Voting Alternatives

Dear Reader

If you were a supporter of electoral reform then you must be hurting from the almighty pimpslap you received from the British electorate, which knocked you seven ways sideways or, as some commentators claim, thirty years into the future. The debate was conducted with about as much good grace as a late night punch-up in the high street, with David Cameron hitting Nick Clegg over head with a metaphorical traffic cone whilst the Lib Dem leader then hid in a mini-cab office and called the police. In this analogy, the cone represents smear tactics, Paddy Ashdown is a mini-cab and Ed Milliband is the police.  Hang on, that made more sense in my head.

The British voters decided that in the middle of three wars, yes three - Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq (not over yet), the greatest economic downturn for seventy years and national debt on course to double, that changing the not-obviously-broken voting system should figure low on everyones' to do list. One tip for any future reform campaigns is beware the celebrity endorsement. Much as we may cherish and admire screen and stage work of comedians and actors, no one is really going to trust them on political issues as they quite clearly could not be left in charge of a box of pencils.

Both sides in the AV debate used and abused the word 'fair', as if it proved their respective case. There can be few words more misleading than 'fair' when used in a political debate other than perhaps 'radical'. 'Radical' should be removed from all policy documents and media is coverage as it is nearly always redundant. Using the simple Pol Pot sliding scale of radical policies, with zero being not radical at all and 10 being Year Zero, totally-bat-shit-mental-radical, most policies count as one or two out of 10, namely more of the same with a few tweaks. Be grateful that radical policies are nothing of the sort, real radicalism tends involve working in a slave labour camp with only mud soup for dinner. (If you work in a call centre in the North East, this may sound like an improvement, but for the rest of us it isn't).

'Fair' when employed in a political debate  is often another way of saying that the speaker prefers one set outcomes to another, so the Liberal Democrats claimed that AV was fairer because they would get more seats. The Tories on the other hand, said that first past the post was fairer because there would be less Liberal Democrats and regardless of the Coalition most Conservatives would like to bury the Liberal Democrats at sea, before they are dead. The Lib Dems want to do the same, but in sustainably sourced coffins.

There is no commonly agreed standard of 'fairness' in elections and voting systems. They all have flaws and all produce outcomes that some resent. For those readers in favour of proportional representation then there is one image to bear in mind:  a Viagra-charged Silvio Berulsconi naked in a hot tub with four women whose combined ages still don't equal his own. First past the post has numerous problems, not least that you are forced to elect someone, even when you think a random person plucked of the street would do a better job. In some cases that is clearly true, Nadine Dorries,  come in your time is up, the man who stacks the trollies at Asda wants to have a go.

So this typing ape concludes that whatever your preference for voting: FPTP, AV, PR or CTDAPP (chimps throwing darts at a piece of paper), there's no such thing as fair. Life isn't, why should voting be any different?

Paranoid Dreams

Dear Reader

Time to celebrate this week, you clever monkeys shot Osama Bin Laden in the head, proving that America always gets its man, even if it is ten years and one trillion dollars later. So expensive was the hunt for Bin Laden that the White House was hoping to recoup some of the money with the film rights to helmet-cam footage. They were planning a director's cut in the style of Apocalypse Now Redux. Instead of the raid taking 40 minutes, it lasts 4 hours with an interminable dinner scene involving French colonists and a CGI fat Brando spouting nonsense. Also in the pipeline was a Navy Seals blooper reel,  including one hilarious mix-up where they got their famous bearded Muslims confused and almost shot Cat Stevens. But some politically-correct killjoy has now decided it would be bad taste to release a picture of man with half his head blown off, so don't order those mouse mats just yet.

Still Bin Laden has hardly reached the bottom of the Arabian Sea and the conspiracy theories have already started. It is a government cover up as Bin Laden has been dead for years, killed by the same Peugot that did for Diana, but Bush and Obama have to conceal the truth because they are working for Freemason lizards who plotting to take over the world using Kofi Annan,  a black helicopter and gay rights. Some of that may be in wrong order, but much like fridge magnets you can rearrange these conspiracies any way you want. The trouble with the conspiracists is you cannot win. Even if the White House released gory pictures, a video or a statement from Al-Qaida's no. 2 saying he was sorry his boss was dead but he relished the challenge of keeping a medieval death cult relevant for the Twitter generation,  there is no standard of proof that would suffice. Much like a schizophrenic on public transport babbling scary nonsense, the general principle is not to react to conspiracists as it only encourages them.  In the case of the bus nutter, you may get a screwdriver in the leg anyway, but it's worth a try.

What this typing ape finds most peculiar about conspiracy theories is you find them on both sides of the political spectrum and there are not solely the preserve of the educationally challenged. They even get turned into award winning documentaries such as The Power of Nightmares,  expertly produced and edited programmes which suggested that Al-Qaida was to an extent invented to serve the neo-conservative agenda. An intriguing idea as long as you ignore just one thing: reality. In particular those pesky Al-Qaida operatives, who are not RADA graduates between jobs, but go round preaching jihad and setting off bombs.

Likewise Nigel Lawson and many other people who should know better are claiming there is a conspiracy of the world's leading scientists to falsify evidence about global warming. Again, a beguiling idea until you think about it properly using all your brain rather just than reptile bit that keeps you breathing. Ignoring for a moment that he has no scientific expertise whatsoever, Lawson is seriously suggesting that leading minds of our age and all the worlds scientific institutions are engaged in the greatest fraud in human history for the sake of grant money or perhaps because they own shares in windfarms.

The diversity and range of conspiracy theories in the modern age is truly awe-inspiring. Makes you wonder if someone's behind it all. No but seriously, the bigger question is why in an era of modern communications with overwhelming volumes of evidence to the contrary do strange movements such as the 911 truthers persist. Your gorilla thinker believes you monkeys have a passionate need for magical thinking. Before science and reason,  you could easily indulge those urges by burning a witch, exorcising demons or sacrificing some random animal to a grumpy deity. These days, however, irrationality is pushed to fringes of public debate, lurking in newspaper horoscopes or the pages of Psychologies  magazine. Like a cartoon bruise, the irrational urges pop up elsewhere. The world is more exciting if it is run by shadowy forces and agents of global reach and power. Any humdrum office worker, who would otherwise lead a life of quiet desperation and borderline alcoholism, can thanks to conspiracy theories feel like they are part of their very own Bourne film.

If, dear reader, you still think that the government, the Met Office or the Pentagon are part of some vast conspiracy, consider one key word: government. These are the same bureaucracies that struggle to deliver your post, spend £7 billion on aircraft carriers we then have to sell and claim for duck houses on expenses. If there really was a conspiracy, someone would leave a laptop on train, get drunk and tell somebody or they would get sacked from the plot and then expose it all in a bestselling book. Let's not forget, Project Kill Bin Laden is a classic government programme, 9 years and 999 billion over budget. These guys really could not manage a conspiracy, even they could insert mind-control chips into people - they would use the wrong sort of chips, the software would be incompatible and the batteries would run flat.