Desperately sad news from the BBC today as it announced the first phase in the sale of Television Centre, White City, London. The BBC’s putting a brave face on this, claiming it’s all about making a smaller, fitter BBC, but the building is where many famous shows were born. More importantly, it’s a central hub for the BBC, which will now be fired in all directions across the UK, into cheaper real estate.

The real reason, of course, for the sale has nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with successive governments trying to kill the BBC by removing chunks of its funding, causing a massive shortfall. It’s depressing to note that regardless of whether you back the Tories or Labour, both of them want the BBC dead. Rupert Murdoch must be laughing his arse off right about now.

I was at a restaurant last night, when everyone within heard a loud bang. A guy had abruptly passed out and smacked his head really hard on the door. He was unconscious, and his wife said he’d felt sick and was trying to get some air.

We called an ambulance. We didn’t think about this, didn’t ask the wife if her husband was insured—we just called. The ambulance arrived in 15 minutes and the guy—now conscious, if not entirely with it—was taken to hospital. He will be treated, regardless of what is wrong, and he will never be asked to part with huge sums of money.

Interestingly, we were dining with two people who’d been living on the USA (one Brit, one American), noting, sadly, that many Americans would think twice about the “hundreds of bucks” an ambulance call-out would cost, and that the idea of global healthcare remains largely demonised in the USA, most often by the people it’s designed to help (the non-rich).

From recent events, it’s clear for all David Cameron’s arguments to the contrary, he and the Tories don’t care about the NHS one bit. Mark Britnell, one of Cameron’s senior health advisors, according to Political Scrapbook, recently said:

In future, the NHS will be a state insurance provider not a state deliverer.

Talking to his corporate private health sector chums, he added:

The NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.

This, of course, coincides with the government’s supposed ‘listening exercise’ regarding health reform.

For Tory MPs, the anti-NHS stance is logical for all kinds of reasons, not least the fact most Tories would happily do away with all socialist aspects of government. It’s unlikely many of them use the NHS, preferring to pay for private care; therefore, they neither have the experience of the NHS nor the ability to empathise with those who cannot afford to pay for an insurance-based system. As someone who’s self-employed and therefore wouldn’t be covered by an employer system, I also dread the thought of ‘NHS USA’, and suspect it would wreck UK entrepreneurialism.

But mostly, I think about random guy last night. We could not have gotten him medical care any more swiftly, and as the ambulance left the signs were good. But with a system where you do think and you do hesitate, that could cost vital minutes and lead to a very different result—all to make Conservatives happy about tearing down one of the finest socialist components the UK will ever see.

I love the NHS, despite its faults. It’s not perfect, but it’s there when we need it, universally. If you agree and your MP is Liberal Democrat, write to them and make it extraordinarily clear they won’t get your support in 2015 (or sooner, if the coalition doesn’t last its full term) unless they block this bill. If your MP is Conservative, argue the same (for all the good it will do). And if your MP is from any other party, ask them what they, specifically, are doing to save the NHS, while a spiteful, class-obsessed Tory-led government is doing its level best to tear it down.

Today is the UK referendum on electoral reform. Brits get to choose between FPTP and AV, and the vast majority of my political posts on this blog have been about it, including the much-read AV versus FPTP—just the facts, man. And an interview with someone a bit right-wing who doesn’t exist. (Note to non-Brits and the politically agnostic—don’t worry, I’ll be back to mostly banging on about tech and gaming next week.)

A bunch of people have asked me to explain in a little more depth about how the voting systems work, and so here’s a brief overview.

Briefly, FPTP (our existing system) works as follows:

• Vote for one candidate
• The candidate with the most votes wins the seat

The main strength of FPTP is that it’s dead simple; it’s also largely fair in head-to-head(ish) seats that are mostly a contest between two candidates.

The main problems with FPTP are that its winner-takes-all approach leads to tactical voting in more complex seats, and it also enables someone to take a seat with a minority vote share. There’s also the spoiler effect, which the Tories have used well in recent years—the ‘left’/moderate vote splits, enabling the Tories to win seats that Labour or Lib Dem supporters would have been happy(ish) going to the other candidate.

AV works as follows:

1. Vote for as many candidates as you wish, ranking them in order
2. If a candidate has 50% of the vote, they win the seat, otherwise:
3. Second-choice preferences for the lowest-placed candidates are redistributed.

2 and 3 loop until a candidate has over 50% of the vote. The end result is a winner with the direct backing of core supporters and indirect backing of people who think they are at least ‘better than the other guy’. This kills the spoiler effect.

How could this work in practice? Well, in a seat where a candidate already has a really strong showing, winning over 50% of votes, AV makes no difference at all. This makes sense, since the candidate clearly has majority backing from their constituents. But let’s travel back to a made-up 2010 and a fairly tight contest in a UK seat, with three candidates: Left Lib, Lefty Lab and Righty Con. Righty Con’s a lazy fucker, but he wins elections because the Lefty votes are split and because he has enough core support to squeak through each time. But in the expenses scandal, it was shown that he’s expensed a £25,000 hat and a decade’s worth of Smarties, and so polling suggests things will be tight.

Under FPTP, this is what happened in Made-Up On Thames in 2010:

Lefty Lib: 29%
Lefty Lab: 35%
Righty Con: 36%

As you can see, Righty Con only had a slim majority over Lefty Lab, but the majority of the voters didn’t want him. In fact, all the Lefty lot are now hugely pissed off and confused, and they’re banging on about tactical voting next time and how they should have voted for someone who wasn’t their first choice last time. But that might not have made any odds because not everyone would have done this and OH IT’S TOO CONFUSING.

In a magical world where AV actually wins the referendum today, here’s what happens in 2015, with the exact same turnout:

Lefty Lib: 29%
Lefty Lab: 35%
Righty Con: 36%

Man, those guys don’t learn, do they? The exact same result. Hurrah for Righty Con!

BUT WAIT! We have AV now, and so the votes don’t work in the same way. Lefty Lib is last, and so he is eliminated (possibly by firing squad) and his second-choice votes are redistributed. The vast majority of Lefty Lib supporters thought Lefty Lab was a better bet than Righty Con, and so this is what subsequently happened:

Lefty Lab: 58%
Righty Con: 42%

Lefty Lab now wins, backed directly by 35% and indirectly by the majority of the remainder. In 2020, Righty Con will have to work harder to appeal to a broader range of people, rather than being a lazy git.

And that, ultimately, is your choice today. I’m voting yes to AV. The system is imperfect and not what I’d choose if we had a larger selection of tasty reform-oriented treats, but I think AV betters FPTP in important areas. However, even if you disagree, go and vote. The UK rarely gets chances like this, so make the most of it and make your voice heard.

Warning: what follows is an inevitably biased and—hopefully—entertaining chunk of information about the upcoming UK electoral referendum. Although I’m clearly pro-AV, my main argument to you would be to vote on Thursday, whichever system you believe in. But do so on the basis of investigating each system yourself and don’t make this the UK’s most expensive ‘Nick Clegg approval rating’ generator—he doesn’t matter and this isn’t about him. Note: if you’re unsure about what AV entails, CGPGrey explains using jungle animals.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there regarding the upcoming voting system referendum. The anti-Alternate Vote (AV) lobby suggests scrapping First Past The Post (FPTP) will be the end of the UK as we know it, leading to dead soldiers and babies and roughly fifty billion new immigrants PER DAY. Meanwhile, the pro-AV bloc seems set on telling everyone that it’s the solution to all the UK’s ills and the Best Thing Ever. Both viewpoints are bollocks, since FPTP is a crap voting system and AV is also a crap voting system.

But hang on. FPTP must be OK, because we’ve used it for years. Surely the UK would be utterly stupid to use a system that’s utterly rubbish?
To be fair to FPTP, it works brilliantly when you need a clear winner for something and only have two candidates. It’s also simple: whoever gets the most votes wins. Yay! The problem occurs when you’ve more than two candidates, as is usually the case in modern party politics. You could feasibly have three candidates in a four-way race get 24.9% of the vote each and the winner take-all with the backing of a tiny fraction of more than a quarter of the voters. Run that scenario nationwide in an election and you have a parliament that doesn’t remotely resemble what the voters voted for. (In 2005, Labour got a working majority in the Commons with 35.2% of the vote. And the same’s just happened in Canada, with the right securing a working majority with 39.6% of the vote.) You also have millions of ‘wasted’ votes in areas where a strongish candidate is always going to win, regardless of whether the second-place candidate polls pretty highly. Now multiply that across, say, an entire county, and you could have a party taking every seat, despite a third or more of the constituents voting for a sole other party.

The imbalance in the UK’s 2010 election wasn’t this severe, but it was also pretty clear that what you voted for and what you got were very different indeed.

Democracy, UK-style. (View larger)

Of the major parties, the Lib Dems were hit incredibly hard by FPTP, actually losing seats in the Commons despite gaining in terms of overall vote-share. That, frankly, is bonkers.

But the Liberal Democrats have turned out to be arseholes, and so more of them would have been awful. PHEW! FPTP SAVED US!
Not so fast. 149 Lib Dems plus 188 Labour MPs would have made for a stable and very different (possibly progressive) coalition government to what we have now. While the Lib-Dems might still have sided with the Tories, they’d have felt far less pressured into doing so, since the Conservative lead wasn’t nearly as strong as it was via FPTP. It’s likely more of the party’s liberal ideas would have come through, rather than merely taking the slightest edge off of a Thatcherite Tory government. And even if the coalition would have been the same (i.e. Conservative senior/Lib-Dem junior—something more likely with AV numbers, although under AV Labour would have secured almost as many seats as the Conservatives, making brokering a deal with the Lib-Dems possible), the balance would have been totally different. It would have been conservative in nature, but not Conservative, and it would have been far more liberal.

Ha ha! But I’m a rabid right-winger, and I want to smack liberals in the face with my fists. I WIN!
Ah, no. See, UKIP should have got about 20 seats and ended up with none at all, since none of its candidates came first in any constituency. Even the BNP, on the basis of its vote share, should have had a dozen seats in the Commons in 2010. The election in 2010 didn’t screw the left or right (or the authoritarians or liberals)—it just screwed all the small parties, as elections always do in the UK.

Yeah, but the BNP are real nutters, so, again, PHEW! FPTP SAVED US! YAY!
One man’s scum is another man’s love-juice. Personally, I trust UKIP about as far as I can throw it, but I know plenty of people in the UK think otherwise—after all, a million people or thereabouts voted for the party. As for the BNP, I’d be happy if they all quit tomorrow and ironically emigrated to sunnier climes, but I’d still fight for the BNP’s voters to have the right to representation, because that’s the fundamental basis of democracy. It’s insane that over 550,000 voted for the BNP, but there’s no representation in the Commons. (By contrast, the Greens got one MP from 285,000 votes; the SNP got six MPs from 491,000 votes, and the DUP got eight MPs from 168,000 votes.) Also, I imagine after five years of BNPs doing piss-all in the Commons, their candidates wouldn’t do so well five years later—politics has a tendency to right itself when it comes to major extremism.

Righto. So AV will fix all this, yeah?
No. The Alternate Vote is not a form of proportional representation—it doesn’t assign seats in the Commons that relate to the vote share. Instead, it has you rank candidates you’re interested in, in order of preference. If a candidate has a majority, they win the seat. If not, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are reassigned to the remaining candidates, according to ballot preferences. This keeps going until there’s a winner. This ensures that candidates have to fight for a wider remit than just the core vote and it also means parties that tend to be people’s second choice have a shot at winning the odd seat they otherwise wouldn’t.

That sounds complicated.
Can you count to four or five?

Yes.
Can you rank things in order? Say, if you were given an apple, a chocolate bar, a chicken sandwich and a live squirrel, could you place them in order of preference regarding what you want to eat right now?

Yes. I’m not stupid.
Quite. In which case, you’ll be able to deal with AV should it win in the referendum. If you only care about one candidate, you can still use a cross; if you care about more than one, rank them in order. There’s more complexity behind the scenes, in terms of figuring out who’s won a seat, but that’s not your problem.

OK. That sounds good to me, but my MP told me that AV is worse than the spawn of Satan and Piers Morgan.
Is your MP a Tory?

Yup.
Tories hate AV (YouTube), for a number of reasons, but primarily because it may slightly reduce the number of Tory seats (the same for Labour, too—AV generally affects larger parties in this way), will increase the likelihood of coalition government, and because it’s not in common use worldwide on a national level.

And the UK doesn’t use it!
Well, apart from House of Lords elections (for hereditary peers), by-elections in Scotland and Northern Ireland, mayoral elections, and the majority of political party leadership battles. Even the Conservative leadership election is a multi-round ballot reminiscent of AV, which David Davis won the first round of. With a direct FPTP election, David Cameron might not be the leader of the Conservative party right now. (Frankly, that, if anything, is one of the best arguments for FPTP, but it’d make Cameron look stupid if he yelled “I SHOULD NOT BE HERE!”) Also, as this chap notes (YouTube), just because a system isn’t in widespread use, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.

But if it will increase the likelihood of coalition governments, I’m out. This coalition is awful.
But that doesn’t mean coalition in and of itself is bad. Coalition is essentially a means of getting more voices heard, of compromise. Interestingly, we for the first time in a long time have a government backed by more than half of voters, although, clearly, they didn’t specifically vote for coalition. Still, the potential for talk and cross-party ideas rather than reactionary politics (do the opposite of what the other guys say) is a mature, grown-up means of dealing with politics and democracy in general. Coalition in many countries that, frankly, do a lot better than the UK politically, can also lead to a degree of continuity, since one of the partners stays in power after an election but a new partner comes in. This greatly reduces the kind of thing that happens in the UK, where the Conservatives spend a term or two reshaping the country to their ideals, only to be swept from power by Labour, who spend a term or two reshaping the country to their ideals, only to be swept from power by the Conservatives… and so on.

What are you, some kind of liberal?
Yes.

Oh. But even so, you must admit the coalition is AWFUL, even for you, Mr. Liberal-face. I heard it on the television, so it must be true.
*sigh* OK, what did you think of the last government?

That was awful too.
What about the one before that? And the last pre-Labour government—Major’s one?

Oh, I hated them. All awful.
And they were all elected by FPTP and were majority governments rather than coalitions. Therefore, that we have a poor coalition now doesn’t make AV bad any more than a poor government in previous years would make FPTP bad.

OK, so voting AV would annoy the big parties. I’m up for that!
Not quite.

Eh?
Labour’s (mostly) pro-AV.

But I thought you said Labour would get a reduced number of seats? Why are Labour pro-AV?
Two reasons. First, Labour’s now in opposition, playing reactionary politics—the party has a tendency to say the opposite of whatever the Tories say. (Labour had over a decade to implement electoral reform, remember—indeed, it was a pledge and a promise to the Lib-Dems before Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 made the entire idea of coalition redundant to Labour.) Secondly, Labour knows AV in and of itself will make little difference to the chances of a Labour victory in 2015—it will hurt the Conservatives way more than it will hurt Labour, and the Lib-Dems will be lucky to secure half the number of votes the party got in 2010. If AV does win, watch Labour suddenly become very silent on the prospect of further reform of the voting system that would negatively impact the party to a much greater degree (such as proportional representation).

So if AV won’t make any odds to the Tories and Labour, why should I vote for it?
Because it’s a first step. You have two choices in the upcoming referendum:

• Retain the status-quo (First Past The Post), and kill the argument for electoral reform stone-dead for at least a generation.
• Vote for a change (AV) that might keep the argument for electoral reform alive, leaving open the chance of something better in the future.

So you’re asking me to vote for something I don’t really care about, for a wooly chance that something better might happen at some point in the future, which would make voting fairer in the UK and mean my vote would actually count for something?
That’s it in a nutshell, yes.

OK, this post is another for the Brits, since it’s about the upcoming voting reform referendum. There’s a great YouTube video by CGPGrey on AV versus FPTP. (Hat-tip: @sneeu.) The big take-homes for people who are undecided but who haven’t written off AV:

• AV is able to simulate a bunch of elections, where the least-popular candidate is eliminated after each round, without the time and expense it’d take to run a bunch of campaigns one after another.
• AV is a better system, because it produces winners that a larger number of voters can agree on.
• While the AV system has its flaws, any problems AV has are shared by FPTP: susceptible to gerrymandering; not proportional representation; trends towards two parties over time.
• AV has no spoiler effect, where a third candidate splits the majority vote. This has long been a massive problem in the UK, where the liberal/left vote has been split between Labour and a version of the Liberal party, whereas the conservative right has been unified. Under AV, assuming the ties between Labour and Liberal Democrat voters remain somewhat intact post-coalition (and therefore vote for each-other as second choice), AV would lead to the Commons reflecting the political make-up of the UK more accurately more often.
• Using AV, citizens can help support and grow smaller parties they agree with, without worrying that they’ll put someone they don’t like into office.
• AV requires bigger parties to be less complacent and campaign harder to get more people to vote for them (which is why the Conservatives are so rabidly anti-AV and why some Labour MPs are against it).

To my mind, AV is far from perfect. I would still prefer a proportional system, where the votes cast lead to a Commons that reflects those votes. However, AV is a step in the right direction, which is why I’ll be voting in favour of it.

Whatever your intentions, though, please ensure that if you vote you do so on the basis of the system you believe in, and not propaganda. At the moment, much of the debate centres on Nick Clegg, and the referendum appears in danger of being some kind of national Nick Clegg approval rating generator. Clegg is politically toxic; unless the coalition becomes massively popular by 2015, Clegg’s dead in the water from a political standpoint and won’t even be leading the Lib-Dems into the next election. To that end, he really doesn’t matter. Ditto the Lib-Dems as a party. The no-to-AV campaign seems to think it’ll propel the Lib-Dems into some kind of equality with the Tories and Labour—it won’t. Under current polling, AV might help the Lib-Dems save a few seats, but they’ll still be down by over 60 per cent under either system. And said saving would be ‘fair’ anyway, since it always takes way more votes to elect a Liberal Democrat than a Labour or Conservative candidate.

If you favour First Past The Post, that’s fine. But vote for it because you believe in what the system is and what it represents, not because you hate Nick Clegg. And if you’re undecided, watch that YouTube video, because it might make you think a change is just what’s required to make British voting a little fairer.

EDIT: Nice overview of no vote tactics here from @unloveablesteve.