What If Proportional Representation Been Used in the May 2015 UK General Election?

In previous postings, I have looked at how UK general elections since 1922 would have turned out if the 'first past the post' system in place in the UK had been replaced by proportional representation.  I did this most recently for the 2010 general election: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/what-if-proportional-representation-had.html

The 2015 election is certainly an interesting one for this consideration because the different between the proportion of the votes each party won compared to the proportion of the seats they won, has probably reached its most extreme.

There are a couple of well-known factors in UK elections which were apparent in 2015.  First is that the 'conversion rate', i.e. how many seats a party gets compared to how many votes they received, has always been highest for the Conservative Party.  The Labour Party and to an even greater extent, the Liberal Democrats, often have tens of thousands of 'wasted' votes that win them no additional seats.  In this election, such vagaries can be seen at the extreme.  The SNP (Scottish National Party) gained 1.45 million votes which won them a total of 56 seats.  In contrast, UKIP (UK Independence Party) won 3.861 million, more than double what the SNP got, but only won 1 seat.  This explains UKIP's sudden support for the introduction of some kind proportional representation.  This is despite the defeat of the proposal of adopting the Alternative Vote (AV) method in the referendum of 2011.

The other known factor is the 'shy Conservative'.  The factor that, in opinion polls, people who are liable to vote Conservative, are much less likely to say they will than supporters of other parties.  This explains the fact that the Conservatives received 2% more of the vote than polls had predicted.

Before I launch into the analysis, there are some caveats.  These calculations are made on the basis of direct proportion, so assuming constituencies with equal populations.  The most simple approach is used rather than ones such as AV which alter the proportionality to some extent.

In addition, I assume that, unlike, for example, in Germany, there is no bar on how few votes a party can get in order to win a seat.  In (West) Germany only parties that achieve above 5% of the vote have been allowed to sit in the Bundestag.  This has meant the absence of numerous small parties at national level and effectively a two-party system since 1949.

The first figure is the number of seats the parties would have gained in a simple proportional representation system.  The figures in brackets are the actual number of seats that the party gained is shown in square brackets.

Note, one seat - that held by the Speaker, was not really contested.  The current Speaker is a Conservative but he does not vote with his party.

2015: 650 seats [Conservative Government]

• Conservatives: (36.9%); 240 seats  [331]
• Labour (30.4%); 198 seats  [232]
• UKIP (12.6%); 82 seats [1]
• Liberal Democrats (7.8%); 51 seats [8]
• SNP (4.7%); 31 seats [56]
• Green (3.8%); 25 seats [1]
• Plaid Cymru (0.6%); 4 seats [3]

Northern Irish Parties:

• DUP (0.6%); 6 seats [8]
• Sinn Fein (0.6%); 5 seats [4]
• UUP (0.4%); 4 seats [2]
• SDLP (0.3%); 2 seats [3]
• Alliance (0.2%); 1 seat [1]

In Northern Ireland a form of proportional representation is used anyway, which is why the figures are not massively different. The adherence to different sides of the Unionist/Republican debate in different constituencies also makes it tricky to predict.

As always, I caution that, of course, with a different system in place, other parties may have come forward.  As a result there might have been a different range of parties on offer that there were in our world.  If we look back to the 2010 election, if then there had been proportional representation then, UKIP would have had 20 seats in Parliament.  Whereas with our system UKIP only gained 2 seats and then only in 2014.  Similarly, back in 2010, with proportional representation, the Greens would have got 7 seats and now would have 25.  Thus, representation in the House of Commons would reflect the trends that have been so commented on in recent weeks, but, because of the system in use, have not come to fruition.

Under proportional representation, Labour would have won 198 seats in 2015, compared to 189 in 2010.  This would still reflect Labour's difficulty in increasing their support, notably in England.  In 2015, voting for Labour did rise a little over that of 2015 but this was heavily counter-balanced by Labour's losses in Scotland.  In our 2015 election they declined in number of seats, a net loss of 26 seats.  The 48 seats they lost compared to their representation in 2010, were not only located in Scotland but in England as well.  With proportional representation system, despite a modest rise, the failure to break through the 200-seat mark might have been enough to see off Ed Miliband even more than the poor performance did in our world.

Proportional representation would not have altered the severe decline for the Liberal Democrats; they would now have a third of the seats they had back in 2010.  However, they would have retained 51 seats rather than just 8.  In this alternative, it would have still be likely that a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition would have been formed back in 2010, though then with the Liberal Democrats three times stronger than in our world.  Persisting with this scenario into 2015, they may have gone back into coalition, but, unlike in 2010, alone, they could not have secured either the Conservatives or Labour a majority.

Even with proportional representation, the often-envisaged Labour-SNP-Green coalition would be no more feasible in forming government in 2015 than in our world.  Indeed, the SNP would only have 31 seats rather than 56, so would be weaker by far than in our current parliament.  Thus, with proportional representation in place what seems would have been the most likely government would have been a Conservative-UKIP-DUP coalition to give David Cameron a small majority.  Given that they had lost two-thirds of their seats as a result of the election (though a better result than losing over four-fifths in our world), the Liberal Democrats, are likely to have been reluctant to have participated in this more right-wing coalition being formed in 2015.

The first-past-the-post system has given the SNP 25 out of 56 of the seats they won.  It  has denied UKIP 82 seats and the Greens 24 seats.  As Douglas Carswell, the lone UKIP MP now, noted, this has meant, combined, 5 million voters for these parties have been denied something even approaching the level of representation they might expect.  In large part those seats have gone to the Conservatives and SNP.

The analysis of how different proportional representation would have impacted has shown that the scenarios discussed in recent weeks were not massively misplaced.  This is because, as I have seen frequently mentioned, polls measure the anticipated proportion of the vote.  As yet, the only good way of predicting the share of seats is the exit poll which, this time was only out by 15 seats, and that neglected the persistent 'shy Conservative' difficulty.  Given that one of those Conservative seats was won by a majority of just 27 votes, it was pretty decent estimation, though, of course, insufficiently close to silence those who at every election howl for the banning of 'inaccurate' polls.  In this case, they worked very much in the Conservatives' favour by making their warning about the advance of the SNP sound convincing and getting out their core voters especially in the very tight marginals that Labour had to take in order to approach winning.

P.P. 11/05/2015
This time round, the BBC has done similar analysis: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32601281

drawing on work done by the Electoral Reform Society using the D'Hondt Method of proportional representation approach.  Their figures are not radically different to mine Conservatives: 256; UKIP: 83; SNP: 31.  However, their work corrects my views based on my previous analysis regarding 'conversion' rates.  This shows that only this year, 2015, have the Conservatives needed fewer votes than Labour to win a seat.  Contrary to my sense of what was happening in 1997, they needed about 30,000 more votes to get a seat compared to Labour.  Now Labour needs about 6,000 votes per seat more than the Conservatives.  This does suggest that the party on track to win gains the better conversion rate.  I wonder what the impact of boundary changes will make on this conversion rate.  For UKIP the rate is running at over 3.5 million votes per seat, 100 times greater than for the Conservatives.

Virulent Misogynism Where You Would Least Expect It

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a mild interest in the Sherlock Holmes stories both the original ones and those written by authors other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Consequently it will be of no surprise that I have followed the second series of 'Sherlock' which ran last month.  It is written by Mark Gatiss and Stephen Moffat who have both been involved with 'Doctor Who' after the past few years; Gatiss also has quite an interest in steampunk as seen in his version of 'The First Men in the Moon' (2010) for which he wrote the screenplay and starred in.  'Sherlock' loosely bases its episodes on the renowned stories from the Doyle canon but brings them into the 21st century.

The first episode of this second series was 'A Scandal in Belgravia' modelled in part on 'A Scandal in Bohemia' (1891) the third Sherlock Holmes story published and the first in short story form.  The antagonist of both versions is Irene Adler in the original an American opera singer and in the recent version a high-class dominatrix prostitute.  In both, Adler has compromising photographs of royalty, in the original of the fictional King of Bohemia and in Moffat's version of an unnamed female member of the British royal family.  In the original story Adler is heterosexual and uses a photograph to leverage non-interference for herself and her new husband, a solicitor; in the modern version she is a lesbian, though she has male customers including a leading member of the Ministry of Defence and uses the photographs (held on a mobile phone) as leverage for non-interference by the UK government.  In both stories Holmes manages to locate the photographs by simulating a fire but is outwitted by Adler who escapes to safety (or not quite and this is where the important differences creep in).  Holmes in both stories has an ambivalent attitude to Adler in turns charmed, excited, challenged and angered by her, ending with begrudging admiration for 'The Woman', the title she earns in the 1891 story but starts with in the 2012 one.

I found the episode of 'Sherlock' engaging and there were new sub-plots such as the British government faking aircraft explosions to mislead terrorists.  However, the part of Adler deteriorated as the story went on.  Despite being a lesbian she falls for Sherlock Holmes (in a way which reminded me of Pussy Galore in 'Goldfinger' (1964)) and steadily comes to depend on Holmes for her safety.  The ultimate degredation comes at the end where she is seen dressed in a hijab about to beheaded by a gang in Pakistan only to be saved by Holmes masquerading as the executioner.  With that scene I half expected the next Gatiss/Moffat collaboration to be a producing of 'Kim' or some other tale of the Great Game set in Afghanistan just as if this was 1901 again and we were watching something penned by Rudyard Kipling.

The fact that 'Sherlock' saw the most renowned and strongest female character from the Holmes stories turned into a vulnerable female falling in love with the sexless Holmes, against her own sexual orientation and then rather than escaping from him and gently ridiculing him as she did in 1891, being a victim who can only be saved by him, not only irritated me but other commentators, well at least one.  On 3rd January, in 'The Guardian' newspaper, Jane Claire Jones wrote an interesting analysis of the gender politics of the episode and how Moffat's seemed to be a retrograde step from Doyle's version despite female equality having (supposedly) advanced in the last 121 years.  The article is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/03/sherlock-sexist-steven-moffat

Now, I am not going to write a critique of the article, which I had no issues with, what I am going to focus on is much of the content of the fifteen pages of online comments that followed in the three days after the article was published.  Now, 'The Guardian' is a liberal newspaper and you might expect many of its readers are as well.  I accept that the online version may attract a different audience to the paper version, but you might think that people with more conservative views would access one of the more numerous right-wing newspapers available online for their articles and to comment on.  What is alarming about the comments is how so many of them are misogynistic both against the article's writer and to the female character she is discussing.  The fact that 'The Guardian' had to remove so many of the comments and replace them with:   'This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards.' indicates some of the problem.  Not all of the comments were offensive.  Some just wondered why there was such fuss about a television programme, though you could argue that about any television review included in a newspaper.  However, television programmes, especially popular ones as 'Sherlock' clearly is (riding near the top of the I-Player list throughout January, so clearly being viewed by people in addition to the millions who saw it on television), do inform how we see society and I guess some of us were depressed at Gatiss and Moffat while being modern and usually supporting of gay characters turned to a Post-Feminist approach.

Beyond the comments about the unimportance of the programme you get on to a spiral of insulting comments generally directed at Jones or expressing views about Adler's character.  They range from the patronising suggesting that Jones give up writing articles and return to study and that she is probably ignorant of the ways of dominatrix prostitutes to utterly vile comments which have now been removed, but the phrase on one: 'death by rape' has lodged in my mind even weeks later.  What we see paraded is a series of comments which treat a woman writer and character at best as if they are juvenile and at worst as if they are some appalling creature who is there only to be abused for the pleasure of males.  Of course, they can hide behind pseudonyms as so many of us do online, but what alarms me is that these men are walking around with such hatred for women, probably mixing with women at work or even in their homes.  People hold vile views, but what shocked me is that in three days so many of them flocked to the website of a liberal newspaper to repeat such attitudes again and again without shame.

I have commented before about the decline of Feminism in the UK, something that has been noted by columnists writing for 'The Guardian' itself like Suzanne Moore.  They argue that Feminism has to be fought for all over again.  I have already agreed with that, but now feel that an active response needs to start immediately.  The internet is rife with vile attitudes in its dark corners, but the women-haters seem confident enough to step up to a widely read website and make such comments, presumably assuming they are 'common sense' and could not be taken as offensive because they are 'right'.  Hatred against someone for simply what they are whether female, gay or of a particular race is never acceptable and the commentators who post such things in places where they can be seen by children ('The Guardian' is freely accessible to anyone on the internet) need to realise they will be stopped because what they say is evil.  They are as bad as those sick criminals they no doubt would like to see executed and should be treated with such disdain themselves.

Trying Not To Be David Brent

Having come back to work after four months of unemployment into a more senior position overseeing two offices, three managers and two supervisors, I have quickly become painfully aware of how easy it is to fall into stereotypical office behaviour.  I have noticed that in my attempt to get to know the staff I have been appointed over, I am in real danger of behaving like the David Brent character, played by Ricky Gervais (who also co-wrote the series) in the BBC series, 'The Office' (14 episodes; 2001-3).  Like him, I am middle aged, probably a bit overweight and try to come over as confident when in fact being a little uncertain of my position (I was surprised to be given the job over the 3 other candidates and as it is do not know if I will even have any staff following the restructuring in July 2010).  He tried to be 'in' with the employees and also to be an effective manager but ended up acting in highly embarrassing and ineffectual ways and ultimately being made redundant.  I have noticed that my attempts to engage my staff in conversations have sometimes similarly backfired leaving me feeling similarly humiliated, though perhaps I am better than Brent in that I realise when I have made a faux pas rather than ploughing on regardless.  I found 'The Office' pretty unfunny.  For anyone who has worked in such an enivronment (it was set in a stationery company - Wernham Hogg [their slogan 'Life is Stationery' with its apparent unconscious pun on 'stationary' reminds me always of the slogan for Shanks refuse comapny: 'Shanks. Waste Solutions']), in its Slough office but is applicable to many industries in many UK towns.

I am conscious of using 'management speak'.  Sometimes it is difficult to avoid it when people promise to 'keep me in the loop'.  I have avoided 'touching base' with anyone or thinking about 'blue sky solutions' and certainly have not 'run it up the flagpole and see who salutes', but today I was charged with ensuring there was a 'can-do culture' in my offices after I protested that the constant banging on about 'efficiency' was translated by staff as simply accusing them of being lazy.  The most comic instance of this was when in a meeting at a previous company a member of staff complained that they and their employees were being 'sucked off into other activities' and then there was discussion about whether other people had been 'sucked off', a wealth of Frankie Howerdesque innuendo followed.

There are many potential pitfalls in the week ahead, notably at the office Christmas party next week.  I have insisted I will not be dancing so avoiding a very Brent-like appearance.  Striking the balance between frosty and being chatty with people who live very different lives (all but one of them is a woman) and who as yet I do not know at all well, is a challenge.  You do not want to walk past them silently or simply grunting a greeting or farewell so you flail around for some common topic to talk about and you can only say so much about the weather, especially as my office has no exterior windows.  This is treacherous ground and you end up saying something about how alert a person looks and that is risky.  One of my staff was sitting at her desk with her eyes closed and I bowled up commenting on how she must have been tired by her lunchtime shopping whereas in fact a colleague I could not hear was talking to her and she was listening attentively.  This made me look inconsiderate by talking over this colleague and simply babbling out foolish comments.  I now feel uneasy when around those colleagues.  I have had to adopt a more aloof demeanour but am always concerned that puts distance between you and staff and so you do not get alerted to developing problems until it is too late.  It is particularly critical in the current post where the staff have had their morale constantly battered by my predecessor still with the company who felt the workers never work hard enough and explicitly said they lie to her about the burdens of her work.

To some degree her manner is a little like some of Brent's superiors in 'The Office' but she is also like more senior managers I have encountered in real life.  As yet I have not reached those lofty heights and so can only speculate whether being up there blinds you to the fact that there is more than one way to do something.  She is the second boss I have had who thinks their is her perception of how things are which is 'true' and any other perception is not only wrong but if articulated then it is a 'lie' despite evidence to support it.  Different opinions are not lies.  I do wonder if this is one reason why British business is always in such a state because of this dogmatic attitude that seems all too prevalent.  The problem for me is that now my boss feels that I am helping to promote the 'lies' and so am disloyal to the management tier when in fact anyone in my position would have come to much the same conclusion that the staff are overworked and under-resourced and uncertain about the future (there is no idea in the company how it will be structured by the summer time) further sapping morale.  Whining on about seizing opportunities, being adaptable and working more efficiently is going to do nothing to improve the situation simply to undermine the staff even further.  If I follow her line, work will not get done, but if I follow the line I feel is appropriate I know I will only get a bad reference.  I find myself in lose/lose situations quite often, but here I reall feel as if I have stepped right in and am now up to my neck in one.

Nick Griffin on the BBC

What is interesting about the appearance of the leader of the fascist British National Party (BNP), Nick Griffin on the BBC political programme 'Question Time' on Thursday, is how it has actually made politics headline news. The particular episode of the programme attracted 8 million viewers, three times the normal level and for the first time exceding the popular entertainment show on BBC1 on Saturday nights, 'Strictly Come Dancing'. If you missed the programme a lot of it is available online (for the moment) at: Http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/default.stm

Everyone seems upset about the event. The BBC said it went ahead with featuring Griffin because it feared that if they did not feature the BNP on the programme they would be sued. At present, though its policies on the race of members has been condemned as illegal, the BNP is a legitimate political party in the UK and it has two MEPs in the European Parliament. The BBC thus seems to have acted out of fear. You could also argue that any party that attracts sufficient votes to get two MEPs is sufficiently significant that it could be ignored and if it had been then the BBC could not have featured other small parties such as the Green Party.


Others fear that featuring Griffin gave free publicity to his racist views. Peter Hain, MP, a strong campainger against apartheid condemned the decision to let Griffin appear. Ministers are concerned it has given publicity to the BNP's views. Listening to BBC radio it was clear that of those who rang in, more supported the BNP's views than those who opposed them. Griffin and his supporters were far from happy about the event despite getting the widest coverage the party has received. The questions on 'Question Time' come from the audience and the BBC over the thirty years the programme has been running has always tried to get a balance of gender, ages, ethnicity and political perspective from audience members no matter what part of the country the programme is coming from (it moves from town to town each week). In my view the real left has always been under-represented, but I respect the BBC's efforts. Griffin complains the BBC put together a 'lynch mob' that only had questions directed at him and in a negative way. Clearly, very arrogantly, he had expected to go on the programme and be able to expound his racist views with minimal challenge. I think because the BNP feels its views are 'common sense' they think the bulk of white British people will accept them without challenge, whereas in fact the majority of us are abhorred by them.


Griffin whines that only a couple of questions were not directed at him. Again, he shows terrible naivety. Members of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties appear weekly and people like Jack Straw (currently Justice Secretary) have been on the programme numerous times; there has been loads of opportunity to question them on this programme and in other places. This was the first occasion anyone from a neo-Nazi party has appeared on a British political programme, no wonder people are going be fascinated. Even if he or one of his colleagues appears again in the future, I imagine they will never have such a fascination for the audience as he did on this first occasion. In addition, of course, Griffin sees his policies almost as bland, common sense and seems oblivious (wilfully or not) to the fact that they provoke a harsh reaction from people across British society. Griffin does not consider blacks or Asian British people as British, he gives them no designation, but say he sees them as foreigners, would he expect any different response to his views if he was speaking to a French audience or an American one? Griffin's horizons are so narrow that he does not realise the implications of the arena he is wanting to step into.


Griffin claims that the particular episode of 'Question Time' was 'not a genuine Question Time' and that it was distorted to discredit him. He is angry that it was held in London (though he would have known this in advance) saying the city was 'no longer British'; he feels that London is 'not my country any more' which seems a bizarre statement. He says it should have been held in Burnley, Stoke or Thurrock, places 'where there are still significant numbers of English and British people and they haven't been ethnically cleansed from their own country'. It is clear Griffin lives in some fantasy world. Ethnic minorities make up only 17% of the UK population, the large majority of Britons are still white and the bulk of the audience, even in London which Griffin sees as some strange country, rather than housing 10 million (71.2% of whom are white) of Britain's 65 million people. Does this suggest that Griffin envisages a UK like South Africa was under apartheid with different 'tribal' groups assigned to 'homelands'? Or does he, even more sinisterly, envisage tufing millions of Britons, at least 7 million of whom are white, out of their homes in London to 'bring it back into' the UK. Now we are moving into the realm of ghettos and deportation so characteristic of Nazis.


It is clear that the programme was a shock to Griffin who clearly believed if he could get his message across he would be welcomed with open arms. The BNP claim that since the programme they have gained 3000 new members. That is not surprising, fortunately the BNP does not get much coverage so simply appearing is going to stir people who support his views to join him, I am sure the same would happen if a member of the Green Party or the Scottish Nationalist Party appeared.


Griffin is going to whine because that is what he does. Everything about the politics of the BNP is based on a distorted view of people and of the UK and then whining about it. What was more worrying was Conservative Baroness Warsi also on the programme telling Justice Secretary, Jack Straw that the mainstream parties need to be 'more honest' about immigration policy to see off the spread of the BNP. Personally I feel that the current government already distorts the news about immigration in favour of the racists and the policies of the Border Agency have helped to whip up racism. However, it does show that any future Conservative government is liable to be tempted to adopt even more racist policies and poor Peter Hain is likely to find himself living in a country increasingly like the South Africa that his family fled.

The danger, shown by Warsi's comment is that the Conservatives, who many are assuming will form the next government, are the ones most in fear of the increase of the BNP (and probably even more so of the less-racist nationalist party UKIP which has 17 MEPs) and so will begin introducing mild racist legislation as a way to draw support away from the BNP.  Of course, there have always been racists in the Conservative Party but they had tended to be kept under control by moderates within the party and by those who actually believe in multi-cultural Britain (which the BNP denies is reality).  However, in the context in which the BNP might be appearing to win support from the Conservatives it will allow the extremists within the Conservative Party to press for discriminatory policy.  Whilst that will not bring on the dystopia the BNP want, it will lead to tens of thousands of individual tragedies and will stoke up racist attacks and discriminatory behaviour rather than defuse it.


Anyone of my generation (I am now 42) can probably remember the 'no platform' dispute of the 1980s. This was the argument at colleges, polytechnics and universities over whether people expressing racist views should be allowed to speak at campuses. The argument from groups like the Socialist Workers' Student Societies (SWSS) was that to allow such people to speak was to give them 'the oxygen of publicity' which would attract support to their cause. Others such as the Labour clubs, argued that in a democracy you had to let everyone speak however vile their views, because otherwise you were imposing censorship something you were fighting against fascists to prevent happening. Policies ebbed and flowed with various speakers barred or allowed to speak. I always favoured letting these people speak so that everyone could at least see what their views really entailed rather than making judgements on assumptions and rumours. In addition, it meant those who opposed them had to have policies that addressed the kind of concerns that such speakers raised. If left-wingers and moderate right-wingers do not face challenges then they get complacent and do not work out or articulate policy (part of the problem with the Conservative Party at present).


Extremists are often their own worst enemies, particularly as so much of their policies tend to be one dimensional and simply complaining about how they feel things are rather than offering any positive alternative. Griffin was caught out when asked about his previous denial of the Holocaust and his persisting dispute over the number of people killed by Nazi Germany and its allies. He admitted he did not know why he thought about it the way he had before (outright denial) which for a politician seemed very weak. To natural BNP supporters even if they were not already in the party, no matter how weak Griffin's performance had been they would have seen it as wonderful and now are complaining that effectively he was not able simply to make a party political speech based on his distorted assumptions of history and of Britain today. However, to more wavering viewers, I can expect that at least some have seen that Griffin is simply full of hatred founded on a perception which bears relevance to the actual UK we live in.


Naturally the focus is on his policies on ethnic minorities, but no-one I have heard has asked him, assuming the BNP came to power, it would treat the Irish population of the UK. He keeps on mentioning the British and the English forgetting that one of the four components of the UK, Northern Ireland, actually has English and British (Great Britain is England, Scotland and Wales; the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) minority. Would people from Northern Ireland be barred from coming to the mainland? Would they be barred from jobs in Britain? That is just one element in the many holes in Griffin's nasty set of policies.


I am happy for any BNP member to appear on political programmes because they cannot but help show how mentally weak they are and that all they do is based on policies of complaint and destruction of British society and its economy. They have to learn that their previously privileged position of being able to stand above the political scene and simply snipe is over and that they will face hostility when they speak in public arenas. These are not closed BNP meetings where Griffin and his cronies are speaking among friends, these are places where an audience exposed to virulent, hateful policies are more than likely to respond equally as forcefully, just as we saw on Thursday. Grow up Nick Griffin, you are in real politics now, do not expect the easy ride you have had up until last Thursday to last any longer.

How Torture Became Culturally Acceptable in the UK

You may have heard about the recent advertisement that the BBC pulled after numerous complaints. In the UK you have to buy a TV licence every year, it costs £139 (€187; US$265). This money goes to fund the state-run television organisation the BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation) which now has six television channels and about ten radio channels. The fine for not paying it is £1000 (€1260; US$1780) and if you do not pay that then you get sent to prison. The number of people being imprisoned (usually women are heavily over-represented for this crime) has been falling, in 1996 it was 157 people; in 2000, 20 people, though there were fines and community service orders instead. In 2001 almost 400,000 people were prosecuted for not paying their television licence, but I guess the bulk paid up because the previous year only 2,149 reached court. In the mid-1990s however, more women were imprisoned for not paying this licence than for theft, prostitution, fraud and forgery, attacking people physically, burglary and robbery or drunkenness, so it is a gender-specific crime. Men are more likely to continue defaulting on their payments but eight times less likely to be imprisoned than women. This may say something about how courts perceive the two sexes, and to some degree that in general women are less likely to commit any crime than men are. With various forms of watching television now available there is mass confusion: do a I need a licence if I watch on my computer or my mobile phone? The licence is a state fee so even if you do not watch the BBC channels you still have to pay.

Anyway, people are being fined and imprisoned for not paying their licences and the BBC is effective at catching them. However, this does not seem enough. They feel the need to terrify people into paying the fee and this is where the advertisements came from. They were introduced in April 2008 and faced immediate criticism. They have been likened to scenes from 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' saying that they know where you live, who you are, etc. This is a standard tactic of government departments in advertising, another regular example comes from the so-called Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA).

The most alarming BBC advert featured the consequences of being imprisoned for not paying a TV licence, showing a man in prison and screams coming from a shower block with the tagline that detector vans can always find you watching an unlicenced television and implied that you could also be found in prison. The clear implication is that the prisoner is being raped in the shower block. The BBC admitted it had gone too far with this advertisement but felt that its softer approach in the past had not been successful. Prisons are violent, dangerous places the world over, people are raped in them, but it seems disgraceful that the threat of this should be used to get people to pay a £139 fee. Why does the BBC not cut out the middle man and simply have a van full of rapists which it drives round to the house of any defaulter and lets them in on the defaulter as a punishment rather than go through all the difficulty of sending them to court? Why is homosexual rape more tolerable for prime-time television than heterosexual rape or lesbian rape which is much more likely to be the case given the profile of those imprisoned for not paying?

The only real complaint about the campaign that attracted attention came from the very avuncular presenter Noel Edmonds who worked for the BBC for thirty years and now is on Channel 4. In September he said that he was going to stop paying his TV licence in protest at the heavy-handed approach that the BBC was adopting in its adverts. What is shocking is that there was not more widespread protest and from presenters with gravitas. Perhaps they are fearful of possible treatment from the BBC. How has it happened that the broadcasting corporation whose 'mission' (and it is on their website) is to 'Inform, Educate and Entertain', not to 'Terrify, Arrest and Punish'? I suppose this is part of the 'permissive atmosphere' that you find in authoritarian states. It does not need the dictator to say that various state bodies should act in a certain way, it just needs him to signal that he will do nothing to hinder them if they do. With the Blarite steps towards authoritarianism, this 'permissive atmosphere' has appeared and so state bodies now feel free to try to terrify people into compliance.

This incident got me thinking about how acceptable torture has now become in everyday culture. The BBC advert went out at prime-time which means that children, certainly teenagers would see it. How would you like to explain to a 13-year old or an 8-year old why that man is screaming? Yet, to the BBC supposedly a cornerstone of British culture, it is acceptable. This is because torture has become acceptable. People talk about how television and computer games have made violence commonplace, not something that I accept, but I do agree they can raise our tolerance for such things. The focus is always on the violence by the individual but in fact it works even more effectively for violence by the state. All of this stepped up in 2001 following the 11th September attacks in the USA. This was the excuse the US government had been waiting for and seemed to allow them to do anything now to counter their perceived enemies. It is ironic that in the 1970s the USA led the way in criticising the USSR for its human rights record and in the 1990s, China. Yet in the 2000s the USA has led the way in eroding human rights, snatching people from across the World to be tried under their jurisdiction (well in fact, that legal black hole which is Guantanamo Bay). We had not seen anything like this since the 1960s when Israeli snatch squads roamed the World seeking out former Nazis to abduct and take to Israel for trial. At least in the case of the Israelis generally they had loads of evidence against the people they took, the Americans do not even have this which is why so many of these prisoners have been held for so long and have to be tortured to get anything that will stand up in court.

The 'permissive atmosphere' was very apparent in the Iraq War of 2003 especially the Abu Gharib prison torture. It is clear that ordinary soldiers felt it was acceptable to torture prisoners. In common with torturers from the past notably Germans and paramilitary units of their allies, they were happy to be photographed carrying out these acts. No-one on the ground in Iraq questioned this behaviour; there were no moral questions about it despite the USA very loudly proclaiming itself a Christian country. The Iraqis (like the Vietnamese thirty years earlier) had been so de-humanised in the eyes of the average American, that treatment of them no longer fell within the bounds of what is acceptable for a human. These American soldiers no longer saw their prisoners as human beings, just objects to be abused. This happened in Vietnam too where the Vietnamese became 'Charlie' or 'VCs' not people. The atrocity of My Lai is well known (but too rarely mentioned these days) and it is becoming clear US soldiers in Vietnam were committing other atrocities, the activities of the so-called Tiger Force in the Vietnamese highlands in 1967 came to light in 2003. Quotes from former members of the unit were similar to these days: 'I knew it was wrong, but it was an acceptable practice.' and 'If they ran we shot them, and if they didn't run we shot them anyway.' This unit alone slaughtered hundreds of civilians and I am sure there are many others that will never be revealed. Knowing this is often the standard behaviour of their troops, in 2003 they sought exemption for all US troops from any war crimes charges, the only country in the World that would have been permitted this. Even though they did not get it, the arrogance of such a demand is alarming.

The USA may feel its troops have a right to commit war crimes and carry out torture if they choose, but the rest of the World generally seems to accept this. The focus in the UK seemed to skip past any concern about what was being done at Abu Gharib and instead focus on whether Lynndie England one of the soldiers photographed carrying out torture was a lesbian and so was asserting female control over men which she then sought to publicise across the internet as some sort of threat to male hegemony. How had the focus shifted from 'US troops carrying out torture' to 'lesbian challenging men through torture'? Given that she was pregnant by the time of her trial there might be questions about her sexuality. People seem happy to accept that torture was going on and somehow were more upset at frivolous explanations for the uses it was put to. This is as appalling as the 'causal nexus' explanation for the Holocaust carried out by the Germans in the Second World War, i.e. blaming Stalin's massacres for provoking Hitler's. Both were simply evil men who wanted to kill, there is no need to find a connection.

The reason why people could allow such attitudes without questioning the basic wrongness of torture I believe is because popular culture has shifted us this way. Torture features in serious, if popular television series. I am sure there are many I could mention but many I have not seen. I did watch 'La Femme Nikita' TV series (1996-2000) and in that torture was a weekly occurrence for a sinister US organisation. One week an agent happened to run into an old girlfriend while on a mission and so was routinely tortured by his own side to find out if he had given away anything. Psychological and physical torture were a weekly part of this series. Torture also appeared in another spy series 'Alias' (2002-06), though in less quantity. There was a sense that it gave these series 'edge'. The series 'Lost' (2004-10) also featured abductions, mental and physical torture. One of the lead characters is a former torturer from Iraq and the characters 'The Others' accept torture as a normal way to defend themselves, directed by their charismatic leader. They even blame the heroes of the series for 'making' them use torture. This has parallels with the USA's attitude especially to the Iraqi population, there are parallels to Vietnam too. I imagine these are deliberate on the part of the writers. A UK one is 'Spooks' supposedly an authentic series about the work of Britain's Security Service commonly known as MI5. It started in 2002 and has now run for seven series and does not look likely to come to an end, partly as the cast keeps on being renewed as individual characters are killed. This tries a very British approach on the counter-espionage/terrorist role and shows that even the UK's allies and leading people in the UK cannot be trusted. However, again torture both mental and physical is used. If this is going on in British prisons for real, then there are a lot of UK officials who should be hauled in front of war crimes tribunals too.

All of these series have had high viewing figures both in the USA and the UK and I imagine other parts of the World. They show torture as being something necessary and generally having to be used as a weapon in the war against even more evil people. I know moral ambivalence is 'sexy' these days and is probably an accurate reflection of where people stand, but it does push on the acceptance of such behaviour in real life, especially when in the context of 'them' and 'us' which our governments have been pushing hard right through the 2000s. It also encourages us to think the way that people did in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR, not to be concerned if a neighbour or even a family member is arrested, clearly they are wrong and dangerous. Our popular culture is teaching us how to live in an authoritarian state without complaining; to accept that whatever is done however horrific because it is 'necessary' for our 'safety'. You need to remember that the organisation that ran the Terror of the French Revolution was the Committee of Public Safety.

So, I suppose we should not be surprised, if by now, after years of such popular and state propaganda, that the BBC feel it is alright to use such imagery and such threats to encourage people to pay a £139 fee. The question is, given how so few people raise any questions about such methods, how far do we go with the next step?

P.P. 18/11/2008: I had forgotten two more popular television programmes which contributed to the 'normalisation' of torture in the British media. The first was the inclusion of scenes from the Japanese television programme, 'Endurance' in which contestants were voluntarily tortured in a number of ways including sleep deprivation, prevention of urinating, bloating with food, deprivation of food, beating, exposure to creatures such as insects and reptiles often to the face (in actions reminiscent of scenes in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four') and so on. This was shown every week on 'Tarrant on TV' (began in 1992 and still running), certainly in the 1990s, I have not seen it for years. In some ways it was a racist feature inviting the audience to laugh at Japanese behaviour but also it made torture seem something comic rather than alarming. Many of the elements of 'Endurance' particularly exposure to creatures to the face and being forced to eat unpleasant things is a core element of 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here' which has been running each year since 2001 with this year's series being watched by nearly 9 million people. Possibly even worse than featuring torture in drama, having it in so-called 'reality' shows makes it seem very normal, and almost to be expected.

P.P. - 05/04/2009: It is interesting that this past week the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, a permanent committee made up of MPs from all parties will begin examining the allegations that have come to light over the past two years about British involvement in torture, especially in connection with the war in Afghanistan and action by the Pakistani Internal Services Intelligence body ISI and the US Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay to which prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq have been flown and held without charge and tortured. In addition, there is the particular case of Binyam Mohamed and other British complicity in torture. Both MI5 (the UK's internal Security Service) and Greater Manchester police have admitted involvement in this torture already.

The fact that a civilian British police force has been involved is even more alarming. I know the Greater Manchester Constabulary have been dangerously odd since the days of Sir James Anderton (nicknamed 'God's cop' for his fundamentalist proclamations) as its Chief Constable (1976-91) and his outrageous statements about purging the city on a kind of religious basis that harks back to the witchfinders of the 17th century. The committee will also investigate the use of British Dependent Territory Diego Garcia for rendition (i.e. kidnap) flights to the USA, oversight of private security companies (i.e. mercenaries) employed by the Foreign and Commowealth Office and incredibly sexual abuse at the British embassy in Baghdad. It is apparent civil service standards deteriorated so far as to be like those of some third rate dictatorship not that of a supposedly leading democracy in the world.

In such a culture of self-righteousness of course torture will be seen as acceptable. I doubt the select committee, whose members are chosen by the prime minister of people previously involved with MI5 or MI6, will probe too deeply, at least some evidence of the shameful behaviour of British bodies is coming to light and makes ridiculous any attempt to portray the UK as a bastion of human rights. Rangzieb Ahmed arrived in the UK having been tortured by the ISI with three of his fingernails missing, so this torture that the UK is supporting is of the most medieval kind. It is sickening.

'Pre-Charge Detention': Wrapping Up the Destruction of Liberties in Weasly Words

Any hope I had for Gordon Brown, any belief that his imminent removal was being over-exaggerated and a hope he would continue has been eroded utterly by his pig-headed push to extend the period without charge from 28 days to 42 days. There is utterly no need for this measure. The USA has only 2 days (though prisoners taken to Guantanamo Bay are exempt) and even places like Turkey which hardly has a good human rights record only has 7½ days. Why does the UK have so much more and wanted it extended? I have no love for the Conservative Party, but am heartened by David Davis the Shadow Home Secretary resigning because he opposes this legislation. He is resigning his seat too and will campaign at the by-election as an independent on this issue. A Labour MP for Rotherham, Dennis McShane, was on television this lunchtime saying he could not believe that a Conservative (the party has a history of supporting strong law and order legisation) is opposed the 'necessary' stronger legislation (McShane listed the things he wants including identity cards for foreigners and more CCTV as well as this extended detention without charge), but he cannot see that this shows that the Labour Party is moving so far to the right-wing in its rush to abolish democracy in the UK that it is leaving the Conservatives behind.

The other thing that sickened me is how the BBC is now referring to detention without charge. It has gone from being called that, i.e. 'detention without charge' which it is, to now being termed 'pre-charge detention' to make it sound like some kind of preliminary process that will always lead to a charge. Of course this is not the case. If the police need 42 days to get the evidence to make a charge it suggests that the case is pretty weak anyway. In fact what the 42 days are about is less to do with gathering evidence and more about psychological pressure and presumably ultimately torture to get the suspect to confess. This kind of detention does not lead to charges as clearly was seen in the Hicham Yezza - Rizwaan Saber case last month. Rizwaan Saber who is studying a PhD at Nottingham University was arrested along with his academic supervisor Dr. Hicham Yezza who is of Algerian origins (he has lived in the UK since 1995 when he was aged 17). Saber's research meant he had to study terrorist literature. He had been accepted into the UK to study this area (which clearly is an important one which speaking Arabic he would be ideally equipped to focus on) and was using resources publicly available on US government websites. Both men were held 14th-20th May and were released without charge. So they were in 'pre-charge detention' for six days, but of course it was not 'pre-charge' because they were doing nothing wrong. The government is clearly embarrassed by the whole incident and are now trying to deport Yezza back to Algeria despite him living here for over a decade and working as an academic (who are usually exempt from immigration regulations to promote contact between universities and their staff across countries).

The Yezza-Saber case is alarming for two reasons. First it shows how even with the 28 days detention without charge it is being used improperly. Second it shows an aspect that I neglected to look at in my posting on the creation of the police state in the UK, that is the suppression of academic freedom to research what is seen as important. This is a form of censorship and seems to have slipped by without the bulk of the population being aware of it. Self-censorship seems to be increasing off the back of it with the BBC coming up with euphemisms and weasly words to conceal the actual severity and speed of the erosion of our civil liberties. Brown you have lost any support I had for you. You could have turned back the tide of Blair's authoritarianism, instead you have decided to extend and accelerate it. I hope that you will lose the vote on extending detention without charge and that it will bring down your government in the way that you have been warning Labour MPs that it will. You are not fit to hold office in a democracy, you need to go.