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notes from JK

The election that was

This is a post I’ve kept putting off because I thought my thoughts would get more clear with time. They haven’t, they’re still a jumble. So apologies, but this is how they’ve come out.

This election campaign was filled with exhausting hard work, lots of late nights, hours spent writing and designing leaflets and hundreds of conversations.

It included reading lots and lots of blog posts, probably thousands of tweets and lots of time on iPlayer trying to watch the good bits I’d missed.

Working on Caroline’s campaign management team wasn’t just exhilirating because of the prize in sight, it was because I got to spend time with some extraordinary people.

The TV debates were overall a hugely negative change – they narrowed the terms of the political discourse and they gave excessive focus to just three parties out of all those standing across the country.

Election night was nailbiting and… long, very long. But the result was worth it – the sense of elation was incredible. Nearly 40 years after our party was founded, we have finally broken into the long-closed Westminster club. I’m not sure who took it, but this video at the count declaration, captures some sense of the moment.

Gathering on the seafront outside the Brighton Centre with a couple hundred of green supporters at 7am to toast our victory was an unexpected addition to the morning.

Going out onto New Road to help with Caroline’s first ‘street meet’ a few hours later was remarkable. We saw incredible support from everyone we met, even as we were surrounded by a swarm of cameras and journalists.

Reading the hundreds of congratulatory emails to Caroline and the Green Party from right across the world has shown what this breakthrough has meant to people spread far beyond what I could have imagined.

And finally, seeing a fraction of the invitations and casework coming in to Caroline, has shown to me how much hope the people of Brighton have put in getting more from their MP than ever before. Caroline and the Green Party will do everything they can to deliver on those hopes.

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notes from JK

People of Brighton, we can wake up on Friday to a Green MP

All the trends indicate that this Thursday, if you vote Green in Brighton Pavilion, you’ll wake up on Friday to a Green MP.

Vote Green because you believe in our policies, because you want to change politics and because you want to see more diverse voices in Parliament. Vote Green because you know Brighton can do better.

And if that doesn’t convince you, how about Queen’s Brian May!?

This has been an extraordinary election to take part in. Aside from partisanship, there have been some incredible grassroots projects including voteforpolicies.org.uk, The Straight Choice and Democracy Club. More power to their elbows – they’ll surely be plenty of post-match analysis from the data they’ve collected.

I shall try to update via Twitter over the next 48 hours, I doubt a blog will emerge before Sunday or Monday.

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notes from JK

Making the case for electoral reform from scratch

Electoral reform is very much on people’s minds as they struggle on how to vote and reflect on the prospects of a hung parliament. David Cameron has defended the current ‘first past the post’ system by saying ” I want us to keep the current system that enables you to throw a government out of office.”

Which is a deeply untruthful answer, as Cameron must surely know. He faces a battle to swing enough seats to win a majority in the face of the voting system’s Labour bias. In 2005 the vast majority of voters didn’t vote for Labour, yet Labour were returned to power with a majority in parliament. Not exactly the ‘throwing out’ Cameron suggests.

But rather than getting bogged down in debates about strong governments, coalitions and the experiences of Germany, Italy or Spain; let’s go back to first principles.

As a developed society we have evolved public services, benefits, a legal system and taxation to fund these. How these are run, what they do and how they work are important decisions which affect us all.

So that we can spend most of time living our lives, doing our work and caring for our families, we have chosen to delegate the decision-making to representatives. We generally agree that the best way to choose people to represent us is by an election where every citizen has one vote. The principle is that our preferences can all be heard equally because we want our chosen representatives to be representative of us. But the electoral system we use  (how votes are translated into representatives) affects the results.

Surely if 15% of people vote for party X and 20% vote for party Y then the percentage of representatives from each of those parties must be as close as possible to those percentages. That’s the most fair and representative outcome. And we know countries like Sweden, Norway and Germany with fair electoral systems have good stable governments and a healthy diversity of views in a mature political culture.

That’s why we need electoral reform – for fairer election results, a more diverse parliament and a better politics.

Categories
voting

India’s e-voting machines cracked

Rop Gonggrijp is someone always worth keeping an eye on. He was instrumental in revealing the problems with the Nedap voting machines used in Ireland and the Netherlands.

How he’s part of a team who have publicly demonstrated serious security flaws with India’s electronic voting machines. Time and time again India has been cited as a good example – but the reality was their systems lacked independent scrutiny. Now that expert scrutiny has been brought to bear, problems have been found.

How many more countries have to make the expensive mistake of rolling out e-voting before we all learn that computers and voting are just not well suited for each other.

Read more, and watch the great video at http://www.indiaevm.org

Rop’s post explaining some of the back story

VeTA – a new group campaigning against India’s e-voting, welcome!

(via Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker)

Categories
technology voting

Upcoming events in Brighton & Cambridge

Two events coming up soon which will be of interest to digital rights type people:

  • Debating the Digital Economy Act Thur 29th April
    I’ll be one of the contributors at this debate, organised by Wired Sussex here in Brighton.
  • Internet Voting: Threat or Menace Tue 27th April
    Jeremy Epstein from SRI International is over in the UK and will be giving a talk at Cambridge Uni’s Computer Lab Security Seminar series. I did one of these a few years ago and it was highly enjoyable – the audience were engaged and very generous with their interest.
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current affairs voting

Links 15-04-2010

  • Israeli e-voting system shown to be insecure
    Israeli ministers are ignoring the global trend against e-voting. Not only that but they want to implement a radio-based (RFID) system which researchers at Tel Aviv University have already broken. Just crazy. Avi Rubin picks up the story on his blog.
  • The single mother’s manifesto
    A powerful essay against the Tories by Harry Potter creator J.K Rowling. Of course once Murdoch’s pay wall comes down I won’t be able to link to such things.
  • Twitter grows up
    At their first corporate conference, a raft of announcements including ways to make money. I don’t envy their trying to shift people from the free lunch they’ve had this far.
  • Stephen Fry – The Intelligence Debate
    What a marvellous presentation, absolutely comprehensive demolition of the problems with organised church hierarchy. I would never want be up against someone so smart and so witty! He nails it, let’s not lose the lessons of “the Galilean carpenter” but rid ourselves of  the organised hierarchy.
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technology

False choices

My wife’s cousin is an electrical engineer. In his spare time he noodles around with lots of kit. For example he buys broken TomTom satnavs off eBay and fixes them up.

He’s really good at it and in the process he’s discovered something very interesting. Despite the appearance of many different models in fact most of them have identical hardware features. Indeed much of the functionality that TomTom only provide in the more expensive models is there in all of them – they just turn it off in the software.

Think about that – they build it in the device. You hold the functionality (e.g. USB2.0 connectivity) in your hands. But TomTom force you to either pay more or it won’t work. Some will say that’s rife across many industries but I think it’s wasteful and disrespectful.

Imagine if the Apple iPhone 3GS (which has a built in GPS receiver) was sold in two models, with navigation and without. The only difference would be in software. I can’t see Apple doing that because: They like to keep their product line simple, and they (generally) treat customers well.

Something else he’s discovered is that many of the TomTom software updates work fine on old models, they just block them from running with hardware version number checks – forcing demand to buy newer models.

False choices (between the 13 models of TomTom car satnavs currently on sale) are bad for customers and ultimately bad for business: We don’t want to have to make difficult choices between all the versions; we don’t want to realise that we’re being extorted to use hardware features we’ve already bought or upgrade when our existing kit is good enough. Today’s smart consumers aren’t going to put up with this kind of behaviour.

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notes from JK

On debating Charlotte Vere over nuclear power

On Monday 22nd March I was invited on Radio Reverb’s “In Brighton Mondays” show to debate political issues with Conservative candidate Charlotte Vere.

I very much enjoy such debates, and the show was no exception. However it raised some interesting issues for the Tories. Firstly Charlotte spoke glowingly of food waste collection and fortnightly waste collection — waste reductions techniques the local Tory council just will not consider no matter what. When challenged on this Charlotte answered that she wasn’t a councillor and wouldn’t get involved in council-level debating. Interesting… I wonder if she and the Pavilion Conservatives see eye-to-eye, does she have the support of Tory councillors in the constituency? I doesn’t seem like it.

But sparks have been flying on another matter. Following from a debate about where wind farms should be sited, we began talking about the challenge of providing sufficient energy over the next 15 years. Charlotte suggested nuclear fusion, which I thought was an extraordinary claim. I sent out a press release highlighting my concerns over this. On Twitter Charlotte pushed back hard demanding a retraction and apology. So I got hold of the show’s recording (thanks to Charlotte & Radio Reverb’s Paul Stones) and had a listen. I’ve copied the transcript I made of the section in question at the end of this post.

Not only do I think it’s clear that Charlotte was strongly advocating nuclear power, including fusion, but that she was proposing non-uranium based reactors. That means either plutonium (which can be used for weapons and is dangerous to store with a half-life of 24,100 years) or the relatively benign Thorium. Given Charlotte kept highlighting how safe new nuclear power is, I imagine she was meaning to refer to Thorium – however there are no working commercial Thorium reactors (there are some which use a Uranium/Thorium mix but that’s an altogether different technology).

It’s a worry that someone who wants to become an MP is advocating betting our energy security on unproven nuclear technologies. There are so many technologies and opportunities for energy efficiency that could meet the challenge, and we have such a long way to go. For example I walked past a large Sainsbury’s on Easter Sunday and saw all the lights on inside despite nobody being there – what did we have to burn to keep those lights going? We can meet the energy challenge by using energy much more carefully and through a mix of renewable energies.

Debate on meeting renewable energy targets – Transcript of Radio Reverb “In Brighton Mondays” 22/3/10
Sections not in [square brackets] are verbatim
==========================================
42:54
[JK criticises nuclear]
44:06
CV I think it’s all very laudable and very um… how can I say, it’s interesting. I think the point is that in the real world we have to look at where we are now and where are we are going to be able to go in the short term. Because we have a 2025 power crunch coming up and we have to sort it out before then. So heat pumps in people’s home and solar panels on their roofs, that’s all great and if people want to do that, that’s brilliant and I’m sure they’ll be government help to allow them to do that.
But the point is we also have to consider that a huge amount of energy is used by business, by the economy and we have to figure out where we’re going to get the electricity for those too.
So if you look at the usage of the country on a daily basis, about 40,000MW. So if we want to do 25% of that, that’s a lot of electricity. Now Jason will of course say oh nuclear power it’s the most evil thing since, I don’t know, the Joker. And the point is: It’s NOT actually. Old fashioned nuclear power based on uranium perhaps was because it was of course it was all done to make warheads, but we don’t need that anymore.
So I think the thing is scientists are making great strides in going from nuclear fission to nuclear fusion so there’s a huge different type of nuclear power that could come online provided we make the commitment to actually having a nuclear component going forward.
Nuclear power is actually incredibly clean, it’s unbelievably clean. So…
JK Apart the waste that takes million of years…
CV No, no but hang on a minute! Non-uranium, non-uranium.
JK Even if you…
CV Sorry non-uranium.
JK Even if you put aside the safety fears, even if you say they are solvable, you’re talking about fusion which has been promised for how long? This is like going back to Star Trek…
CV It’s coming, it’s coming!
JK We’ll see!
CV If we don’t invest in it we’ll never know, will we?
JK Of course keep the research going. [JK then argues that nuclear hugely slow to build and hugely costly, not economical]
CV It has to stay in the mix. [referring to nuclear]
[Later on CV admits fusion not a proven technology before going back to fact that renewables won’t meet needs of 2025 energy crunch.]
[Debate goes back to windfarms on the downs]
Categories
voting

Electoral Commission Chair re-opens the e-voting question

I’ve just come across a Guardian interview of Jenny Watson, chair of the Electoral Commission, which includes this:

People, she said, should also be allowed to vote online. “There will always be people who will want to vote in person, just as there are people who want postal votes. But you could allow more choice in the system,” she said.

It’s extremely disappointing to hear the Chair of the Electoral Commission, of all people, promoting this kind of view. These kind of facile arguments were being made by Labour ministers 3-4 years ago.

Since then we’ve been on a journey with many MPs, publicly at least, agreeing e-voting is a long way from being ready for consideration, if ever. Most Electoral Commission officers I’ve met have also been taking ever stronger lines against e-voting and e-counting.

I absolutely support the Electoral Commission being more outspoken and pushing more forcefully for reforms that improve the security, accuracy and accessibility of our elections. However I believe, I hope anyway, that Jenny Watson’s comments do not reflect the views of her staff who thus far have been very conscientious (but perhaps too soft-touch) in highlighting the serious risks associated with postal votes, e-counting and e-voting. Online voting being the most risky of all of them!

The risks & challenges of e-voting are laid out in detail in the writings section of this site.

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notes from JK

Refreshing British Politics

There are many good reasons for people to want see a change in British politics. A key way to achieve that is going to be refreshing the cast of characters who sit in Parliament.

The lead candidates in Brighton Pavilion offer three different models for change. Conservative Charlotte Vere represents a party who want to change our country to benefit the few well off people at the expense of the majority. (I know that’s simplifying things dramatically, but that is the overall end result of Tory policies)

Labour’s Nancy Platts offers an interesting alternative approach. By rejecting many of her party’s policies she implicity suggests that, if elected, she would be a rebel campaigning for reform from within the Labour party. That’s an entirely valid approach to take, but I’m not sure how much influence Nancy actually would have within her party if she did follow through on her personal policy positions. A good number of people have already tried and failed to steer New Labour back to its original roots. (As an aside, it’s really quite extraordinary how many policies on which Nancy differs from her party e.g. Rail privatisation, ID cards, Trident, Heathrow expansion and supermarket expansion.)

Caroline Lucas for the Greens is offering an alternative, more credible, approach in my view. By getting Greens elected the breadth of views in Parliament, the diversity of representation will be meaningfully increased. Us Greens have long standing policies on social justice, workers rights, health and much more. We’ve been getting messages of support from people across the country, from all party backgrounds, wishing us well. They express their hope that some Greens will get elected to Parliament so that they open up and improve debate. It’s down to the Brighton Pavilion as to whether that will happen.