But it could be worse

There is at least one country that needs the  "alternative vote"  system even more urgently than the UK:  its near neighbour,  recent ally and ancient enemy France.

Back in 2002,  Jacques Chirac was re-elected as president there despite getting just 19.88%  of the vote in the first round of the election.  In other words,  more than 80%  of voters wanted someone other than their incompetent incumbent.  Just under 46%  voted for a left-wing candidate  –  ahead of 43%  for the right and just under 11%  for centrist parties  -  but the left-wing vote was splintered between 10 different candidates.  Under the two-round voting system used in France,  only the top two candidates from the first round advance to the second,  and because there were only four right-wing candidates,  two of them managed to take those spots.  Since the other one was the appalling far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen,  Chirac romped home with a massive 82%  of the votes  –  even though most of those were from people who loathed him.

The French two-round system is like many French innovations:  a novel but actually quite impractical version of some idea that someone has developed  (or will develop)  much better somewhere else.  In this case,  it's like the  "alternative vote"  because it too eliminates the low-scoring candidates and gets voters to choose between the highest-scoring ones;  but incredibly it does so in such a way as to lose the key benefit of the alternative vote system,  namely to get a winner who is the candidate most favoured by the electorate.  The French system continues to allow situations where someone can end up winning despite being very nearly the last preference of the vast majority of voters  –  exactly the same problem as the first-past-the-post system.

And in a way,  the French situation is even worse than that in the UK,  because here we're not just talking about a few individual members of a parliament containing more than six hundred seats,  we're talking about an extremely powerful elected monarch,  the president of France.  You'd really think they would have learned their lesson after 2002 and would have introduced the alternative vote quick smart.  But no,  they stuck with their own benighted process.  Now it looks like yet another miscarriage of democracy could be looming,  with a recent opinion poll indicating that the current frontrunners for the presidential election in one year's time are Le Pen's daughter and successor on 23%,  the unpopular incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy on 21%,  and the leader of the main left-wing party also on 21%.  And sadly,  there seems virtually no likelihood of the French using the remaining year to change their godawful system while they still have the chance.  You really wonder how many times this is going to have to happen before they draw the blindingly obvious conclusion.

The alternatives are clear

Looking at the debate brewing in Britain right now over the  "Alternative Vote",  I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  It's utterly astonishing how much confusion they are generating over what seems an incredibly simple issue.  Okay,  I have the benefit of having lived most of my life in a country that uses this system and am therefore not beset by any of that fear of the unknown that evidently plagues so many Brits when faced with it,  but it still seems to be causing them far more trouble than it warrants.

Basically the proposed reform is to replace their current,  dreadfully undemocratic first-past-the-post voting system with one allowing people to vote for the candidates in order of preference,  voting  "1"  for the candidate they like most,  "2"  for their next favourite,  and so forth.  Candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and their voters'  next preferences are counted until one candidate gets 50% of the total votes cast.  All fairly straightforward,  surely.

The pro and contra sides of the debate,  however,  have managed to befuddle things magnificently,  partly through deliberate misinformation and distortion of the truth,  but perhaps partly through a sheer inability to communicate clearly.

Essentially,  it all boils down to this:

Currently,  British voters mostly vote for either the Conservative Party,  which gets about 30-40%  of all votes across the country,  the Labour Party,  which also gets about 30-40%  of all votes,  or the Liberal Democrats,  who usually get about 15-20%  of all votes.  Under the first-past-the-post system,  it is entirely possible for either the Conservatives or Labour to win a comfortable majority of seats in the House of Commons on these figures,  while the Liberal Democrats struggle to win a handful.  The winner of each seat is elected by a geographically defined  "constituency"  of voters,  with these three major parties all fielding candidates in most of the them.

The other important fact to know when assessing the potential impact of the  "Alternative Vote"  is that opinion polls have fairly consistently indicated that people who vote Liberal Democrat prefer the Labour Party to the Conservatives by a ratio of at least 2 to 1.

What that means is that when the Conservative candidate and the Labour candidate come first and second in the race for a constituency,  causing the Liberal Democrat candidate to be eliminated,  the next preferences of the Liberal Democrat voters would favour the Labour candidate heavily.  Labour should end up with at least two thirds of the Lib Dems's 15-20%  of the vote. Labour should also pick up preferences from Green voters and voters for various other small left-wing parties,  totalling a further 2%  or so of the vote.  As for the Conservatives,  all they can really rely on,  apart from the remaining third from the Lib Dems,  is the preferences of UKIP and BNP voters  -  about 5%  nationwide.  This will give Labour a major advantage in many seats and should cut heavily into the Conservative representation in parliament.

In constituencies where Liberal Democrat candidates currently comes first or second,  they will probably be the greatest beneficiary,  as they will presumably pick up preferences from both Labour and Conservative voters.  So the Lib Dems will win seats from both the other major parties.  At this point it's important to remember that there are not in fact very many seats  (relatively speaking)  where the Liberal Democrats come first or second,  which will seriously limit their potential gain from the Alternative Vote system.

Result:  number of Conservative seats falls a lot  (as they will lose them to both Labour and the Lib Dems);  number of Lib Dems seats rises but by a much smaller amount,  and the Labour Party probably stays at about the same level it is at now.  And that means,  in turn,  that Labour could still find itself with an outright majority in the House of Commons,  but the Conservatives will quite possibly never enjoy that position again  -  unless and until they shift their politics towards the centre,  i.e.  towards the left.

This is the simple,  sufficient and only reason why nearly all of the Conservative Party is against the proposed reform,  while most of the Labour politicians,  and all of the Liberal Democrats,  are in favour.

A lot of the distortion of the truth coming from both sides in the debate is,  I am certain,  the result of their attempts to avoid saying how the reform will affect them personally.  Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberal Democrats nor even Labour can admit that their main concern is what it will do to their numbers in parliament,  so they come out with whatever other spurious arguments they can dream up.  I really wish they could just come clean and tell people straight up:  "If you like the Conservatives,  vote against it.  If you hate them and/or like Labour or the Liberal Democrats,  vote for it.  That's all there is to it,  folks."

Hillary Clinton courageously defends WikiLeaks

Via The Guardian; full original here:

On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress. But the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world's information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.

This challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic. The words of the First Amendment to the Constitution are carved in 50 tons of Tennessee marble on the front of this building. And every generation of Americans has worked to protect the values etched in that stone.

Uh oh.

An uncomfortable suspicion is beginning to form in my mind. Angela Merkel, it is said, is crucial to the survival of the euro, because Germany must be central to any plan to save it. So Germany's leader must take a leading role in the rescue process.

Trouble is, she doesn't seem to be very good at it.

Merkel once seemed so competent, capable of dealing wisely and well with nearly any issue that crosses her path. But she's so far made two massive blunders in dealing with the euro crisis, which have made things vastly worse, not better. First, she refused for eight months or more to help Greece, until Greece was pushed to the wall and confidence in the euro was shattered. Then in October, her extremely ill-timed declaration that bond-holders should have to cop some of the damage from the bailout (and not just taxpayers) seems to have helped to topple the next domino as well, Ireland.

Hence the uncomfortable conclusion: the person who is most important in the struggle to save the euro is sorely ill-equipped for the role. Merkel seems to have an uncharacteristic blind spot when it comes to this issue.

And that means the euro is in a great deal of trouble indeed.