Interesting Links for 05-05-2017

[andrewducker]

Live streaming your life - threat or menace?

I "love" how they trotted out the "And of course you can livestream bad things!" and "Kids - don't forget that streaming video of yourself isn't the same as having friends!" Also, people seem to have forgotten that people have been doing this kind of thing since the late 90s...
(tags: video life money )

Labour eyes proportional representation as party's elections minister backs voting shake-up

(tags: proportional_representation voting labour uk )

Most US homes have mobiles but no landline

(tags: phones usa )

Sail from Britain to Japan in 20 days thanks to global warming

(tags: globalwarming arctic shipping )

After years of warnings, mobile network hackers exploit SS7 flaws to drain bank accounts

(tags: security phones banking OhForFucksSake )

Carly Simon plays You're So Vain's lost verse

(tags: music history )

Comments

[calimac]

So now that Labour can't win, they're interested in PR again. And last time they were in power, they ignored their previous interest in PR. (Something the Canadian Liberals are demonstrating right now.)

These are examples of something I've been assured is a general rule of politics: Policies will only be advocated by parties which benefit by them. Only parties out of power would benefit by PR; parties in power would not. Therefore PR will never be backed by anyone with the power to enact it, and thus it will never be enacted.

Sounds like an airtight argument, which leaves only one question unanswered:

How did other countries get PR, then?

[danieldwilliam]

I also expect that the Labour Party will run cold on PR the next time they get in to power. I think the only way this doesn't happen is if a) the Labour Party are out of power for long enough that PR becomes an article of faith, b) the Labour Party splits or c) they end up depending on the Lib Dems or UKIP in a minority government situation.

I think other countries largely ended up with PR because the UK told them they had to have it.

[calimac]

"they end up depending on the Lib Dems or UKIP in a minority government situation."

I don't think so, because that already happened with the Conservatives. The Lib Dems were in an ideal spot to demand PR, and they funked it, getting only a referendum on AV (which is not PR) which the Cons didn't back anyway, and which lost.

"I think other countries largely ended up with PR because the UK told them they had to have it."

Huh?? What? When? How? Here's a list of countries with PR. When and how would the UK have told the entirety of Latin America, a number of African countries that were never British colonies, and half the former Soviet Union that they had to have PR?

[danieldwilliam]

The Lib Dems in 2010 were more worried about the impact of an unstable government on the banking sector than they were about electoral reform and decided not to negotiate to hard on it. I think they regret this. I've seen several influential Lib Dems on record saying that the next time they are in the position of propping up a government the first thing that happens is that STV becomes the voting system, no ifs, no buts, no maybes, no referendums.

I tend to believe they have learned their lesson.

As for the British involvement in the adoption of PR I think as part of our role in post-WW2 European reconstruction and post-colonial administrations in Africa we normalised the idea that when you are setting up a new country or a new constitution you use PR. We're certainly not the only influence but I think we've played an influential role - probably by accident - by helping to establish a norm.

The other influence I think (and probably the reason why the British encouraged PR in parts of the world we used to control) is that PR is a good way to mediate shared power arrangements in polities with potential for political violence - like Europe or Africa or Latin America or other places. I think one of the reasons lots of the world has PR and the UK doesn't is that the UK has not (yet) suffered a complete breakdown of the the nation-state through internal revolution or losing an existential war. When you are recovering from that sort of national disaster you need to accomodate lots of different views in order for your state to be legitimate - so you pick a PR voting system.

[calimac]

That still doesn't make any sense. Though the map in the article I linked to is not complete, it shows only South Africa and Lesotho among former British colonies in Africa as having PR. The rest do not; the other African countries with it weren't British colonies.

As for the new-nation/revolution/war theory, that doesn't always apply either. Sweden has PR. Finland has PR. Iceland has PR. Switzerland has PR. New Zealand has PR, and only got it a few decades ago. Even the countries that did get rampaged by WW2, I don't think all of them revamped their entire constitutions at that time, and if I had time to look up when they got PR, it might not have been then.

[andrewducker]

Great question. I suspect that if you reach the point where no party is getting a significant portion of the vote then eventually you have to do something about it.

Which makes it a shame that the Conservatives are likely to do so well at the next election!