A better way to elect the UK parliament
When people in the UK discuss alternatives to the current electoral system used for Westminster (first-past-the-post), they tend to look towards Ireland, Australia or possibly Germany, but never Scandinavia.
However, the system used there has many advantages, and indeed people there just take it for granted, so it must have got something right!
To make the Danish electoral system tangible, I have therefore made a simulation of the UK General Election 2005 according to the Danish system. (It’s quite long, so feel free to skip down to the results instead of reading all the details.)
Here are some of the advantages of the Danish system:
- Every vote counts. Even if your vote doesn’t get anybody elected where you live, it will count towards your party elsewhere in the country. This combats the way parties under FPTP tend to concentrate all their efforts on swing voters in marginal seats.
- The politicians need to get themselves elected, not just their party. A politician will typically be up against at least ten other candidates from their own party, and it is therefore important to have a personal agenda, not just to toe the party line.
- Need to be positive. When all votes count, if party A claims party B are evil, it might benefit party C or D just as easily as party A. So instead, party A needs to give the voters reasons to vote for them.
- It preserves some sort of constituency link. Given that it’s still the constituencies that put up candidates, and given that MPs are elected in small groups of constituencies, there is still a very strong local link, and it’s easy to understand how to get rid of a bad MP.
- Results are available quickly. Like FPTP, but unlike STV, results come in quickly, thus providing for a good election night experience.
- Opinion polls are right. Under FPTP, there is no simple correlation between share of the vote and number of seats won, so a party can lose votes but gain seats and vice versa. Under the Danish system, more votes leads to more seats, and opinion polls will therefore accurately predict how many MPs each party will get.
- Parties become truly national. Under FPTP, most parties tend to get most of their MPs elected in specific geographical areas (LibDems in the South West, Labour in the cities, the Tories in rural England). The Danish system spreads out the MPs more evenly, so that the LibDems will get fewer seats in the South West but more in the cities and rural England, Labour will get fewer seats in the cities but more elsewhere, etc. (This is not taken to extremes. The SNP only gets seats in Scotland – it’s not artificially extended to England.)
Tschenkéli’s Georgian-German dictionary is in print again!
Great news!
The famed three-volume Georgian-German dictionary by Kita Tschenkéli (კიტა ჩხენკელი), “Georgisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch”, which is the best bilingual dictionary of Georgian into any language, including English and Russian, is in print again!
When I studied Georgian in Tbilisi, my dad had to get all 2508 pages photocopied from the university library’s copy and sent to me because it was absolutely essential but impossible to buy anywhere.
The price is €145, which is really quite cheap for this type of work. The only reason I’m not ordering it is because I still have my prized photocopies.
They’re also selling his excellent Einführung in die Georgische Sprache at €75. This is not essential in the same way, but it’s definitely worth having if you’re serious about learning Georgian. I don’t own it, but I’ve spent many happy hours with it in the library of the Department of Linguistics in Aarhus.
Prime ministerial debates in Scotland
The BBC’s Michael Crick can report that “the Leaders’ Debates at the forthcoming election have now been cancelled. Instead, over the past 2-3 weeks they’ve been quietly replaced with Prime Ministerial Debates. It’s a cunning manoeuvre, agreed by the three main broadcasters (the BBC, ITV and Sky) and the three main parties, to exclude the SNP and Plaid Cymru leaders from the debates.”
I’ve discussed in the past why the SNP cannot be excluded in Scotland.
It is also very well described in a comment to Crick’s story by DougtheDug:
If it is true that this renaming has been done to exclude the SNP and PC from the debates along with the Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic and Labour Party, (The Ulster Unionist Party will be represented via their link with the Conservatives), then it’s a clever ploy but once again done with no knowledge of the rules of the game.
Under OFCOM the SNP is classed as a major party in Scotland along with the Conservatives, Labour and the Lib-Dems. PC has major party status in Wales and the NI parties have major party status in Northern Ireland.
Party political election broadcasting is not worked out on the basis of a party’s UK standing but its standing in each of the constituent home nations of the UK. The debates, call them what you will, are multi-party election broadcasts and unless they are impartial in all four home nations then they will fall foul of OFCOM, the BBC guidelines and the law. The only way they can be impartial in Scotland is for all four major parties to be on the platform at the same time. Similarly for Wales and Northern Ireland.
What the broadcasters are trying to do is to apply the rules of impartiality in England which has three major parties to the four party setups in Scotland and Wales and the four party set up in Northern Ireland. It’s a classic case of the broadcasters thinking that England is Britain is England.
Brown’s Enron-like constructs
Willem Buiter describes Brown’s economic legacy well in the Financial Times today:
Britain’s true fiscal circumstances are about as bad as Greece’s reported situation, once we allow for the understatement of UK public debt through the off-balance-sheet accounting tricks of the past decade (the private finance initiative, unfunded public sector pensions, student loans and other Enron-like constructs).
The fiscal weakness of the UK is largely government-inflicted, rather than a result of the financial crisis and global contraction. During the long boom preceding the crisis, fiscal policy was relentlessly pro-cyclical, with public spending rising steadily as a share of gross domestic product.
[...]
Public finances during the last boom are the obvious guide to expectations about the likely future fiscal behaviour of a Labour government. The cynical manipulation of Gordon Brown’s “golden rule” (over the economic cycle borrowing only to invest) and the decision to jettison it and the sustainable investment rule (net debt not to exceed 40 per cent of GDP) as soon as they threatened to become binding constraints will cause the markets to act like St Thomas towards promises of future fiscal tightening: seeing is believing.
Do read the whole thing!
I’m surprised that anybody can still think that Brown is the right person to get us out of this mess.
First anniversary
Today it’s exactly one year ago that I wed my beloved Phyllis!
So much has happened since then – Amaia was conceived and born, I left Collins, and Phyllis and I started up our own company – but it still feels like yesterday.
It was definitely one of the best days of my life. 
We were deceived: Q4 GDP was revised down, not up
When the revised estimate for Q4’s GDP growth was announced to be 0.3% (up from 0.1%), I was a bit surprised, because I didn’t think Q4 seemed to be all that wonderful.
However, Edmundo has now analysed the underlying figures and it turns out that GDP was actually revised down, not up.
His graph is not very clear, though, so here’s my attempt at explaining what happened.
The blue line shows the old estimates from January: Q3 GDP was estimated at some £313bn, and Q4 GDP at £315.845m, thus growing by 0.1%.
The red line shows the revised estimates from this month: Q3 turned out to be much worse than initially estimated, at less than £307bn, whereas the Q4 estimate was almost right, getting adjusted down to £315.712m, and the growth from Q3 to Q4 was therefore 0.3%.
In other words, GDP was slightly lower in Q4 than initially estimated, but the growth is much bigger because Q3 was much worse.
There is therefore nothing whatsoever to celebrate about the revised figures, and the ONS must have been deliberately lying to the public when they sent out a press release called “Services growth in December pushes up GDP estimate”, given that the GDP estimate was actually down.
Theft as marketing
It looks like Sony have vandalised an important landmark in Amsterdam in order to promote a new game (hat-tip: Dina).
It probably seemed like a fun idea to Sony’s marketing department, but I do hope they will be prosecuted harshly, because it sets a very dangerous precedent if you can commit crimes without punishment if it’s for marketing purposes.
I mean, in the first instance it might only be the letters in Hollywood’s logo that get stolen, but what will the next step be?
Will you be allowed to hijack planes to promote a new plane game, or perhaps even blow up a building to promote a new version of Worms?
Brown the bully
The revelations of the past few days that Brown is a paranoid bully cannot have come as much of a surprise for readers of this blog – this is exactly what I surmised nearly two three years ago.
Some people have come to his defence saying that he’s just forceful, or troubled, or focused.
I’m sure most bullies have psychological issues, but that doesn’t excuse them. A bully is defined by their acts, not by their mental health (the CED defines a bully as “a person who hurts, persecutes, or intimidates weaker people”).
As former Father of the Chapel at Collins, I can only condemn those who think they need to intimidate their staff to get good performance – in my experience, the opposite is true.