Advent calendar

My flatmate bought me a milk chocolate advent calendar this Christmas. I didn't know what to say - I'm lactose intolerant! He's German though, so you can't make excuses. He'll only wake you up in the middle of the night to check if you've had your chocolate, shouting "Where's your Blitz spirit now?".

He likes the Blitz spirit, but thinks it would have been improved by more rules. Like all things to do with being English. I keep a box of After Eight mints in the kitchen purely so he can tuck in with the phrase "makes you proud to be British", which I enjoy by refusing to detect any irony in his voice, but he gets very upset if I eat any of them before 8pm. It's the same with the advent calendar.

After five days it became clear he was struggling with my lack of commitment to eating the chocolates on time. He got all a bit "no wonder Britain's out of the EU if you can't stick to even simple targets". I said that British people are too used to relying on immigrant labour, so maybe we could get a Polish woman in to eat the chocolates for me? They're used to being pushed round by the Germans. But he said no, and something about how I needed to learn to understand Christ's struggle up the hill with a cross. Nonsense. Living in this flat, I already identify fully.

So I've decided to go with Greece's approach to any challenging situation. I've put the advent calendar under my bed, and am now simply pretending to eat the chocolates. "Yes, Chancellor Wehn, all the chocolates are being eaten, correctly and on time." Failing that, I'll be using my Veto. It might put me in Dave's camp, and probably Richard Littlejohns's but that's the madness of the festive season.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Are you flirting with No to AV? I did too. NOW READ ON....

Thinking of voting No to AV? Then know this! I’m an actor-comedian type who is currently writing two sitcom scripts. I could do with a bit of exposure and some ready cash. I was offered (*place finger on mouth*) ONE THOUSAND POUNDS, or to put it another way £1000 in my bank account, 1K, a pony for my Cockney readers (it probably isn’t a pony) to be in the No to AV campaign alongside Rik Mayall, who is one of my comedy heroes. He was as funny recently in Let's Dance for Comic Relief as he was at the start of his career in The Strike and A Fistful of Travellers' Cheques.

So I did my research. I really wanted to take the money and the fun of a few days’ filming with Mr Mayall. I knew the ad campaign would be on telly, and if I was funny enough, it would help my career (just for the record, I could have made that teacher part really funny). The director also said that if I didn’t want to do that I could play Rik’s secretary. So you can understand, I started my research kind of wanting to agree with the No to AV campaign. I even went down the route of trying to convince myself that we should say no to this reform because it isn’t full-on proportional representation. But this was desperate behaviour.

In the end I had to conclude that, to put it bluntly, you can’t side with this depressing and pessimistic bunch of lies, half-truths and myth of a campaign. Here’s why. Our voting system is broken. New Labour and the Conservatives are essentially the same party. There is fuck all to choose between their policies. I remember two Libertarian and Socialist friends of mine having many arguments down the pub and then finally agreeing on one thing: that neither of them had anyone to vote for. Our voting system doesn't allow most people's voice to be heard. It's basically one where once every five years a minority of swing voters in marginal seats decide the government.

It is mainly the Tory and Labour parties who in any way want to keep the current system. That is because the people in power desperately want to keep that power, an endless ping-pong between practically indistinguishable parties. Put simply, FPTP is undemocratic.

Keeping First Past The Post, which is a really bad name for it, as this fantastic blog from Gowers points out, implies that only people with mainstream opinions deserve a say. People should almost not be 'allowed' to vote for any other party, because what is the point? This seems to me to be most undemocratic. No-voters who don’t like the idea of the Lib Dems or other minority parties should consider that people who don't want to have to choose yet again between cat shit and dog shit, are not crazies or tree-huggers; they are serious voters with a point to make. Putting aside my view that, at some point, maybe not in our future but at some point in the future, anything other than environmental concerns will seem laughably fatuous, the parties other than Labour or Tory still have much to contribute politically to the concerns that will shape our lives.
This Tory party is not about to introduce any kind of Libertarian, small-state policies. The Labour party spent more of its time sucking up to big business and letting it have its rampant way than the previous Tory party could ever have dreamed of. When can we vote for a party that will actually do any of the things we want?

As you can see from this, there is nothing in this voting system that makes it inherently more likely to return 'mediocre' candidates. In fact, the opposite is potentially the case. The only exception to this is that the least popular candidate – probably the racist vote - WILL be eliminated. The fact that their second votes are counted is because..y'know.. because we live in a democracy. But it is likely that the least popular will be the racist vote, and that's why the BNP are saying No to AV.

Basically, AV is a non-wasted vote. That, surely, is what democracy is. AV is a good thing if you think that 'democracy' is a good thing. You can vote with your heart AND have a safety vote. At the moment, there are so many people in this country whose votes are being completely ignored. The only people who want to keep FPTP are the twats who’ve been in power for the past 30 years.

One final thing on the question of whether AV will lead to more coalitions. More coalitions are likely, but this is the case whether we have AV or not. To quote fullfact.org, because it's a devilishly sexy website, as I think I'm about to prove with my hot, hot, hot quote: “as the outcome of the 2010 general election proves, FPTP can no longer claim to guarantee ‘strong single-party government." The report argues that this is because of the rise of minority parties, and falling support for Labour and the Conservatives. Yeah? Phwooaaargh. Electoral reform gives me the horn.

To quote further:
“The current trends to multi-party democracy in the UK and the regional fragmentation of party support across the UK, make it more likely that no government will gain a majority in future elections, whether under AV or FPTP.
Neither of these trends are due to FPTP or AV.”


So I think that about wraps it up, as I don't think any of us can take any more of these come-to-bed facts. Democracy! Freedom! Liberty! Quoting from political nerd websites that nobody gives a shit about! My agent LOVES ME! (Actually, he does. He is ace for putting up with my ongoing moral principles).

And that’s why you should vote yes tomorrow. For the sake of liberty, and to in any way vindicate my decision and the loss of… oh, a monkey or whatever it’s called.

You Have One Identity, Drones

I have just read Lauren Weinstein's excellent blog on Mark Zuckerberg's latest frolics: basically an attempt to integrate Facebook, and your one uber-identity, into everything you do or comment on, on the web. His justification for this is as follows:

"You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."

Pretty sinister, hey? That, or the devastatingly naive comments of someone who, as Laura points out, is too young to have acquired any "life baggage" as yet and cannot possibly understand the implications of what they are saying. Or thirdly, the cynical comments of someone who needs to find any justification for their business model, and ways for it to keep on expanding (although by now we can assume that the need for continued expansion is not about the money, but about the game itself).

Sure, I hear you saying - if you're against this problem, don't be on Facebook. Or just have a fake Facebook identity to comment on the websites you want to. Great. But then maybe you can't comment on your favourite blogs: y'know, join the big debate. And I think we can already imagine how people not on Facebook, or who have a private alter ego on Facebook, will increasingly start to be viewed, not just socially, but in the competitive jobs market.

The whole thing has got me thinking about the concept of privacy. Zuckerberg's 'belief' that anonymity must intrinsically be a bad, even dangerous thing - and the increasing willingness of other people to share that view - is leading towards the kind of world I don't want to live in. Here's why:

"The greatest passions, however, require privacy, and the good society
would not deserve to be so-called if it lacked ample opportunities for
seclusion and solitude. In work and in love, creativity requires time
alone, to think and plan. Great, passionate works of art are not
usually brought into existence by committee. The deepest friendships
and loves also need time away from prying eyes to blossom; time to
share intimacies not shared with others; time to build a special
microcosm of private meaning within the wider, public world. A society
devoid of privacy would be a society with no room for great passion,
and hence not a place I would want to live. Warrantless wiretaps and
extensive networks of closed-circuit television cameras have
contributed to the United States and England being ranked alongside
other “endemic surveillance societies” like Russia and China,
according to Privacy International. But those who say, in defense of
such invasive government actions, that people who have done nothing
wrong have nothing to hide, reveal a profound misunderstanding of the
importance of privacy. Privacy matters not because of the bad that it
hides, but because of the good and the great that it nurtures."

I've been saying that last sentence to myself over and over. This quote is from a blog by Bradley Ducet called Freedom and Virtue in the Good Society. Give it a read, as I link to this blog from Twitter and quite possibly, Facebook...