Will the Electoral Reform Society prevent Yes peer pressure bias ?

To Juliet Swann the admin worker in Electoral Reform Society's 2-person Scottish office. Their director Willie Sullivan works for Common Weal and has long given the impression of being a Labour Yesser.

“If the Yes bias in yesterday’s session on citizen’s conventions was accidental, you will be happy to agree with measures to prevent its repetition. This event was supposed to be nothing to do with backing either side on independence. From the main speaker, it was: nothing wrong with the main speaker. The offender was the supporting speaker with a Canadian experience who came after her.

To prevent hijacking of events, a rule needs to be billed, saying: whenever a claim is made in favour of either side on independence and in the referendum, someone on the opposite side will be entitled to respond to it. Even though this is a diversion from the meeting’s intended topic.

Otherwise, speakers can use events supposed to be about other things, to project claims on behalf of one side as measured facts without having to justify them. The supporting speaker, you will remember, claimed to have measured that Yes voters were more likely to have researched their facts than No voters.

This was obviously intended to make No voters sound stupid and propagandise that the facts pointed to voting Yes, and it was presented in support of a pushily self-satisfied Yes voter in the audience who had expressed that prejudice already. We then had to make the most of our opportunity to contribute to the intended topic’s discussion, without getting any opportunity at whole-room level to give a No voter’s defence to the claim made against us. As a result, that Yes voter left believing she had picked up a scientific statistic in support of her prejudice, and she was not accessible in the informal time at the end either as she chose just to engross herself with a friend then leave. Any number of folks could have seen the spectacle of her prejudice confirmed and been swayed by it themselves too. These all left without ever knowing that a No voter present in the room thought they had missed a big fact when they researched their votes, and thought the statistic claimed was misleading because it did not consider whether voters chose reliable sources for their facts.

My counter to the statistic, as a No voter, would be: (1) it assumes the voters had available all the facts they needed, but facts of big importance to me on racism and citizenship were not easily available, (2) did these voters question the Yes campaign on facts and dig behind them, or just accept claims as facts because they wanted to believe? (3) some voters for a status quo may be choosing on the evidence of life experience, hence have less need to read up on it, this does not make their choice less intelligent. This just to show I have an answer – and if I slipped in claims for my side into an event about something else, you know the Yes voters would have an answer and would be indignant to have it heard.

This is a question of whether ERS events and their findings are reliable, or will be corrupted by bias towards the Yes movement’s undemocratic game of peer pressure. I find it necessary to circulate the question openly, so that future participants and the whole reform scene be alerted to watch out that you make the right choice to prevent hijack bias by always having a right of reply to it when it happens.

As you know, I raise this question already from a position of lapsed membership, because of the unanswered question on exactly where you shared our local group’s voter question action towards the 2 ref campaigns.”

This may be read by folks who never reached the meeting, so I would mention about that too. Why was there any need to do this relatively small meeting as a limited places book your place event? They told us there was a waiting list of folks who had not got places, they emailed asking we to tell them if we weren’t coming, yet by the chance of stormy weather on the day folks did not turn up and there were lots of empty seats without the waiting list folks having had a chance to be there. This was brushed aside quite trivially saying the weather would make them relieved. This is a totally unsatisfactory standard of practice towards inclusion in democracy! the very thing we were there for!

EU mucked up

Nobody needs telling that Salmond has not had a happy day in the newspapers. Or in his party. Blink and savour having a majority government while it lasts, it may be over any minute.

Just when the SNP's years of tabloid law and order nastiness towards the young seemed to be starting to thaw, as he pledged a bill to make the voting age 16 properly. How will all that young bashing, the tightening up on pubs and their under-18 licensing, look in hindsight if the same party that did it makes some breathtakingly ironically British history by turning out to drive votes at 16 into place across all Britain's elections? After the half generation of nasty reluctance and faffing there has been by the British major parties, continuing not to do it, all through the new era of reform opportunities since Thatcherism ended in 1997?

Just when Salmond seemed to start turning a bit nicer to the young again, now that he needs their votes, he had to go and spoil his whole enterprise by the sneakiness over our continued EU membership, where the SNP has now been tripped up. To try to be popular he persisted in saying he would go along with the existing British system's narky old racist line of not joining Schengen. If we had to rejoin the EU as a new member we might have to join Schengen: GOOD - I want to join Schengen. So does any rational and humane person who fears the losability of travel documents and finds covering the world in apartheid passport barriers an obstacle to common sense life. Though Schengen only exists because the EU does, you can even belong to Schengen without belonging to the EU, like Norway, which is worth knowing if our membership gets interrupted.

It was not worth telling fibs and blowing trust for the whole Yes campaign when it was falling behind in support already, to get out of joining Schengen and pander to Tory passport racism. That will be a mortifying mortal failing for the Yes campaign to be remembered with in history.

OCT 26: Newsnet Scotland here has posted a story that was in the Herald, of the European Commission Vice-President saying EU citizenship once given can't be taken away. Yes supporters on Facebook can criticise the BBC for not majoring on this story, but they are seizing on it too eagerly, it does not establish Scotland would be in the EU, only that we would not lose our citizenship for travelling to the EU.

Electoral Reform Society

In the Electoral Reform Society's election for its own council, which in these post-referendum circumstances is a dramatic one with 53 candidates and a fight of reformers versus STV purists, there are 2 candidates who have a writing involvement in some political media and who have ignored the court change. Jonathan Bartley and James Gray.

This is not to say that the other candidates all support the court change. These 2 had significant media connections to prompt telling them about it, and asking them:

"So as an indication of your standards towards democracy, are you in favour of the following "court change" being made publicly known and the media silence on it stopped and overturned?"

and "Remember of direct ERS relevance, that your position on the court change is your position on any legal issue around an election's fair conduct too." Which means the potentially difficult position they put the ERS in if they get elected and continue not to take any position on the court change.

The ERS's own election is hardly a good experience of its favourite system STV either. There are 53 candidates for 15 places, so that in any fair system you would have 15 votes, and there is one organised slate of reformers standing consisting of 15 names, while another more radical slate of 2 also endorse the 15. In STV, slates or parties are not distinguished into separate lists on the ballot paper, you are just wading through all these 53 names. But the worst feature of STV is it only gives you one vote, that's what "single" means, in electing multiple winners. A big voter disempowerment, you don't get your whole say over the result. It's absurd that such a mean system is the trendy favourite for fashionable reform groupies who don't actually study systems' merits. It means allies, including the majority of the names in the 15 name slate, are fighting each other by each appealing for your first pref vote for themself instead of their colleagues. They know they can't say it will be okay so long they are in your top 15 votes. In fact, all the prefs you cast beyond the first 3 or so are unlikely ever to be counted, all the way down to 53. Only very high prefs, much higher than the number of winners, are any use to any candidate.

ERS is clangingly showing why the faction moving an amendment at its AGM to change away from its long standing fixity on supporting only STV, are right.