Among yesterday’s front pages was a data visualisation which, at first glance, was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen: the Independent had made an infographic showing yesterday’s £6bn budget cuts in context - as a fraction of a debt mountain.
Then I looked closer - and something’s very, very wrong.
Can you tell what it […]
The UK’s not considering introducing a “pure” proportional representation system – where number of votes translates entirely into number of seats – but comparing the status quo with what a ‘fair’ electoral system yileds interesting results.
It’s visualised below.
Highlights include:
Let me know what you think. The systems being mooted in the UK would result in something between this visualisation and the status quo - a pure list system isn’t under consideration, so consider this as for illustrative purposes only.
Labour has a neat piece of crowdsourcing going on at the moment, under the banner of “Change we See”.
Party supporters are being asked to send photos of new hospitals, schools and sure start centres to help remind the public what Labour investment has achieved. It’s a nice idea, and it never hurts to be positive.
But - naturally - there’s a problem.
Take the photo selected for the first mailout to party members from general secretary Ray Collins:
The photo’s of the recently St Helens Hospital in Merseyside. The hospital was built as part of a £338m redevelopment of acute hospitals in the area. So far, so good.
The problem is, that £338m wasn’t investment. It was debt. St Helens Hospital was bought on the never-never, as part of the Government’s PFI scheme.
The repayments for the St Helens redevelopment, over the next 30 years, will total a huge £1.65bn. Repayments only started last year - at £30m a year. By the time of the next election, less than £65m will have been paid off, leaving future governments with over £1.5bn still to pay off.
And that’s just one of over 100 NHS PFI projects.
Yes, we have the shiny new hospital now. But it’s the next government - and the one after that, and the one after that (and so on for seven to eight government terms) that get the privelage of paying for it.
Is that really what Labour want to highlight as one of the triumphs of its time in office?
Update: See the data behind this story - and investigate your local hospital PFI - here.
Nigel Farrage and his UK Independence Party are keen to spout how 75% of the UK’s laws are made in the European Parliament (dubious itself - guesstimates vary from 9% to 85%).
So it’s odd, then, that they put in so little effort in the EU parliament. On Thursday, Farrage told the BBC Question Time audience he spent his time “representing his constituents” and so spent less time than others in Brussels.
There are 300 EU plenary sessions in a four year term. There are 1,461 days in four years. That’s plenty of time. So I looked a bit deeper at how hard UKIP MEPs actually work. The headline figures were published in today’s Independent on Sunday.
MEPs don’t make up a government, and don’t have local constituencies. Their job is to hold the EU commission accountable, scrutinise its work, and call on it to take action. So I tracked how often MEPs attended (for which they’re paid), and more importantly how often they spoke, asked questions, sat on committees and tabled motions.
The results are bad for eurosceptics: UKIP and the Conservatives, on average, do less work in Brussels than others.
UKIP scored worst by every measure, yet were still willing to accept an average of £57,800 in attendence allowance. Labour MEPs spoke twice as often as their UKIP counterparts, and asked five times as many questions. Scottish Labour MEP David Martin spoke more times than the ten-strong UKIP contigent combined.
Robert Kilroy-Silk spoke the least in Parliament, giving just seven short speeches in his four years over there. Given what he’s claimed in attendance allowance, that’s notionally equivilent to just under £6,000 per speech, making him the world’s second-best paid public speaker (Tony Blair is first).
Out of the big three parties, the Conservatives sit clearly behind Labour and the Lib Dems, who are neck-and-neck.
Conservative and UKIP MEPs might argue that they’re not part of the Brussels crowd, and so they don’t “engage” in the same way. But if they’re not putting the same effort in scrutinising what the Commission does, why are they applying for the job? Voters electing UKIP to stand up for Britain in Europe might find themselves seriously shortchanged…
Anyway, you can take a look at how your MEP’s done below, or click here to see it in a seperate window. If you have any questions about the data, or do anything interesting with it, let me know on twitter or by email.
As of this week, 37% of us hadn’t yet had our faith in politicians eroded by the expenses furore. David Cameron’s working to fix that. At the rate he’s going, it should be down to 10% inside a week.
He hasn’t been caught using his expenses to shampoo his drawbridge, or wax his puppies, or whatever bizarre expenditure’s been caught out most lately. No, his ploy is shrewder and much more cynical: he’s petitioning for a general election.
Like all low political tricks, the motives sound grand. “There is now only one way of sorting out the mess, and that is for Parliament to be dissolved and for a General Election to be held right away,” he declared, as if members of his party had been totally exempt from recent shenanigans. He’s been calling for an election for months (funnily enough, since his polling lead strengthened), but this time took it a little further. He’s also opened a petition for voters to sign, to call for one too.
Trust in the House is at its lowest ebb in recent memory. It’s going to take a concerted effort, and serious reform, to achieve it. The expense system obviously needs overhauling. The rules governing outside jobs make the expenses rules also need reform. Even constitutional change may be called for: MPs in safe seats were much more likely to be implicated in expense scandals than those in marginal, yet another case for proportional representation.
To suggest the solution is simply an election – and presumably a tory government (after all, there are no known cases of tory sleaze in UK history) – is tacky at best. To do so when enjoying a poll lead of between eleven and sixteen points looks downright opportunistic, largely because it is.
None of this is exceptionally surprising – politicians are meant to be opportunistic. In many ways, it’s a necessity for professional politicians. What makes Cameron’s move particularly distasteful is that he stands to benefit directly from a disengaged, distrustful electorate.
The key to political victory in most elections lies as much in convincing supportive voters to turn out to the polls as in swaying floating votes. Voters feeling upset and mistrustful after the expenses furore aren’t necessarily likely to switch their votes. But they are likely to stay at home, rather than make the effort of voting. If there’s a general election anytime soon, turnout’s set to be low.
Low turnout doesn’t just mean each party has slightly fewer voters. Depending who stays at home, it can seriously benefit certain political parties. It may come as a shock to learn the Conservatives would benefit more than any other major party from a vote in the immediate wake of the expenses scandal.
The Conservative party, whose base of above-average income and above-average age voters comes from a demographic particularly likely to turn out, generally benefit from strong turnout, as evidenced from academic studies of previous elections.
In this case, the Conservatives would benefit even more. Polling studies so far show working class, low income, and young voters are all particularly affected by the recent revelations. All of these groups are more likely to vote Labour than the general population.
Attempting to benefit from disengagement is a crass move at the best of times. Playing with the electoral maths and trying to call it an attempt to make people “proud of their Parliament” is downright low.
Cameron knows what he’s doing. Even in some imaginary scenario when pollsters and strategists hadn’t gone over every detail of the move, Cameron even studied PPE at university. There’s no plausible way this was anything but a stunt to gain political advantage. Some way to regain trust.
This petition is not only a naked scheme to gain party advantage out of a pissed-off and untrusting public, it also demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the level of reform and rehabilitation needed.
David Cameron is trying to present himself as a candidate of substance. So far, he is proving himself anything but.
What persuaded the House of Commons Commission to appeal the Information Tribunal’s order to release details of expenses claimed by MPs on second homes?
Just a week before the decision, the commission said it had “no further legal steps” to prevent the release of receipts and address details for 14 MPs after a ruling from the Information Tribunal. But just one day before the deadline for handing the information over, the committee received new legal advice and lodged an appeal at the High Court. The appeal is expected to cost the taxpayer over £100,000.
The commission’s concern is that releasing such information could “inhibit democratic debate” as MPs would be fearful to speak their minds if their addresses were known. Obviously unrelated to the decision to appeal would be any embarrassment over the amount of expenses claimed by the committee’s six members. MPs have speculated that were details of the 14 MPs expenses to be revealed, they would lobby in the interests of fairness for similar details to be released for all their Parliamentary colleagues.
All but one of the commission’s six members claim Additional Costs Allowance (ACA), which covers interest payments on second mortgages. The remaining member, Harriet Harman, is ineligible to claim as her constituency is in central London. Labour’s Stuart Bell and Liberal Democrat MP Nick Harvey, both commission members, have both claimed within £20 of the maximum allowed - £22,110 in 2006/7 – every year since 2004. Conservative member David MacLean jointly topped the list of ACA claimants for two of the last five years. MacLean was behind attempts last year to excluse the Commons from the Freedom of Information Act entirely.
Michael Martin claimed a more modest £17,346 on ACA in 2006/7 – but then does enjoy the use of a grace-and-favour apartment which received over £700,000 worth of renovations during his tenure as speaker. He has also had expenses headaches of his own after his official spokesman stepped down over misleading reporters about the taxi bills of Martin’s wife. The committee claimed a total of £736,635 in 2006/7.
The appeal goes to the High Court on May 7th. The commission are sure to follow proceedings closely – in the interests of democratic debate, of course.
Addendum: The same six commission members make up the committee overseeing the rehaul of MPs’ expenses.
Every time I watch “Yes, Minister” I’m reminded how timeless it is. Take “Equal Opportunities”, an episode from the third series I just watched while working.
Hacker attempts (unsuccessfully) to reform the senior civil service, which is chronically short on women employees - zero out of 41 permanent secretaries and just 4 of 150 deputy secretaries (now Director-Generals) are women. Hacker suggests an immediate 25 per cent quota, with a 50 per cent target in 20 years time.
Of course, in the real world we’re 20 years on, and equal opportunities laws and guidelines are everywhere. Hacker’s targets show the series is starting to age - right?
Of course not.
I couldn’t quickly get figures for permanent secretaries, but did discover women make up fewer than one in three staff in the top grades of the service (”senior civil service”) - 29 per cent to be exact.
Women, on average, are paid £3,000 less than their male counterparts, too.
Just for interest, there are half as many disabled people working in the senior civil service (2.5 per cent) than the most junior grades (4.9 per cent). It’s even worse for people from ethnic minorities, who make up 4.1 per cent of the senior civil service but 9.6 per cent of senior grades.
Raw data is available here
Oops, eh?
Self-indulgent post here, I’m afraid (skip at will). The below is a first-person interview piece with a Big Issue vendor, done as part of my coursework last year. I like to get a few of these pieces out somewhere now and then. Here goes:
“I had to leave my parents’ house. I was just a kid, and ran away from home. I’ve never been back. I’ve been “homeless” ever since. I went to the officials and explained my situation, and they put me up in a bed and breakfast, then a hostel. I was there for months.
You’re in a single bedroom, with a toilet in your room and not much else. The bathroom and kitchen are shared with a load of other guys. There are drugs everywhere, and you start using them more than you would believe.
It’s fucking horrible. I started by smoking dope, and thought it’s cool, then I’m taking speed and pills and all that in clubs and being the big guy. And, it’s just so different. It takes over a part of you. I’m a heroin addict. I’m not a using addict any more – I’m on methadone, but it’s hard.
I’m doing better now. I see young people who are dabbling, you know, and they think they’re really cool. They think they’re different, that they’ll be okay. Then I see them two years later – well, there’s a young lad at the moment, and two years ago he started injecting.
He’s twenty now, I saw him earlier today. His clothes were disgusting – his tracksuit bottoms were black, and he’s got dirt under his fingernails. He’s picked his face where he’s been smoking crack and looking in the mirror – it’s like a beard of scabs. When it’s so dirty, you know it’s not going to heal. Because I’m doing okay at the minute, I gave him some stuff – some jeans and a t-shirt – but what else can you do?
Watching this happen to your friends is tough. People have died in Oxford in the past year, through getting banned from the night shelter and not having anywhere else to go. They can’t get in to hostels – they don’t let you in any more if you’re not from the area, so they’re on the streets. Being out on the streets - well, if you’re not on anything, you usually are in a few weeks. And your use just becomes massive, it just becomes your whole life. Because it’s the only thing that keeps you going.
It’s a trap: once you become homeless, you stay homeless. There’s so much day-to-day support, you wouldn’t believe. I come in the morning to a place by the train station and get porridge, for 10p, and egg on toast for 12p, and you get coffee all day long. Then Night Shelter does dinner at half 12, and a place on Cowley Road gives you dinner for £1.10 at 5pm. Then round the corner the Gatehouse gives you sandwiches, tea and juice until 7pm. Then three nights a week the Christians come round and give us coffee and snacks. I don’t know why anyone pays for food round here when there’s so much for free!
You’ve got drug addicts and alcoholics, and you just give them free food, and Big Issues to sell, and they don’t have to make any commitment to change anything. Where do you think their money goes? At least no-one has to go thieving or shoplifting or hitting old ladies over the head for their handbags, but it’s an easy ride. So a lot of people, a lot of people I know have been in the same predicament for a long time, for ages, for years. Well, me too I guess.
It takes so long to get off the streets. You start out in the night shelters, or bed and breakfasts, and wait two or three years to get into a housing association – a shared flat in sheltered housing. They watch you closely there, you can be out after one mistake. I know one guy who was kicked out for letting one of his mates take a bath. Three years keeping your nose clean, working up, and you’re back in the night shelter. When you can live okay in the shelters, and it’s that hard to get out, you stay.
Homelessness is different now to what it was. It used to be working boys who drank hard and worked hard and split up with the wife. Go in the Night Shelters now and the majority of people are 30 years and under, and heroin addicts or young alcoholics; 25 year old men that look like 40 year olds.
You’ll find most of us are upbeat because that’s the way you’ve got to be, otherwise you just fail miserably. If we didn’t, you’d see Oxford, “the city of dreaming spires” with people like me hanging from them everywhere. I’ll be all right. It just might take a while, you know?”
The answer may surprise you - but right up there among them is the News of the World, it seems.
Last week it emerged a local council was using surveillance powers introduced to help fight terrorism to monitor families applying to secondary schools, the Act involved - the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) - jumped to public notice.
But the NOTW had noticed it a bit earlier. In February, it emerged that MP Sadiq Khan had been bugged while visiting a constituent in prison. The law involved in authorising such surveillance is - you’ve guessed it - RIPA.
In the wake this story, it seems the NOTW sent Freedom of Information requests round to public authorities across the country. According to an advisory published by “Information Lawyer” Ibrahim Hasan, the News of the World requested:
1. The total number of requests made to access peoples’ personal information
2. A list of the types of information sought – for example, but not limited to, mobile phone records, telephone subscriber info, and so on. Please provide as much information as to the different types of information that have been requested.
Hasan’s release goes on to helpfully list exemptions which could be used to refuse this request. You can take a look at his post here (PDF).
Still, good thinking that reporter - even if the request went public and the story came in to prominence in the meantime. Be interested to see if anything appears in there as a result, of the request - given this week’s splash is a Karen Matthews ‘expose’, it doesn’t seem a given.
Bonus RIPA background
RIPA is the Act which allows the Government to compel individuals to release passwords for encrypted data - one of the most controversial aspects of the law at the time. If the individual claims to be unable to decrypt any data stored on a computer they own, they must be able to prove they cannot do so - a difficult task. The Act also governs electronic interception and monitoring of phonecalls and emails. The Act was strengthened in 2003.
The first group to be hit by the decryption powers of the Act were animal rights campaigners, back in 2007.
Ministerial Assurances
When the Act was passing through Parliament, Ministers promised measures had been taken to protect privacy:
“The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill contains within it all the protections necessary in the event of the use of these vital powers.”
Jack Straw
“The system proposed in the Bill is designed to ensure that the need-to-know principle is strictly observed and that details about particular individuals are shared to the minimum extent possible.”
Jane Kennedy
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal
One of the privacy safeguards was the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which considers complaints from anyone who feels they have been unfairly investigated under the Act. By 2003, it had considered 470 complaints.
Quaequam (great blog, awful name) proposes an interesting test for the London Mayoral race - “Pick a candidate and try and imagine what they would be like handling a crisis such as 7/7″. Harsh but fair test, but it does hurt Boris’s fun/earthy chap image.
What the hell is Jacqui Smith doing as Home Secretary? Not content with letting the country know she didn’t feel safe walking the streets at night - and that “people didn’t really do that kind of thing”, Dizzy reports she said on yesterday’s ‘Today’ programme that it’s Government advice not to walk alone after midnight. Good grief. For a Labour - once the party of the working classes - Home Secretary to be so utterly out of touch is offensive to the electorate
