A better way to elect the UK parliament
Filed under: Cons, Denmark, England, Germany, Lab, Lib, ROI, SNP, Scotland, election, psephology
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.)
Lisbon is now a part of what we live in
Since midnight, the Lisbon Treaty has become part of the fundamental EU treaties.
It has thereby ceased to be a treaty that a country can withdraw from – from today, it is just as much part of the EU as all the past treaties, and if any future government were to disagree with Lisbon, their only way out would be to leave the EU altogether.
Anyway, in my opinion this is a day to celebrate.
I know Lisbon was not perfect by any means, but many of its changes were very much needed to make the EU able to function well.
It’s hard to say how different the EU will turn out to be. Some changes, such as the new EU foreign minister, could be revolutionary, but if the EU officials are timid and the member states are hostile, very little will change.
I for one hope it will work out well. Who knows, perhaps the peoples of Europe will even come to love the Union one day?
Europe in 2039
Filed under: Cons, Europe, France, ROI, environment, referendum
When people said back in 2009 that there wouldn’t be another treaty revision for a generation, they didn’t realise how true it was.
Here we are in the year 2039, and the EU is still operating according to the Lisbon Treaty.
Sure, the Union has expanded to 37 countries, and a few areas have seen power moved from the states to the EU, in particular the environment, but it is still the same old treaty.
This has been such a change from the period from 1988 to 2009, when the EU treaties were revised again and again.
However, it became clear when France and the Netherlands rejected the Constitution and Ireland later rejected Lisbon that it was becoming too hard to agree on any meaningful changes.
However, the defining moment was on the 4th of November 2009, when the leader of the British Conservative Party, David Cameron, announced a new policy that ensured that all future Treaty revisions would be decided by a referendum in the UK, virtually guaranteeing that they would be defeated.
At the same time, he pledged that the Tories wanted to remain in the EU, working positively to advance their national interest, so any hope that other countries might have had the the UK would leave the EU were finally laid to rest.
It was attempted, of course, to make a major revision in 2024, but the Belgrad Treaty was soundly defeated in the British referendum.
It is therefore no wonder that twelve continental European countries today announced that they would enter into a new union, the European Federation (EF), completely pooling their defense and foreign policies.
The EF will probably become a member of the EU instead of the individual countries, so the EU will become completely dominated by the EF in a few years’ time.
It is expected that most EU members will join the EF in due course. The Twelve have said that all EU members are welcome to join the EF, provided that they sign up to the full package, including the Euro, Schengen, etc.
The EF actually doesn’t differ radically from the EU in scope at the moment. The main difference is that the EF Constitution can be changed if 2/3 of the member states agree and it is agreed in a European referendum (not on a national basis), so it is expected to change a lot over the next decades.
Although many Europeans are still nostalgic for the old nation states, the rapid rise of China and other non-democratic countries has made it necessary to create a single, strong European power to preserve our values.
Update (8/10): Rob asked for a map:
After the Irish yes
Filed under: Cons, Europe, Lab, ROI, economics, election, psephology, referendum
It was a relief to see that Ireland voted yes by such a large margin.
I’d be the first to admit that the Lisbon Treaty isn’t perfect by any stretch of imagination, but it’s time to accept it and move on.
It doesn’t seem like the Tories have understood this, though.
The leadership are ducking the issue: ‘However, Mr Cameron declared in an email to Tory supporters last night on the eve of his party’s annual gathering, in Manchester: “I want to make one thing clear: there will be no change in our policy on Europe and no new announcements at the conference.”‘
And most of their members want a referendum no matter what: “The poll of 2,205 Tory members by the ConservativeHome.com website found that more than eight in 10 want him to call a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon even if it has been approved by the next general election – a pledge he is refusing to make.”
Scarily, according to the latter link, “total withdrawal from the European Union is the most favoured option among party members when asked how a Tory government should handle the issue, putting them totally at odds with a Tory leadership committed to British membership. Some 82 per cent want to freeze Britain’s financial contributions to the EU.”
Much as Gordon Brown and New Labour are a disaster, it’s hard to believe that such a europhobic party can be an improvement for the country. 
Married, but not allowed to live together
When the current Danish government got into power in 2002, one of their first actions was to introduce the so-called 24-year rule, which means you can’t bring your lawfully wedded husband or wife to Denmark from outside the EU if you’re younger than 24.
Although theoretically introduced to reduce the number of forced marriages, it has had lots of negative consequences for young married couples that actually are in love.
It seems that the UK has now introduced something similar, only with a limit of 21 years instead, and as the article shows, this is already having disastrous consequences, in this case for a Welsh-Canadian couple.
However, the EU can help such couples to a certain extent:
But Adam and Rochelle do have one chance – they can move to any other European Union country and they will be allowed to live together as man and wife and get work.The only place they cannot is Adam’s home – Britain.
“It’s insane”, he says. “We can go anywhere except my home country, where we got married, and where they gave us permission to get married.”
Danish couples are doing this, too, typically by moving across the Øresund to Sweden.
Will young British couples now start to emigrate to Ireland?
Ireland and the Gricean maxims
The latest opinion polls seem to indicate that the Irish referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon will be very close.
For some reason, most referendums tend to end up with a close result, even if one of the sides is far ahead before the campaigns start.
I’ve been thinking a bit about this, and I think an explanation might be found in the Grice’s conversational maxims.
Basically, the maxims are some rules that form the basic assumptions underlying human communication. The rules are often broken, but not without reason, and breaking them implies a meaning on its own.
In particular, I think the Maxim of Relation (“Be relevant”) is crucial here. In means that one will assume that a question asked is relevant, that is, it is assumed it can be there is more than one possible answer. If the politicians arrange a referendum but say that only voting yes really works and that a no would be a disaster, they break this maxim, which makes people confused and angry and they start thinking they’re being lied to. They might even think the Maxim of Quality (“Be truthful”) is violated, too.
To make it even worse, people tend to say no when they don’t fully understand a question, which is why making people read the whole treaty is normally a winning strategy for the opponents.
Because of all this, I believe referendums only work where politicians are happy to proceed with either outcome. For instance, Scotland can feasibly continue as a part of the UK or become an independent country, so this is a possible topic for a referendum.
On the other hand, saying yes to a complex treaty that is a messy compromise between 27 countries that took years to negotiate is clearly not a good basis for a referendum. If one had wanted one, it should have been held years ago and have been about the negotiation mandate for the Irish government (but that’s of course not what the Irish constitution demands).
Schengen
It’s now finally been confirmed that Schengen (the travel zone without passport control) will be expanded from 21st December this year.
All the countries that joined the EU in 2004 (except Cyprus) are joining, which will leave only the UK, Ireland and Cyprus outside Schengen if we ignore the two new member states that haven’t had time to be approved yet (Bulgaria and Romania).
I just wish the UK would join, too!
Liberalism and nationalism
Sir Ming said in a recent interview that “there is a sense in which liberalism and nationalism are the antithesis of each other.”
I guess he means that liberalism is partly about creating equal opportunities for all people, and that doesn’t mix well with borders and national laws. However, I’m sure Sir Ming doesn’t seriously propose to abolish all countries anytime soon, and if he did, he would be violating another liberal principle that says that decisions should be taken as close to the involved people as possible.
Scottish independence is not about building up new borders – Scotland is already a legal and political entity – but about removing a superfluous and top-heavy construct: Great Britain.
So long as Scottish independence happens within the EU, there is no reason to assume it would violate any important liberal principles.
Besides, if Scottish independence is so terrible, is Sir Ming implicitly asking for Ireland and all the British colonies to come back to the UK? Surely Scottish independence isn’t any less acceptable for a liberal than Irish independence?
Irish interpreters
There’s an article in The Times this morning about the difficulties of finding Irish interpreters for the European Parliament. As it says in the article:
Despite the Irish campaign for language recognition, there is not a single specialised conference-level interpreter’s course in the Republic. [...] The problem is that, in most EU countries, most people speak their own language. Irish is one of the official languages of the Irish Republic but maybe only 1 or 2 per cent of the population truly speak it on an everyday basis.