Freeborn Adam

I have been wondering since the general election. I classify myself as liberal. I believe that a primary function of the state is to protect the autonomy of the individual, to maximise our freedoms and restrict them only rarely and with *very* careful consideration given to the need to protect the citizenry from violence, fraud, theft and the abuse of power. I believe in the value of pluralism, that the expression of opinions (even those utterly distasteful to me) should be protected where they do not incite violence, fraud, theft and the abuse of power.

I classify myself as being on the left of centre because I believe that the state has a further responsibility, to manage education and health services and the necessary infrastructure for a viable society (transport, utilities etc) in a manner that ensures equal access and opportunity for all citizens.

I classify myself as left because I recognise that society left entirely to an “invisible hand” promotes inequalities of access and opportunity, inequalities based on gender, on race, on disability, on class (defined by the wealth and professional connections of the family one is born into). These are inequalities that I believe a just society aims to address. And this perception is not born of annoyance that I don’t have things that others have. I was born into a reasonably middle class family, certainly middle class enough for me to maximise my opportunities as a white, middle class male with reasonable academic ability. It is born of an understanding of the research that supports the observation that such social exclusion mechanisms exist, followed by my own personal observation.

As a liberal, I have found my seat increasingly uncomfortable in the Labour camp. While making massive inroads on equality issues over the years, there is no denying that the Labour party have managed to successively erode civil liberties over the years. probably with the best of genuine intentions. But I do not need or want the state to protect me at the expense of my freedom. There are losses I am willing to risk for the preservation of my freedom. In the words of Ben Franklin “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

So I voted Liberal Democrat in the last election. And I have no qualms about that. I made my choice and I see benefits arising from the current governmental situation, though it isn’t one I ever foresaw. I’ve been heartened by the Liberal Democrats I have met in my local party, though a quirk of fate seems to have made sure that they were pretty left of centre, which may have given me a distorted view of the party.

But within days I find my seat increasingly uncomfortable in the Liberal Democrat camp. It isn’t about the influence a minority party is having on policy. That influence I see as wholly beneficial under the current circumstances. It is the blinkered belief that I encounter again and again that all is well in the world of equality and opportunity. That we live in a meritocracy. We do not live in a meritocracy. The belief for example, expressed by several, that it is not only acceptable, but desirable, that we have a *very* high number of Oxbridge graduates in the cabinet because people who got to Oxbridge a) got there on merit and b) Oxbridge graduates will have had the best education to prepare them to govern. The inability to recognise that the mechanisms that perpetuate inequality of access and opportunity are complex and reach through every layer of social activity, or that a few sops and tweaks to policy will fix them.

Again and again I am hearing, from the right of the party, generalisations drawn from specifics. Private schooling isn’t so bad because some children can get scholarships based on merit. Unfortunately, these generalisations only need a few counter examples to invalidate them as social truths. And there are many counter examples.

I really am a pluralist, folks. You are entitled to those opinions. But if manifest in policy they will be the death of any hope of any real sense of freedom for all, independent of origin, creed, colour or gender. Just as I stand and fall by the rule of law, a law that applies to us all irrespective of standing, so too must I stand by a rule of equal opportunity and accessibility. And that is a pretty binary thing. Either all children have access to the same standards of education, and equal opportunity to choose what they then do with that when they leave school (be that plumbing or particle physics) or they don’t. Either women have an equal opportunity to progress through the political system and stand for and be elected to Parliament, or they don’t.

So I’m left wondering where the best place to promote a liberal left agenda is. And I’m still wondering.

Musing over the last few days following the electoral results, I’ve formed a hypothesis. I’m not a political analyst, so it might not be a new hypothesis, but it certainly seems to be one that is testable to a degree, so I thought it worth pursuing.

My first question was, if the Liberal Democrats seemed so popular in the polls, how come they consistently do so bad in the elections? We all know that they will, we knew that they would though the degree to which they did came as even more of a shocker than usual. I saw the popular support for them dwindle in the polls after the first Leader’s Debate and it was often presented in political commentary as if a childish fascination with Nick Clegg’s presentation skills was somehow giving way to the more traditional, sensible views of the two main parties. I think this is utterly and unspeakably wrong. My sense was that basically people who wanted a change started to bottle it as the election approached because they know that the Liberal Democrats could not get elected, so fell back into traditional patterns of voting against the party they didn’t want rather than for the part they did want.

My second question lead on from this. If people resorted to voting against the party they didn’t want (and here I refer to a battle between the Conservatives and New Labour), how did this result in a voting pattern that resulted in distorted seats for each of the two main contenders and significant loss of seats for the other parties? What is it about voting patterns across the country that resulted in Labour getting 29% of the vote and 39.7% of the seats, while Liberal Democrat get 23% of the vote and 8.8% of the seats? (I’d like to add here that I have no party political axe to grind on behalf of the Liberal Democrat Party. They are simply the best example to use to demonstrate the dis-proportionality of the system).

The only pattern I can think of that can result in such an outcome is one where Labour and Tory votes are heavily clustered, while Liberal Democrat votes are far more evenly spread. Clustering votes in regions will, in a first past the post system, give advantage to those parties who cluster and disadvantage those parties whose support is uniformly spread. This is pretty well understood, old news I know. It’s why we refer to the Labour and Tory “safe seats”. It’s why the Liberal Democrats cannot readily increase their women MPs in the same way as Labour because having no “safe seats” denies them the strategic opportunities that Labour have. I wanted a clearer confirmation though. So I took a spreadsheet of every constituency and votes within that constituency. I removed, for clarity, all those constituencies that did not have either a Labour, Tory or Liberal Democrat ppc, and then I looked at the standard deviation of the percentage votes for each party across all remaining constituencies.

It has been a long time since I have done any maths involving this sort of statistics, but to a statistician it is pretty basic stuff, only one step up from averages. If you don’t know, the standard deviation is (in lay terms) a measure of how wildly a set of numbers deviate from the average or central point. So, if one particular party got very low votes in some areas, but very high ones in other areas, I would expect to see a standard deviation that was quite high. If they got a similar proportion of votes in each area, the standard deviation would be low.

That is indeed what happens. Labour and Conservative get pretty much the same deviation,14.6 and 15.9 respectively. The Liberal Democrat Party however, get a significantly lower figure, 10.5. (I attach the spreadsheet in case anyone should be geeky enough to want to check the figures).

It is interesting that Labour and Conservative get similar figures. It is what I would expect, since areas that have high Labour support tend to have lower Conservative support and vice versa (a pattern pretty much born out by re-ordering the spreadsheet and glancing down the columns).

I would venture to suggest that this is still a traditional class battle played out over decades. This clustering is representative of local cultural values that go back to the height of Britain’s industrial age. Voters’ response to Toryism and Labour is a visceral response, often rooted in local community memory and or aspiration. The Liberal Democrat Party appeal is very much more philosophical. Take the opening paragraph from “Its_About_Freedom“, the definitive statement of the philosophy and beliefs that underpin the Liberal Democrat party.

The core of the Liberal Democrat intellectual inheritance is Liberalism. We start from the autonomy and worth of the individual. Any interference with the freedom of the individual to live as he or she chooses requires to be justified, if it can be, by reference to a system of values drawn from that primary recognition of individual freedom.

Such an intellectual position, rather than a class value based one, is going to have a much broader base of appeal, much more evenly spread through communities. It can be agreed with and ardently believed in by those from disenfranchised communities struggling with poverty and the closure of industry as readily as it can be by those in city business communities, though it is frequently characterized as the province of the middle classes.

It is a truism, I think, that one remains most strongly attached to that against which one struggles most violently. I don’t see that we have much chance in this country of transcending class distinctions and the privilege based system it brings until we move beyond a First Past The Post voting system and re-enfranchise those individuals, those beliefs and values that look beyond simply seeing another party as an enemy to be defeated in the polling station or on the benches of parliament.

2 days after an election that delivered a hung parliament, in which I voted Liberal Democrat because they are the party whose policies form the least worst fit with my beliefs and values and, above all, they stand on a platform of proportional representation, the people are being urged to march. To show their dissatisfaction with an electoral system that could return a party to power with an absolute majority with 40% of the votes, while disenfranchising a party with 23% of the votes by returning them less than 9% of the seats.

I have been a believer in and campaigner for PR all my adult life. But I will not be marching today.

After the noise and shouting has died down, then the real work can begin again. What we have now is a spectacle. A sideshow. After the testosterone fueled election (and despite the attempts to increase female participation at higher levels of politics it remains a whiskey and testosterone fueled game) it is natural that people should express their outrage. People who didn’t get the electoral result they wanted express anger, people who did, party. In effect it is no different to the aftermath of a football match. One side wins, one side loses to a greater or lesser degree.

In the long run though, that is a fleeting, emotive response. Cameron claims that Lib Dems want PR because they would benefit from it. Clegg claims the Tories don’t because they benefit from the status quo. Noise and thunder, all of it.

There are intelligent people behind this election, voters, members of the electorate, who do not agree with me on the issue that I consider singularly most important to the future of politics in this country, that of electoral reform. They have cogent criticisms and concerns. Now begins the task, not of wearing purple and claiming that PR and electoral reform is on a par with women’s suffrage and other fancy dramatic public relations stunts, but of meeting these objections head on. Of engaging with those whose opinions differ, and presenting the solid arguments for while discussing openly and intelligently the arguments against until we can reach a consensus.

I will not be asking Clegg to force through PR. I will be asking that the government bring it to referendum. It seems somehow contrary to the principle of fair election that we attempt to bully PR into the constitution. But not yet. There is work to be done first.

I don’t know if Gillian Duffy is a bigot or not. She is quoted as saying “You can’t say anything about the immigrants. All these eastern Europeans what [sic] are coming in – where are they flocking from?” to Gordon Brown. To me, that reads as an elderly woman with anxieties about immigration. Now I think those anxieties are utterly unfounded, but I also want to live in a pluralistic society where people are understood and accepted as having differing opinions and concerns. So, if she were willing to talk about her anxieties, I would be willing to discuss them and put forward arguments that aimed to allay those fears.

But what does our Prime Minister, the leader of our elected (and supposedly representative) government do? Goes and gets himself recorded calling this woman a bigot behind her back.

I live in a constituency that a few years ago had 25% of those who voted in the council elections voting for a BNP candidate. 25%. 1in 4. Now I walk through the streets, go into the shops, visit the park with these people every day and it is not easy to dismiss them all as bigots. Most of them are normal every day folk who have anxieties about the world they see around them. And no one in main stream politics is taking those anxieties seriously. Taking them seriously does not mean agreeing with them, it means not dismissing them simply because you disagree with them. Because the alternative is disenfranchisement, and creates a society where those who disagree with the government are “dissident”. Disenfranchised dissidents prove fertile soil for minority extremist parties who promise to lend an ear to those concerns.

All it would take is for politicians to acknowledge opinions and feelings within the electorate that are contrary to their own. Why is that such an unreasonable thing to expect?

Addendum: The point I am trying to make is that the problem stems from an approach to politics that discards and devalues difference, that only surrounds itself with like thinking, complacent in the belief that it is “right” thinking. It is NOT acceptable in my opinion to lazily vote for a party like the BNP that appeals to your baser fears… this post is not an apologist post for BNP voters. But nor is it acceptable for those in power with the responsibility of representing the elctorate to marginalise swathes of that electorate because they express opinions that you might find uncomfortable. It is also dangerous.