What is this story really about?

I’ve been re-reading the Guardian story about the phone-hacking at the News of the World, as reported in the New York Times extraordinary feature. Even allowing that we had a full-scale spread on the story by the Guardian earlier this year, this story has not been altogether drowned out by the Hague-Myers story or the launch of Tony Blair’s book. The BBC and ITV are both leading with the story this evening.

I am always interested in stories that just won’t die. Alistair Campbell is reported to once have said that no normal political story could last more than 11 days, but this is still festering, and it brings several important political conflicts into sharp relief.

At the basic level, this is about Andy Coulson - it would not matter if the former NotW Editor was not David Cameron’s Director of Communications, and the UK’s best paid SpAd. His being a SpAd, knitting this story with that of Christopher Myers makes editorial sense. The Guardian’s decision to pursue the story in April/May was seen as part of its partisanship prior to the election, though the paper is very much also a bastion of anti-Murdoch sentiment matched in this country only by the BBC (see the latest farrago concerning Murdoch’s HarperCollins publishing the autobiography of ‘The Stig’ from the BBC’s Top Gear and other stories passim ad nauseaum).

Compound the story then with the entry of the New York Times (which, as it notes, is in a well-financed deathmatch with Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal), and its high-browed approach to journalistic ethics and reporting. If they are right, Coulson would stand accused of illegal activity, and potentially misleading a Parliamentary committee. Several questions still stand: how widespread was this practice, and to what extent did the authorities (the PCC but more importantly Scotland Yard) investigate and take action (or not).

Apparently, rebellious Lib Dems are now putting pressure on Nick Clegg to get the PM to agree to a judicial inquiry. The Guardian names Mike Hancock MP, Roger Williams MP and Lembit Opik (whose phone was apparently hacked. Of all the fights Clegg will have on his hands at party conference, might this be an easy one on which to make concessions?

With Labour figures, including Lord Prescott and Chris Bryant MP, taking legal action to see a judicial review of the investigation by the Metropolitan Police (who stand accused by the NYT of caring about their “long-term relationship with News International”), I suspect this story could run well into next year. The particulars of Coulson’s actions are not, I don’t think, the biggest story here - people knew and hated Alistair Campbell, and yet he survived far worse allegations than this. Damien McBride lost his job for acts widely regarded as deplorable, whereas phone hacking celebs by the tabloids is unlikely to shock British readers half as much as the staff at the New York Times. What might shock them is that Scotland Yard was apparently reluctant to pursue a more comprehensive investigation at the newspaper.

As journalism (or more properly, the mass media industry) is claimed to be in its death throes, and people like Columbia University President Lee Bollinger are seeking to remind us of the importance of a Free Press to hold government to account, this story is interesting because it suggests that one arm of the media is so powerful that even an arm of the government in the form of the police (who are, for the moment, unelected) are nervous about investigating it.

It’s almost funny to think of the way in which major political leaders, from Blair to Brown to Cameron, have courted the Murdoch empire, and yet the entire tabloid industry is being accused of widespread activity that carries custodial punishment at the hands of the State. Maybe future political leaders should learn a lesson from Caligula: it is better to be feared than loved. Start prosecuting cases uncovered by Royalcelebritymobilecellphonevoicemailhacker-gate (it’s official long-form designation in the Pantheon of Political Scandals), and you might find the remaining executive editors a lot more pliable come the next election…

Morus
Mike Smithson is away

Rod Crosby puts the case for voting YES

Theoretical Case
Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem states that no (#1) voting system can be totally fair when choosing between more than two candidates. Selecting a single-winner voting system therefore depends on which aspects of fairness we consider more important than others.

FPTP’s unfairness has been understood for centuries, and its most deprecated flaws are:-

1) failing the Majority Loser Criterion. FPTP can elect the candidate whom the overwhelming majority of voters wish to defeat.

2) failing the Condorcet Loser Criterion. FPTP can elect the candidate who would lose a head-to-head contest with every other candidate.

3) failing the Independence of Clones Criterion. The well-known phenomenon, also known as “the spoiler effect”, where two similar candidates split the vote, allowing the election of a candidate inimical to both. See Bush, Gore, Nader, 2000.

4) failing the Mutual Majority Criterion. If 59% prefer lemonade, fruit-juice or tea, and 41% prefer whisky or beer, FPTP says it’s democratic for the majority to have to drink whisky.

5) failing the Favourite Betrayal Criterion. FPTP encourages some voters to behave dishonestly, abandoning their sincere choice for the “lesser of two evils.” Philosophers, unsurprisingly, find this troubling. In the UK we know this syndrome as “tactical voting”.

The Alternative Vote completely cures the first four problems, and while not wholly removing the fifth (no system can) it renders it less severe. Last, but not least, AV demonstrates that every elected candidate has the acquiescence of the majority of the voters, increasing their legitimacy. By objective measures, therefore, AV is a far superior system to FPTP (and also superior to other single-winner methods).

Empirical Case
Let us dismiss some canards about the operation of AV in Australia. Firstly, Australia does have a third party. It’s an agrarian party called the National Party (formerly the Country Party), which retains its own identity. It has been in permanent if sometimes uneasy alliance with the Liberals in the lower House but acts independently in the Senate, and it’s probably fair to say that without AV it would have sooner or later been absorbed by the larger party, in a similar way that the Liberal Unionists and National Liberals were absorbed by the Tories here. Australian politics seems richer for the existence of this separate, if somewhat eccentric third party.

Secondly, there are currently 4 independents in the Australian lower House, which would equate proportionally to 17 in the British House of Commons. So it would appear that AV, in practice as well as in theory, is slightly more capable of electing independents than FPTP is. [Another example is the Irish Presidential election of 1990, where against all expectations AV elected an independent instead of the machine politician put forward by the major party.]

Thirdly and perhaps most surprisingly, AV is a semi-PR system(#2), displaying about half the dis-proportionality of FPTP elections, and has actually delivered results in Australia that are more proportional than the so-called PR systems used in the UK (#3) to elect Euro MPs and the devolved Assemblies!

For those reformers holding out for some perfect version of PR - which doesn’t even exist - remember, this is the first time since 1931 that any change to the voting system has been seriously proposed (and that was to AV). Eighty years is a long time to possibly wait for the next opportunity for reform, and our great-grandchildren will rightly look askance if the 2011 referendum is defeated by an unlikely coalition of diehards and dreamers…

Footnotes:
1 some voting systems, such as Borda, Approval and Range appear to confound Arrow’s Theorem, but they are cardinal systems which violate the principle of majority rule (the Majority Criterion), so Arrow excluded them from his definition of a voting system. The shortcoming shared by these systems means that they are never likely to be considered suitable in a mass democracy.
2 Taagepera, R. and Shugart, M. S. (1989): Seats and Votes. The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems. Yale University Press, New Haven.
3 Kestelman, P. (2005) Apportionment and Proportionality: A Measured View. Voting Matters, Issue 20(4), The McDougall Trust

This is what his memo looks like enlarged.

See Daily Mail here.

“Dyed In Some Wool” puts the case for voting NO

When considering the upcoming referendum, AV seems to me not only to be the wrong answer, but the referendum itself is the wrong question. Let’s look at the main reasons for considering a yes vote.

I want a more proportional system
AV is not proportional and will not lead to parliament reflecting the national vote, most seats contested at the 2010 election would remain in the same hands. AV will create a handful of additional marginals on which the parties will concentrate campaigning efforts to the detriment of other areas of the UK. Will democracy be better served by parties campaigning locally on ‘How To Ensure xxxx Does Not Get In?’ The right answer offers a proportional system, AV is not the right answer.

My vote is a wasted vote
Under AV, anyone will have the ability to state secondary preferences, but if the party or candidate you wish to win does not secure 50% of the vote, then your vote is wasted in any case, if your secondary choice also fails to win then again your vote remains wasted. In a constituency system, clustering of party support will always tend towards supporters of an unpopular party locally feeling their vote is wasted. However, we have not been given the option to rebase our democracy away from the constituency based to a proportional system that would properly address the notion of a wasted vote. The right answer addresses the perceived waste of votes, AV is not a comprehensive, or the correct, answer.

I hate the notion of the safe seat/I want to punish the individual MP
AV will not address this problem. The safest seats in the country will remain safe under AV as the main party will secure over 50% of the vote making the alternative votes unecessary. The very problem stated as a reason to vote for this change will remain as is under the new system. There are more effective ways to deal with a problem MP in a safe seat, the open primary being but one example which would erode the apparant safety of party selection and thus prevent bed blockers or expense cheats prospering. The right answer addresses the problem, AV is not the right answer.

It is a step in the right direction
We should be wary here. If the referendum passes, the yes supporters will have nailed their colours to the mast and it is unlikely a further change to the system will be offered (and indeed should not be) until the electorate has seen and experienced AV for a few elections. Therefore a yes vote from those who wish to go further will likely delay the possibility of this. This also goes to the very heart of the matter, are we unhappy with our political system and if so, what change do we want? We are being offered a solitary answer to a question we have not been consulted over.

I suggest that the vote must be no. I would amend the referendum to state ‘do you wish to retain FPTP?’ and if no is victorious, spend the following 4 years consulting on the sort of features we want, offering, at the next general election, a series of options in a referendum. The very least we deserve is that the right question is asked.