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My slightly different take on Thursday's elections, now that I have had a bit of time to separate my own defeat and local party's odd targeting strategy from cold hard results, is that the second biggest winners were....nobody. Of the councils up for election, 66 have returned councils with no overall control - where no party group is large enough to take control of the council; six more than previously.

So probably up to about a third of us live in an area that has minority or coalition government. This sort of result is usually one of the main arguments against Proportional Representation - that it leads to "weak" government. But, you know, I believe "weak" government is exactly what we want and need. Government is too big, too strong, too interfering as it is, and under the winner takes all voting system we have this leads to absolute power in the hands of a minority of voters.

Next year, Scotland will have "all up" council elections, using the Single Transferable Vote system to return multi-member wards (which local government is already used to anyway). So if Scotland can cope with it, why can't the rest of us?

Take Oxford for a minute again. Apart from one lady who disappeared without a word half way through her term of office, the Tories have now not had a single councillor for ten years. Yet with a "paper" candidate in my ward they still achieved 350 or so votes (17.5% of the vote and in the process kept Labour's candidate safe from my attack!). Across the city they have 12% of the vote, pretty well without trying at all (I reckon they only targeted, and not very enthusiastically at that, four wards out of twenty four). The Greens, through judicious targeting in their core areas, achieve 20% of the vote and get some 17% of the seats and Labour, the Lib Dems and the Independent Working Class Association are over-represented for their vote.

If Oxford wants to be a unitary authority (and on its present performance I agree with the Conservative leader of the county council that that would be a bad thing unless the city can prove it can run what services it has already efficiently) then it is only fair that all political opinion amongst its citizens be represented proportionately. Yes, there is a "democratic deficit" in the two tier situation at present where a political party completely unrepresented in the city (at borough or county council level) has complete control over some very big aspects of local government for Oxford's citizens - such as schools, roads and social services, but let's not replace that with another democratic deficit. If we want to have change, start with creating something closer to a democracy first. For the current system is anything but.

Technorati Tags: electoral reform, oxford, politics

It has been estimated that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between them underwrite debt of some $5,000,000,000,000 and that US losses from the current credit crunch could amount to $1,600,000,000,000.

The entire external debt obligations of the world's 40 odd Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) is some $300,000,000,000 - that's about 6% of Fannie and Freddie's problems. So any bailout of the US mortgage system is going to amount almost certainly to more money than would write off all that, mainly African, debt (were that the best way to proceed, which I believe it is, with conditions).

By contrast the EU has today decided to support the idea of giving the surplus it has made on the Common Agricultural Policy as a result of rising food crop prices (so it has been subsidising less) to "African farmers". That's about €1,000,000,000 - or one three-thousandth of Fannie and Freddie's problems and two hundredths of Africa's problems.

But where did they get that money from, how did it arise? Robbing those very African farmers by denying them access to our markets and subsidising dumping on theirs. Tariffs are pure evil, aren't they?

So, whenever anyone says to you that it's difficult to find the finance for debt relief in the poorest countries, you'll now know that is total bollocks.  Just think of the scale of the US mortgage debt and what such sums could do for the 600 million or so poorest on the planet.

This is from a month ago or so, but "Buckie" is back in the news as Scottish health minister seems to be blaming all society's ills on it. In a previous story the BBC wrote:

Binge drinking - the Benedictine connection

Buckfast Tonic Wine originates from Roman Catholic monks - not a group traditionally associated with the drunken masses

Interesting choice of words there methinks.

Have they not heard the joke:

Q: How many English Benedictines does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Two - one to call the electrician while the other mixes the drinks.

You Are 60% Capitalist, 40% Socialist

While you are definitely sympathetic to a free economy, you also worry about the less fortunate. Wealth and business is fine, as long as those who are in need get helped out too. You tend to see both the government and corporations as potentially corrupt.

These political quizzes never seem to ask me the right questions! Since I've been defending Milton Friedman elsewhere people might get the impression that I am a rabid corporatist right-winger. I always leave these quizzes wanting to have been asked "but do you think xxx actually works". In this case xxx = capitalism. And to that I would have to say, in its current incarnation, no. We have so much protectionism and what is known as "rent seeking" - lobbying for political favouritism basically - that we end up with gigantic corporate behemoths with market positions they can easily abuse.

But I believe in the general idea that on a level playing field (and creating and maintaining that is a function of the collective social networks we create) competition and choice will make more people better off and enable more people to reach their potential and leave us more resources with which to help the most helpless. But I also believe that we have not got, and perhaps have never had, such a level playing field in all of political-economic history. But that, with new technologies putting us more in touch with other individual around the globe instantly, we are on the verge of the sort of society in which voluntary cooperation can indeed take over from the coercive state.