I had a conversation with a friend today who is left/liberalish but having qualms over how to vote in the election; one of the many dissatisfied with Blair but not sure what alternative there is out there and whether the Lib Dems are worth it. This was more or less the advice I gave him, with a few additions, and I thought it’d be best to repeat it to anyone else interested. It’s more or less a longer version of stuff I’ve been posting to del.icio.us of late, so apologies to anyone annoyed at getting it twice. Anyway, here goes:

Most importantly, check if you’re in a marginal the Tories might win
If you are queasy over Labour but definitely do not want a Tory in, then it is worth checking tacticalvoter.net and seeing whether your seat is either currently a Tory marginal, or one where they could win. In which case, hold your nose and pick their closest rival regardless of affiliation.

Check to see how good your local MP is
If you currently have an MP standing for re-election, who you might vote for, then check out their record. TheyWorkForYou summarises their interests and recent speeches, while Public Whip will show you how they voted. No point voting out a Labour MP who rebelled over Iraq/tuition fees/ID cards/whatever your particular bugbear is, after all. Information about the how they’re doing on the campaign trail can be found by trawling through Google News, which sources both local and national news.

Check to see which party best fits your politics
The election has become twisted and warped as it descends into mudslinging and backbiting (thanks, Lynton), so many of us probably have no idea what policies are. Unfortunately, many of the sites to help you decide, such as Who Should You Vote For? look like exams on memorising party manifestos; they’re still caught in the terms the parties themselves use (I mean, is “Parents of under-5s should be able to spend childcare tax credits as they wish” really the biggest issue we’re facing?). Political Survey 2005 is a better, more wide-ranging and less pushy, site that matches you with the party you’re more likely to agree with.

If you’re not in a marginal, consider the minority parties
By this I mean the Greens. I think they are a nice bunch of people, and so do many others, but for some reason many people, though agreeing with them, never consider them a realistic choice for power (tellingly, in the 2004 London Mayoral elections, Darren Johnson, the Green candidate got only 57,000 first-choice votes but nearly 210,000 second-choice votes). If you’re in a safe seat with little chance of change, then don’t be afraid of voting for something you believe in. Your vote towards a Green (if they’re standing) could at least help them keep their deposit; every little helps.

Campaign for PR
If you’re sick of having to go through these tactical voting shenanigans and wish you could just vote for who you want and for them to represent you, then why not start campaigning for a better form of democracy?

Right, that’s it. Any extra links or hints welcome. Happy voting.

“The election would be stopped if we had our way”

Who said this? An Islamic revolutionary in Iraq? A hardline fascist in some former Soviet republic? Nope. It’s the words of Andrew Spence, of the Fuel Lobby, who apparently would like to deny every other citizen in the UK their basic human right, for the glorious and rightful cause of cheaper petrol.

The Fuel Lobby will be attempting to blockade the country again from May 3 in an attempt to disrupt the election (can you imagine what Thatcher would have done had the miners pulled a similar stunt in 1983?). It’s even more remarkable when you consider fuel duty has only gone up at the rate of inflation or less so far this decade (and inflation has been kept nice and low thanks to the Treasury and the Bank of England). The real reason why fuel prices have been rising is thanks to the market, an inability of current production to cope with demand. The Lobby’s argument is, well, just a load of babble:

“We equally recognise that government has frozen fuel duty for some while now, but this has done little to stem the huge increase in costs hauliers must pay before they receive any return from the customer - even if that customer is paying something towards the extra cost. We desperately need some kind of fuel stabilisation formula which would result in tax levels on fuel being reduced as world oil prices increase.”

But this already happens - as duty is a fixed amount per litre rather than a percentage of the price, any rise in production price results in the proportion of fuel costs as duty falling; the government is doing the haulage industry a bit of a favour here by not using a percentage tax, which would have exacerbated the recent world oil price changes much more.

There should be a debate on fuel and how it should be taxed, within the much larger context of the economy, the environment, carbon dioxide emissions, congestion, the future of world oil production (not looking too rosy, to be honest) and whether the fact we rely so much on oil to keep our economy going is sustainable in the long term. But is there an attempt to create such a debate? No, just simple thuggery. All that scum like Andrew Spence can think of is to threaten to a hold a gun at the ballot box. Hopefully the politicians will have enough spine to stand up to them.

Jackie Ashley, in today’s yesterday’s Guardian, talks about the reforms a third Blair government would bring in (amongst other things). If Blair gets a stonking majority, as Paul Davies mentions, Blair could introduce (or at least propose) PR as a revolutionary measure to reform the electoral system.

Sadly, as much as I wish this to be true, the only possible reply to this is: Bollocks. Utter, big, sweaty bollocks. Would Blair really want to uproot a system that will have delivered him three full terms, an unprecedented achievement for Labour? Through cleverly working at the marginals and all the stereotypes associated (Warwick woman, Mondeo man, school gate mum), New Labour have become experts at swinging the 1% (or so, that’s a rough estimate) of the population whose vote clinches a victory.

Ashley forgets that Blair initiated an investigation into better voting in 1997, with the Jenkins Commission, then promptly ignored its conclusions, presumably after realising that trying to convince the country as a whole would mean a shift from the centre to the left. As a result, first-past-the-post rules, and the big two parties now devote their efforts entirely on the marginals. The result… well, I’ll leave Phil to say it:

We’re living in a strange, muted, deadened political landscape, where many of the most important questions go unanswered or unasked. I don’t for a moment believe that this is our historical condition, that we’re beached in some Fukuyamaesque arrivals lounge at the end of History; I believe it’s the calm before the storm breaks.

I agree totally, unfortunately I can’t see how a storm can break. Maybe if some future government manages to swing a majority in the House while gaining an absolutely tiny minority of the popular vote, we could have some sort of popular revolution, but this is unlikely given the apathy in the country (particularly as apathy would be a leading cause of such an unpopular government gaining power in the first place). Instead, maybe a regional legislature that is proportionally elected could defy the unproportional House of Commons and prove its representativeness, but the only such body with any great power at the moment is the Scottish Parliament, and I don’t see it having too much effect south of the border, no matter what.

So, basically, we’re fucked. Some of us will continually lobby to Make Votes Count, others will try to vote tactically with some, but not much, success (which is, as I’ve said, rubbish - hacking with an already broken system, as any geek will tell you, is never a good thing to do long-term). The only possibility for PR to be instigated in the current climate, is if Labour form a hung government and need to bribe the Lib Dems for their co-operation, but this is not something that can be delicately instigated by the tactical voting campaigns; if it does happen it will mostly be by chance. In the meantime, not only are people like me cynical about the outcome of this election, but also of any election in the foreseeable future; there must be some tonic or revival for frustrated lefties like us. Anyone?

Thomas Friedman is at it again, with a new book, extracts of which are in today’s Guardian. In it, he has to update his highly spurious Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, namely that once countries is developed enough to support McDonald’s franchises, then they will be unwilling to fight one another, a fact sadly disproved by the American and British bombing of Belgrade (which had seven branches) in 1998. Undeterred, he’s modified (well, outright changed it, if we’re being honest) from McDonald’s (because everyone has them now), to Dell (whose example he tediously recounts), or rather any mulinational firm that has a global supply chain. Two countries that depend on trade between the two will never fight.

The problem is that being trading partners does not always entail peace. France was Nazi Germany’s biggest trading partner right up until 1939; this week, although China is Japan’s biggest trading partner, the two are still bitterly exchanging harsh words, with China more or less condoning outright anti-Japan demonstrations over a matter a piffling as school textbooks, which are only entering a tiny minority of Japan’s schools. Alright, it’s unlikely to go to war, and there are deeper reasons, but it is still likely to damage the two nations’ economic relations. Prosperity does not guarantee sanity.

And anyway, we’re all trading partners. There have been global supply chains for centuries; Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion details a wonderful example of Spanish silver, mined in Mexico, smelted and exchanged by the Dutch, transported by the Turks and traded with the Chinese in exchange for Japanese steel. Global trade has existed for far longer than we credit; what has changed is the speed and ubiquity it now possesses; for some reason we need a new word, ‘globalisation’, to describe it, but much of what did apply before the word was coined still applies now.

Trade is, on the whole, a good thing (just look at economies ruined by sanctions, like Iraq’s in the 1990s), but like many good things can also be misused for evil ends; what goods we buy and sell (butter or guns?), and who profits from them (as many people in as many countries or the capitalist elite?), are all still very much of our own choosing. Friedman seems to happily surrender to just letting trade go (and who can blame him? He got a cheap working Dell out of it) but building any sort of global society, as outlined by the globalisation evangelists, is not as simple as just acquiescing to the invisible hand.

Oh god. Five-and-a-quarter hour train journeys and me don’t mix. For the record, the Virgin Pendolino trains from London to Edinburgh, while giving you a fantastic view of the Lake District and full of tilty goodness, is not the most comfortable if you’re a pleb in standard class. They pack as many people in as possible in ‘airline’ seats and only the (very few) table seats have plugs for your laptop or mobile to charge on.

Having said that, the tickets on offer are dirt-cheap, which makes up for it. And the five hours gave me some valuable time to sit and read and hack about with things, so my brain is happy though my back and legs are not.

I’ve just got back home after a 10-day break in London, to an email inbox overflowing (174 messages) and I don’t want to even look at my RSS reader. Most of my internet use was business rather than pleasure while I was down there so I didn’t blog much and only linklogged occasionally. Sorry. This will change. I am now back in Edinburgh, refreshed (ish) and without the burden of essays or any other nags, so this should mean plenty of spare time to waste spend blogging to all and sundry.

In the meantime, enjoy one small piece of interweb goodness I caught - Dabblers and Blowhards (via ntk) is an excellent debunking of a crappy analogy that tries to hang hacking and coding on the coat-tails of painting (oil, rather than house - though I’m sure you could come up with some analogies to the latter as well if you thought hard enough). There is always the paradoxical situation of people pushing information technologies as new and revolutionary, while at the same time trying to portray them as the equivalent of some other art form (in the UK, this could be called the Swiss Toni method of explanation). The truth probably lies somewhere in between, in a subtle and complex manner, but that’s not as easy or as much fun as going “You see Paul, hacking in Lisp is much like making love to a beautiful woman…”

Christ’s banjos. After a gruelling week of essay deadlines and general academic paranoia, I’ve had little respite, having come down from Edinburgh to London and immediately starting a temporary resumption of my old job at The London Line. And today the first proper issue is out! Papers are out on the streets! The London Line website (designed by yours truly) has gone live! The BBC and Guardian talking about us! And we have proper writers and things - Dave Green! Londonist! Belle De Jour! Even I’ve got an article in (which was originally twice as long but got mercilessly edited), which I managed to bash out in between coding the site (which makes me a sort of Tesco Value version of Ben Hammersley, I suppose).

Anyway, for those of you in London, pick one up from outside (not inside) a central London tube station. For the rest of you, read the site (which is still in beta and probably a bit rough around the edges). And for me - I’m dead, so I’m taking a break. Not least because it’s my birthday this weekend…

While everyone and their blog says this is the first election to be blogged, they all failed to predict that would also the first election to be photoshopped.

The story is, er, a little bizarre. Ed Matts, Conservative PPC for Labour’s most marginal seat, Dorset South, last month attended a protest in support of a Weymouth asylum seeker, Verah Kachepa, and her family. A Tory in support of an asylum seeker is news enough; it gets even weirder when you find out that Anne Widdecombe (not exactly the most pro-immigrant politician) also supported her case. They were pictured holding placards, one of Mrs Kachepa and the other saying “Let Them Stay”

Despite this very public protest (which got mentions in the BBC and Guardian), Mr Matts decides it would be a good idea to take the photograph of him and Widdy, and ’shop in a quite contradictory message, baying for controlled immigration and an end to ‘chaos’, for his election literature.

Now, strictly speaking this isn’t really hypocrisy or lying (after all, one could in theory oppose economic migrants coming here and just accept asylum seekers), but it is breathtaking stupidity. I mean, how dumb do you have to be to totally doctor a photograph whose original contents were splashed across the press (especially the local press) only a few weeks ago? John Reid is doing his attack dog best to turn this into a scandal (”he should be sacked for telling lies”, ” “the only conclusion I can come to is that this organised deceit has been sanctioned and organised by the Conservative Party”, etc.) when outrage really isn’t the appropriate emotion. The only response should be derision, maybe even disbelief that someone that dim is the best the Tories can get, for such an important marginal seat. Labour are spinning this all wrong.

Others have the right idea - take the piss as much as possible. While b3ta takes its best shot, the best effort is the one featured on the Guardian’s election blog.

Update: You can now make your own…

Whenever copying & pasting text from a web browser (not just IE, but Firefox too) into Microsoft Word*, Word feels compelled to connect to the Internet to do something. I only know because my firewall alerts me. Why would it need to connect to the Internet, just to paste some HTML from the clipboard on my local machine? Anyone have any idea?

* All I’m doing is pasting in paper and journal citations into essays, lest someone accuses me of plagiarism :-)