There’s been a BBC climbdown over removing 11,000 recipes from the internet. Now, just the links to them will be obliterated, with the bulk of the recipes moving across to BBC Good Food, so that the main BBC website doesn’t compete with commercial companies that freak out at the prospect of actually having to make something good, diverse, reasonably ad-free and usable.

According to the Guardian’s article on all this, culture secretary John Whittingdale, who told the BBC what to do, attempted to distance himself from what was going on: “It’s not my job to tell the BBC whether [or not] to broadcast The Voice, or Strictly Come Dancing or indeed to put recipes up on its website,” he told a conference in London. “We have said firstly that the BBC needs to be more distinctive. And also it has to be sensitive to its market impact and not be directly going out of its way to compete with commercial offerings,” thereby essentially telling the BBC whether [or not] to broadcast The Voice, or Strictly Come Dancing or indeed to put recipes up on its website, just like he did before in the White Paper that essentially told the BBC whether [or not] to broadcast The Voice, or Strictly Come Dancing or indeed to put recipes up on its website.

So it begins. The BBC Food website is to be axed. 11,000 recipes on a usable, inclusive website are to vanish, because Tories have been convinced by their rich friends that competition is only acceptable when the BBC is out of the running, and that the BBC Food website apparently is too dominant (i.e. not rubbish).

According to the BBC, scrapping the website is part of a plan to cut £15m from the corporation’s online budget, even though leaving the website up would cost naff-all. Furthermore, a BBC source stated:

What we do has to be high quality, distinctive, and offer genuine public value. While our audiences expect us to be online, we have never sought to be all things to all people and the changes being announced will ensure that we are not.

This is a rocky road the BBC is heading down — being forced to head down. The Conservatives would prefer at most for the BBC to become a broadcaster of last resort — a small PBS-style outfit that only creates content that others cannot or will not. Now, it’s being urged to not compete with other terrestrial broadcasters in prime-time slots, to pare back its website, and to focus on more niche fare.

We’ve seen this play out before. In a few years, Conservatives will be slamming the BBC for not having enough TV audience share/overall website users to justify the licence fee. The BBC will be told it is a broadcaster that’s supposed to cater for everyone, but now it’s only serving the few. And it’ll be ordered to pivot accordingly. Rinse and repeat.

All the while, the general public — still largely pro-BBC — will gradually get increasingly irritated by the corporation, and see less value in the licence fee. If enough people are hoodwinked, there’ll be a call for it to be scrapped entirely. And Rupert Murdock will crack an evil grin, while figuring out how he can somehow close down The Guardian and The Mirror.

Update: As Tom Pride notes, Murdoch has a couple of recipe sites waiting to launch. I can’t imagine that had anything to do with getting the BBC to scrap its recipe website, and also only have future recipes online for 30 days.

If you’re not from the UK, you might be unaware the Conservative Party is currently fighting a reckless proxy war for the leadership, with the UK’s membership of the EU being the battlefield. We can look forward to four months of campaigning, outright falsehoods, and attempts by both sides to skew and spin stories to their advantage. One today, however, was eye-opening in attempts at ‘balance’, both by campaigners and news outlets.

On the BBC’s report, EU exit would risk jobs, says group of business bosses, the following is stated:

Leaving the European Union would threaten jobs and put the UK’s economy at risk, leaders of some of Britain’s biggest companies have said. […] In a move described by No 10 as “unprecedented”, chairmen or chief executives of 36 FTSE 100 companies signed the letter, organised by Stronger in Europe and Downing Street, backing the campaign to stay in the EU, including Burberry, BAE Systems and EasyJet.

So 36 FTSE 100 companies are arguing already that the UK quitting the EU would deter investment in an already shaky UK economy. That should be terrifying to most people. Perhaps predictably, ‘balance’ was found:

Leave campaigners point out two-thirds of FTSE 100 firms, including Tesco and Sainsbury, did not back the letter.

This is true, but the inference here by those who want out is clearly that the majority is somehow not in favour. However, that’s not the case. What we currently have is 36 per cent saying “don’t leave, you idiots” and 64 per cent saying nothing at all. If even half of those companies sign a letter saying “leave the EU”, fair enough. But until then, the ‘score’ for those keeping count in this particular match is 36-nil, not 36-64.

The UK now has a Conservative majority government, after a night where the SNP took over Scotland, the Liberal Democrats self-combusted, Labour did poorly, and the Greens and UKIP barely made a dent in the Commons.

However, looking over the votes cast tells a different story. When comparing only the larger and non-nationalist parties, and looking at how many votes it took to get an MP elected, the imbalance is stark:

• UKIP (624 candidates): 3,875,409 votes per seat
• Green Party (568): 1,154,562
• Liberal Democrat (631): 299,983
• Labour (631): 40,258
• Conservative (647): 34,292

Unsurprisingly, calls for proportional representation have now erupted, and for the first time the ‘left’ is joined by the ‘right’, given that UKIP amassed a third of the votes the Conservatives did, but the latter party got 331 times as many MPs. (The Greens did ‘better’, in getting a single MP on about an eighth of the Labour vote, which returned 232 MPs.)

However, there’s also considerable push-back against the idea of proportional representation, not least people saying: But do you really want 80 UKIP MPs? Of course not. My political leanings are progressive, not extremist Tory. But I recognise that they are my political leanings, and not those of an entire country. I feel it’s absurd over a million votes returned just one Green MP, but it’s actually more unfair all those people who voted UKIP have barely any representation in the Commons.

The ‘80 UKIP MPs’ argument also supposes British people would vote in exactly the same way under a PR system, which no-one knows for sure. Certainly, people would be less likely to vote tactically, and there’d be no safe seats. But even if PR did return that number of UKIP MPs, better the UK is mature enough to own its politics and who supports whom, rather than attempting to sweep it under the carpet — especially if trends continue. Although many small-party voters are now disillusioned, what if they double down in 2020? How will the UK look if the Conservatives and Labour between them amass 16 million votes and 85 per cent of the seats, but UKIP and the Greens get half as many votes, but still only a few seats between them?

The narrative surrounding various other aspects of PR is also troubling. I keep hearing the argument was laid to rest when we got a referendum on PR, but we never had that. In 2011, we were offered the choice of the status quo or switching to Alternative Vote, described by some as a “miserable little compromise”. AV is not a proportional system — it essentially assist the third party at the minor expense of others. At the time, the Liberal Democrats would have benefitted slightly; now, UKIP would. In either case, the result would not be proportional.

Additionally, many argue PR would wreck the constituency link, but that doesn’t necessarily have to happen. Electoral systems like AMS retain such links, and the UK could have reform where MPs for the Commons were returned on a fairly tight regional basis, for example by county rather than region. (The latter is currently how MEPs are elected, and would perhaps be an option should the Lords be replaced by an elected senate.)

The final issue is that coalitions are inherently unstable, apparently. If we were to head down the PR route, a majority government would be extremely unlikely in the UK. (But if it did happen, it would be because the majority of the country actually voted for the party in power, unlike now, when just over a third of voters — and under a quarter of the electorate — backed the Conservatives.) The thing is, I don’t see Nordic countries descending into chaos because of their proportional systems, and Germany seems to be doing quite well, despite electing its parliament in this manner.

Still, with the Conservatives in power now and Labour still presumably reckoning it can again win a majority in 2020, I doubt we’ll see any electoral reform happen. Far better to bang on about fairness while ensuring most votes fundamentally don’t matter, and gamble on winning those few that do. Politics: British style. Partying like it’s 1899 in 2015.

This year’s general election in the UK is a crapshoot. The outdated voting system — combined with the rise of UKIP and the SNP, the curveball of the Greens, and general anger at the coalition — makes the result impossible to predict. Plenty of people call themselves undecided voters, but just as many fall back to habit, voting for parties they assume speak for them. I’d largely made up my mind how to vote, but decided to read the manifestos of all of the main parties with candidates in Great Britain (as in, England, Scotland and Wales). The results were insightful and frequently surprising.

In a general sense, I found it very clear how much of people’s perception of politics is warped by the media, but also how the actions of a small set of politicians doesn’t necessarily correlate with what a party claims to stand for. Arguments about how all parties are the same are impossible to support on actually reading their policies; while there’s no doubt the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats are often seen fighting for a certain kind of middle-England voter, I wonder how much of that is down to the broken electoral system rather than what they actually believe in. Certainly, the manifestos showcase three very different parties — although not necessarily standing where you might expect.

What follows is my reaction to the manifestos for each party, in the order that I read them in.

UKIP‘s manifesto, to my surprise, wasn’t a kind of rambling embarrassment. The party wants to be seen as a properly mature political force, and the manifesto is evidence of that. My personal politics are at odds with much of what the party’s suggesting, but the document is some way from the ‘swivel-eyed loons’ label the media frequently paints the party with. That said, the party does retain some oddball thinking at times, such as banging on about British seaside holidays and funnelling money into saving such towns, and its overall stance on policy was, to my mind, coming from a fairly extreme Conservative viewpoint.

The SNP manifesto was broadly impressive, human, and positive. Whether the economic figures within are accurate, I couldn’t say, but there was a refreshing openness and humanity throughout, not least in displaying a candid position on potential post-election support. The party’s policies on the whole now appear to veer towards socialism, with a progressive bent that I’m sure plenty of people outside of Scotland would vote for. It’s easy to see why the party is on course to take a huge number of Scottish seats. Purely on the basis of the manifesto, ‘the SNP will destroy the UK’ alarmism seems misplaced. Like Plaid Cymru, the SNP’s long-standing aim is to usher in an independent country, but the manifesto goes to great lengths to say the party wants to be a positive influence on all of the UK.

The Conservative manifesto was in some ways a tougher read than the UKIP one, and it had strange ideas of its own, such as dredging up the A303 tunnel near Stonehenge as policy. It referred heavily to Labour and the mess the party left so often that it may as well have just added ‘REMEMBER: LABOUR IS EVIL’ as a footnote on every page. But I was nonetheless surprised with how caustic the manifesto was. In practically the same breath it talks about eliminating child poverty, it then says the party would lower the benefit cap by three grand. It talks about the BBC World Service being vital, yet elsewhere argues for the licence fee to be frozen. Education policy also seems positively Victorian, demanding core subjects include history or geography, but ignoring IT, creativity and social studies entirely. Elsewhere, there was a lot about rewarding people for work, but the policies on tax and benefits are more about rewarding the rich. If anything, I disliked this manifesto more than the UKIP one, and noted on Twitter that the Conservatives truly are the Selfish Bastards Party as we head into this election.

With Plaid Cymru, I was expecting the Welsh version of the SNP, but for some reason the spark just wasn’t there. I’m not sure why. Somehow, the Plaid Cymru manifesto seemed a little lacking in ambition, and it probably didn’t help later on when some of its big-hitter policies on devolution and train nationalisation are very similar to those in the Liberal Democrat and Labour manifestos. Still, the party’s broadly progressive aims were evident.

The big surprise for me was the mammoth Liberal Democrat manifesto, a 158-page document that looks like it’s been spat out from Microsoft Word. It’s a baffling read in many ways, not least because it’s for the most part really good. Policy-wise, it reads like a mix of new and old Labour, with largely socialist and well-meaning policies that I was hoping for (but often didn’t find) in Labour’s manifesto. It was the only manifesto that seemed truly savvy about the potential in digital and technology, and the UK’s role in that. However, it did also make me wonder why we don’t actually see this version of the Liberal Democrats anywhere. If the party in government was this party, it’d be polling in the 20s at least, not single figures. Maybe it is this party, but the media has hammered it; but the Liberal Democrat voting record suggests otherwise. Perhaps had we got a Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010, things could have been very different.

The Labour manifesto was perhaps the weirdest one. The others generally outline their policy in specific areas, but Labour’s lumps policies together under rather broader umbrellas like “Helping our families and communities to thrive” and “Providing world-class health and education services”. I imagine this was designed to make the manifesto more approachable, but it just comes across as a bit messy. And the same could be said for the policies in general. Unsurprisingly, Labour’s extremely strong on health, but it too often feels here like it’s hedging its bets — faffing about rail nationalisation, trying to convince people who might vote Conservative about Labour’s tough stance on immigration, and so on. Read the Labour and Conservative manifestos back to back and they are very clearly different beasts, but I too often felt Labour’s veered into being ‘Conservative Lite’ (while the Conservative one goes ‘Full Tory’ right from the get-go). Labour needs to be bold, whereas its manifesto practically admits it’s being unambitious. (Still, that beats caustic.)

Finally, the Green Party manifesto is a weighty tome in terms of word-count, and by far the most radical. The Greens aren’t so much ‘merely’ progressive as demanding an ambitious overhaul of society, from top to bottom. There are things within I took issue with (not least the party’s energy policy), but the majority of the ideas the party has are interesting and the arguments are mostly sound — and a long way from the ‘mad vegan’ label they get. Much like UKIP, the Greens have been branded as a kind of dangerous and extremist party; with UKIP, I just see the establishment in a different hue, but with the Greens, I see a threat to establishment thinking and dominance, which is presumably why newspapers and rival parties alike argue they are to be crushed.

Update. Here are the links to the manifestos: Conservative; Green Party; Labour; Liberal Democrat; Plaid Cymru; SNP; UKIP.