much Brown confuses the difference between the government and the wider economy. He reckons that taxes can’t be cut because he needs all the money to fund all kinds of government assistance. In fact, the greatest government assistance we could have is none. Nobody will run with that level but less is definitely better: why shouldn’t we spend more of our own money rather than have the government make all those spending decisions for us? What he forgets most of all is that the government doesn’t have any money as such: all the money that it takes, it gets from us.

Laughably, he “had” to support the banks. Just a few years ago, he was encouraging them to get on and do just the things that got them all into trouble. Moreover, since he managed to borrow so much money over his time as chancellor and prime minister, the country was in a much weaker state to deal with any problems than it might have been had we had a sensible government over that time.

Since he was on a breakfast time programme he didn’t have any of the hard questions thrown at him which is, of course, why he appeared on it. Thus he wasn’t pulled up on his job creation schemes which it turns out have merely created jobs for the immigrants that his policies have pulled into the country. Hence, our relatively new IKEA is almost entirely staffed by Polish rather than creating employment for the locals. So far, nobody has really ran with the link between unemployment and 90% of new jobs going to immigrants.

I wonder how well Labours spin doctoring will work when they’re in the opposition? Somehow, I suspect that it’ll be several years before the realisation sinks in that they need a better way to go. At the moment, they seem to be as much taken in by the spin as they would wish the electorate to be.

Last year in a fit of enthusiasm I managed to sign up for both my first ever biology course and its sort-of associated residential.

As expected, the human biology course was both heavy going parts and thoroughly interesting right through. Having said that, it’s with some trepidation that I approach the revision for the upcoming exam in June: there’s a LOT of revision to be done in what seems to be an awfully short amount of time.

However, it’s now into the initial stages of the sort-of associated residential. I say sort-of because it’s associated with three separate courses (S204, SK277 and SD226) of which I’ve only done one so far and had intended to be in the midst of another one as I write this though I’ll not be doing it for another year or perhaps two on the current plans. The net effect of that is that I need to go over more of the background material than is ideal but, so far, that seems remarkably doable as has all of the biology so far.

Slightly unusually, the website is open before the paper versions of the documents have arrived which has let me get an initial look at them. There’s not really that much: the usual course-team letter, the introductory booklet and a course guide which also contains the background science required of the course. That last one is so comprehensive that I’d say it would be possible to come to this course without having done any of the three related biology courses though obviously you’d need to work that much harder if you did that.

Assessment-wise, it seems easy enough from this vantage point with the usual attendance requirement, marks on two mid-week presentations and a short (1000 word) write-up after the course which collectively seem very doable at this point. Total time required is supposed to be 10 hours going over the preparatory information, the week itself and about 10 hours doing the write-up following the course.

Because of the mix of associated courses, there’s a corresponding mix of experiments to be done over the week. They’re split into three separate themes: regulation and control (aimed at the human biology people), energy (aimed more generally at animals I think but I’ve not read that yet) and plants and carbon dioxide (obviously aimed at plants). All look to be very interesting at this point and that’s a view that seems to be reflected in all the course comments from previous students.

The only problem is that this course plus the human biology one are too darned interesting! That’s created a real dilemma for me in that I was originally intending to be doing a physics degree and, so far, I’m finding the biology both fascinating (much more so than the physics at this point) and a whole lot more doable than I had ever imagined it would be. That fascinating+doable combo has me thinking that perhaps I should jump ship and do the biology degree now. Snag is that with the withdrawal of the named science degrees by the OU, a choice to do that at this point basically rules out the possibility of doing a physics degree later on (though the courses would potentially remain available).

In principle, it sounded like a good idea. Other countries have organised debates between their potential leaders in the run-up to an election, so why not do it in the UK too?

For one thing, by the time they’d gotten around to running with the idea, the UK had saddled itself with three separate regional governments in addition to the Westminster parliament and therefore there needed to be four separate debates running in the pre-election period. Not a big deal to be sure but it meant that the heavy-hitters in terms of presenters were snapped up by the main debate so the other debates seemed very much a down market affair in comparison.

The biggest problem though is that we don’t actually elect those leaders directly. They’re selected from amongst all the people we’ve already elected around the country in the regional assemblies and in Westminster. Those regional assemblies are a problem too because their election periods aren’t in sync with those at Westminster so there wasn’t a lot of point in having the regional debates on air now.

But then it descended into silliness with the little worm thing going across the screen as the second debate progressed. What was the point of that? It was driven by people the TV companies had selected from amongst the “I want to be on TV” crowd (we noticed several on the programme who’d clearly joined that bandwagon some time ago). That in itself wouldn’t be so bad but it ended up with a reliability that must be close to zero given that the TV people had “balanced” the audience controlling the thing thus making it highly skewed towards minorities (the “token white” syndrome) but did they really think that everyone would remain alert to what was being said throughout the long and tedious debate?

Perhaps if it had been a debate, they might have but it seemed more like isolated presentations for the most part, particularly in the regional debates.

All it really showed was that the leaders are quite good at making presentations and that leaders of parties with no real hope of forming the next government can really let their total lack of responsibility run wild.

Last night there was the choice between watching round 2 of the UK wide debates or, for those of us outside England, watching our own local guys debating instead.

In the end we opted for the local guys simply because the UK-wide debate was getting really boring with all the expected reactions trotted out on cue. There’s only so much interest you can drum up to watch a fairly calm debate: what’s needed is a bit more fighting between the parties I think as there didn’t seem to be any real depth of feeling coming across this time around.

Our local debates were even more calm and collected if anything (there was the one with the main leaders, another with the also-rans). As in the national debates, the parties that have no real power had all the wonderful ideas to put forward but with no worries about taking responsibility of implementing whatever grandiose ideas that they could come up with. As usual, the greens came across as wanting to take us all back to that calmer and gentler time that was the middle ages when we could all grow our own food, didn’t pollute too much and died horrible deaths at an early age. They generally don’t mention that last bit for some reason.

There wasn’t even much following up of the scandals that the two major party leaders had been involved in which seemed a shame in some ways as it was the only part where the level of debate even approached an interesting level.

Why are they all so boring? Everyone says that they want to encourage people to become interesting in politics but they don’t seem to do anything substantial about it. That’s a shame because it is interesting and affects us all: it’s just that the debate format being used at the moment just isn’t a suitable means to generate that interest.