Which Lib Dems voted to (essentially) defenestrate Bercow?

In case you were wondering, by my reckoning four Liberal Democrat MPs voted for the Hague / Gove "student union politics" move that would have allowed Bercow to be unseated by a secret ballot.

They were:

- Tom Brake (no surprise; the Deputy Leader of the House dutifully sat alongside Hague throughout)
- Ed Davey
- Don Foster
- John Thurso

I read that 10 Lib Dems voted against, but don't have their names at hand.

Quite why the Liberal Democrats in government (and indeed William Hague for that matter, whose reputation as a "Commons man" must now be severely tarnished) agreed to go along with Gove's "clever" little scheme is beyond me.

Do Scotland's Tories Know on Which Side Their Bread is Buttered?

Alex Massie has a great piece in The Spectator on 'Why an SNP Surge at Westminster Could Mean the End of Britain'. I recommend you read it. I suspect he is fundamentally right about the obliviousness of English voters to the 'Rise of the 45' in Scotland. The referendum might have been won, but the Union is far from safe for as long as a majority of Scottish MPs are from the Scottish National Party. Moreover the collapse of Scottish Labour undercuts some of the structural advantages the First Past the Post electoral system gives the Labour Party, meaning that in the current electoral climate it is very difficult to see either Labour or the Conservatives getting an overall majority any time in the foreseeable future, unless something very fundamental changes.

Another important question, however, is whether Scotland's Conservatives are as tuned in to the dangers of the current political maelstrom as one would expect them to be. In short, Scottish Tories have it in their gift to deny Sturgeon and Salmond at least 10 seats, and there are perhaps 10 more held by unionist parties in which a combined unionist vote could deny the SNP a victory, as the chart below shows.

(Pic Via @SNPout) We are likely to see more of this for other types of seats. Tactical voting guides pic.twitter.com/060CcTVFau
— Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) March 14, 2015

It may be difficult for Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, to hang on to his seat, even with a fair wind of tactical voting behind him (or so Lord Ashcroft's polls seem to indicate). The other 10 Lib Dem seats are probably salvageable if beating the SNP becomes more important to Labour and Tory voters than traditional tribal loyalties.  This is particularly true in seats with a strong residual Tory vote like Northeast Fife, Edinburgh West, Argyll & Bute. This also applies in a couple of seats where before the SNP surge the Conservatives were hopeful of making gains at their coalition partners' expense:  West Aberdeenshire and Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk. Returning the current coalition (Lib Dem) MP at least holds out the hope of the current government being returned; a SNP Member of Parliament makes that possibility even more remote.

If sufficient Labour and Conservatives vote tactically in Gordon, Ross, Skye & Lochaber and the Liberal Democrats' other Scottish seats, those seats could also be saved, though selling it to a mixture of Labour and Conservative voters becomes a lot more difficult.

The bigger challenge comes in Labour-held seats, where on current numbers the SNP may be about to sweep the whole lot of them away: can Labour drum up enough support in "Only we can stop the SNP" fashion to stem the nationalist tide? Can sufficient Scots Tories in East Renfrewshire be persuaded to hold their nose and vote for Jim Murphy? Similarly in Ayr, Carrick & Cumnock, Dumfries & Galloway, Glasgow North West and Airdrie & Shotts (!).

Nobody will know the answer until the early hours of May 8th, but if the SNP sweeps the board in Scotland it will be evidence that the continued existential threat to the United Kingdom remains little appreciated by unionists north of the border, let alone to the south.

Dear Snow...

Dear snow,
I know that when we first met I was young and pretty impressionable -- looking back I was so naive -- but I fell in love with you. You knew it. I knew it, and I also knew you probably didn't feel the same way. But to be honest, I didn't really care. I just loved you. You weren't really around that much, and sure, I knew rain and sleet and hail a lot better, and got pretty intimate with all of them (I'm sorry), but you were the only one I loved.

You would show up every now and again, get me excited, and then you would disappear, without so much as a note to say when you would be back. But that just made me love you more. You were so exciting, and sometimes a little bit dangerous. I liked that. Even as I did a little growing up and went off around the world myself, you always occupied a special place in my heart, and I still looked forward to the next time you would swing by, more or less unannounced, so we could spend some time getting slushy together.

When I moved to the U.S., I looked forward to spending more time with you. I thought it would be nice if we could get to know each other a bit better, instead of just one night you were there, and then in the morning you were gone, as mostly happened in Ireland. I was looking forward to walks with the dog and you, hanging out in the park at the weekend, maybe playing with your balls if we were feeling naughty or playing angels if we weren't. It all sounded blissful. I couldn't wait.
But in truth, snow, we have both changed. I am maybe a bit less idealistic and playful than I used to be, but since we have both been in New York I barely recognise you. Spending so much time together has been a lot less fun than I thought. You have been around a lot. Like, a lot. You showed up before Christmas and you haven't gone away. To be perfectly honest, I am getting a bit tired of seeing you every day. More than that, you are a lot less fun than you used to be. Since moving to NYC you have got really messy. You've also got really filthy. That's not my thing. And I just find you cold and boring. You were already starting to annoy me, but then tonight happened.

You had already forced me to change my plans on a few occasions, selfishly, to suit you. It happens, I said. Snow's like that, I said. No point in getting annoyed about it. It's part of the fun and excitement. And then tonight, even though it was literally just around the corner, 1 block away, you decided that you were going to dick about so much that the show I have been waiting to see got cancelled. That was the last straw. Let me tell you hunty, I want you out of here. Gone. Get the feck out of my life. I am sick of you. What we had is gone, and now you are just one giant pain in my A-hole, so you have until Sunday to get your shit together and GET OUT OF HERE. Take a cruise down the Hudson or across the Atlantic or something. Travel. See the world, whatever. I don't care. Just get the fuck out of my life before I kick the shit out of you before pushing you down a drain.

I mean it.

Chris

State's Appeal Against Pistorius Murder Acquittal Allowed

In a welcome move, at least for those of us who had serious concerns about how Judge Masipa dealt with dolus eventualis in the Oscar Pistorius judgment (see my previous blog post on the matter here), Judge Masipa has permitted the State's appeal, which will now be heard in front of the South African Supreme Court.

To recap, in a nutshell, without making it clear in her judgment why and on what grounds, Masipa J. had to have accepted that Oscar Pistorius did not foresee that firing four bullets through a closed toilet door risked causing the death of the person behind the door. You don't have to be a lawyer to see the problem with that (though the lawyers out there may note that the State got a lucky break that the Honourable Judge didn't explain her reasoning fully in the original judgment, for if she had perversity could well have been the only avenue available for the appeal, and that is a very difficult bar to get over. As it is, Masipa J. accepted that it is a point of law as to whether she correctly applied the principle of dolus eventualis to the facts.)

The Guardian's liveblog of the original judgment had a useful explanation of what happened:

Read the State's grounds for appeal below.

  State papers for Oscar Pistorius sentencing appeal by eNCA.com

Eric Garner and Mike Brown: the problem is the system

I am so frustrated by what has happened that I have found it difficult to take a step back and write a measured blog post about it, and instead have been engaging in debates/arguments on Facebook. I still haven't coalesced all my thoughts, so instead am just going to flag a point I made in response to someone on Facebook, which somewhat gets to the core of my thoughts on this troubling issue.

It is impossible, in my mind at least, to say "I am on one side on Mike Brown and the other side with Eric Garner", because in both cases the problem is the same: a District Attorney is so scared of pissing off the police union that he chooses not to pursue criminal charges against a police officer, even if he does go through the pantomime of pretending to do so. In both cases (we know in Ferguson, and we can assume in Staten Island), the prosecutor bent over backwards to avoid having the issue go to a full, public, trial, during which the testimony and evidence would be tested at length. By subverting and perverting the grand jury process Bob McCullough also further undermined African Americans' faith in the justice system. The son of a cop who was shot, he refused to recuse himself, but had neither the balls to take a decision not to press for an indictment nor leave the question of guilt or innocence to a jury in a trial. It's almost as if both DAs were scared of what the outcome might be, and intentional or not, the end result is that cops in America have become judge, jury, and executioner. That's not a democracy, that's a police state.

12/10/14 UPDATE:

The New York Times has a good piece expanding, in rather more measured terms, the point I was making above:

Grand Jury System, With Exceptions, Favors the Police in Fatalities

Smugness Alert

But I couldn't resist.

Of all my run-ins with RWNJs (right-wing nutjobs) on Twitter, this was by far and away the most satisfying...

@baseballcrank @charlescwcooke Other than my doctorate on Sino-American relations and degree in Chinese Studies, nothing at all. Yup.
— Chris Connolly (@Cripipper) November 12, 2014

The Puzzling Problem of the Pistorius Plea

A blog post by Felicity Gerry QC has today left me thinking again about the verdict in the Oscar Pistorius trial.  I need to disclaim at the very start that I saw very, very little of the actual trial and thus did not have the evidence in front of me that was placed in front of the judge.  However, given the provocative title of Ms. Gerry's post, 'The Oscar Pistorius verdict: was it a miscarriage of justice?', I was slightly surprised at her conclusion that

"justice was done and seen to be done. It may or may not be the truth, but on the available evidence, the important standard of proving serious criminal charges beyond a reasonable doubt was maintained."

What puzzles me about the verdict is an issue that I highlighted back in April,  which is that the Pistorius defence boiled down to something along the lines of "I killed Reeva when I accidentally fired through the toilet door thinking there was an intruder behind it."  From what I have seen and read, in her verdict Judge Masipa has not adequately dealt with the issue of transferred malice, and the blurring of what were essentially two separate defences offered by Pistorius: 1) That he acted in putative self-defence (which would require an assessment of whether it was reasonable under the circumstances as he perceived them for Pistorius to think that the force he used to avert the perceived threat was reasonable); or 2) He fired the gun accidentally.

This problem with the verdict has been highlighted by a number of South African legal scholars, and put very clearly by Pierre de Vos, of the Constitutionally Speaking blog, when he wrote:

The state can only prove intention via the concept of dolus eventualis [indirect intention/transferred malice] where the state can prove that while Pistorius might not have meant to kill the victim (Reeva Steenkamp or the putative intruder), he nevertheless foresaw the possibility and nevertheless proceeded with his actions (in legal terms he nevertheless reconciled himself to this possibility and went ahead).

In 2013 Judge Fritz Brand reminded us in the Humphreys case that it is not sufficient for the state to show that the accused should (objectively) have foreseen the possibility of fatal injuries to convict him or her of murder on the basis of dolus eventualis. The state must show that the accused actually foresaw the possibility of his actions killing someone (in this case, the person – whomever it might have been – behind the toilet door). It is not about what a reasonable person would have foreseen (which would speak to whether he is guilty of culpable homicide).

In this case the judge found that Oscar Pistorius did not actually (subjectively) foresee as a possibility that he would kill the person behind the toilet door when he pumped four bullets through the door. 

Like Mr. de Vos, when I wrote my original post I could not see how the judge could fail to come to the conclusion, on the facts known, that Pistorius did not foresee that possibility.  As far as I can see the issue was not properly dealt with in the judgment either.  What is more puzzling is that an acceptance of the argument that he fired the gun as a result of an involuntary muscle spasm would then be somewhat inconsistent with a guilty verdict on the count of culpable homicide.

While it would certainly have led to an undramatic trial, I always felt that by trying to prove the intentional murder of Reeva Steinkamp, the prosecution was aiming too high.  The state allowed Pistorius's defence to cloud the issues.  The simplicity of the question at the heart of the tragedy was overshadowed and drowned out in the melodrama of the saga of Oscar and Reeva, but it remained a simple question: Did Oscar Pistorius fire four shoots through the door believing that there was an intruder on the other side, and if so did he foresee that it could kill that intruder?  The issue of guilt or not on the charge of murder would hinge on whether it was reasonable for him to use lethal force. From what I know of South African law I believe the answer inescapably points to 'No'.

As Pierre de Vos concluded:

In the Pistorius case the question is whether there was any reason to believe Pistorius did not share the foresight that his actions could lead to the killing of a human being. The judge found that there was. The question is whether the facts support such a finding.

Perhaps the judge felt compelled to find as she did because the prosecution, in her view, failed to make this point beyond reasonable doubt.  If so, it is an appalling oversight on the part of Gerrie Nel, the prosecution barrister and in which case then perhaps Felicity Gerry is correct, and justice was done and seen to be done, however imperfect it may be.  But in the absence of clearer reasoning from Judge Masipa, we are left to guess, which is unsatisfactory from everybody's point of view.

The Power of Negative Thinking (Scottish edition)

There's a lot of keech, as they say in Scotland, bring spouted on both sides of the indyref debate. No, Scotland will not slide into catastrophe as an independent nation, and nor will it be a megarich socialist utopia with unicorns giving out free prescriptions. It probably will thrive and become wealthier in the long run, but the birth pains of getting there could well be pretty painful and I am certain that there will be some who will regret, in the short term at least, voting Yes. Conversely, it will probably see a rebirth of the sensible centre-right in Scotland, and some right-leaning No voters will quickly embrace and love the possibilities offered by independence.

Weirdly, though, it appears that about half of No voters want an independent Scotland to fail. I have been looking at the data tables for Sunday's Sunday Telegraph ICM poll that showed 'Yes' 8 points ahead. Martin Boone of ICM gave an interview last week to the BBC in which he expressed concern that the pollsters could get the result completely wrong, as they did in 1992. That tells me that even he isn't entirely comfortable with the results of ICM's own poll. It should be noted that the sample size was also smaller than usual (700), and it was online rather than by telephone (ICM's own telephone poll a few days earlier gave No a 2-point lead).

Anyway, I digress.  A big part of the No campaign has been that they believe Scotland having its own currency and central bank would be a disaster for the country in the short term (and they are probably right), to the extent that it's not currently even on the agenda: the plan is for a currency union with the rump UK (rUK). The No argument contends further that even a currency union with rUK would be bad for Scotland, even were rUK to agree to one.

Fairly logical so far. Where it starts to get weird though is that according to the ICM poll, half of No voters believe Scotland shouldn't be allowed (by rUK) to have a currency union (page 14).  Now, I accept that it is possible that a section of No, having given thought to the economic and monetary policy implications of a currency union believe that, actually, a new Scots pund would actually be preferable to a currency union. I suspect they are small in number though.

That leads to the conclusion that a very significant minority of No voters, believing that an independent Scotland keeping the £ sterling would be the lesser of two evils, also believe that Scotland should not be able to keep it in any case. Or to put it another way, having convinced themselves that Scotland won't be allowed to keep the £, or alternatively believing that Scottish independence and a currency union will damage the economy, they want to see Scotland not being able to keep the pound to vindicate their opinion and how they voted*.

I believe that psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. You and I are more likely to call it cutting off your nose to spite your face.



*(There is also the possibility that they believe that it would be unfair on rUK to allow this to happen; I can't see that equating with No's claims to also be 'Team Scotland').

The most annoying thing about Ian Paisley is that he actually was quite likeable

One of the most frustrating things about Ian Paisley, a man whom history ought to judge harshly for his role in creating and perpetuating a vicious cycle of violence fuelled mainly by his own sense of self-righteousness and a Bible-inspired sectarian disdain for the Roman Catholic Church and its adherents (or as my father used to put it, rather more succinctly, "that oul' bastard"), is that he was in real life very personable and likeable, and with a great sense of humour.

And while it was welcome that he became a peace maker later in life, I think Ian Jack has it right when he concludes that Ian Paisley exploited people's fears and fuelled a conflict, labelling former allies traitors and enemies devils, in large part to satisfy his own ego.  Northern Ireland would never be safe until it was in the DUP's hands.  Unfortunately for Northern Ireland, the manner in which he squashed other unionist leaders and ran his own party like a one-man band, has left Northern Ireland unionism led by a squad of petty political pygmies, to the detriment of all.

'I was rescued from the IRA that early' - Ian Paisley talks to Ian Jack

Why the Yes campaign has a lot in common with 'Chuggers'

Alex Massie, who I believed earlier last week had somewhat conceded one of the main arguments for independence, has written a really excellent piece in the Speccy.  I recommend anyone with an interest in Scotland's future read it.


Come in Britain, your time is up

Despite the fact that both the Yes and No campaigns have done their best to present this referendum as a battle between rival cost-benefit analyses, it is still – as it has always been – about the idea.

There’s always been a constituency for independence and it’s always been larger than many people imagine. Always. How often have you heard a variation on the theme of I like the idea but I’m no’ sure we could really do it? or Yes, in an ideal world and all other things being equal (but not, alas, in this world).

Even when the idea was ridiculous it was attractive, you see.

It reminded me of my days doing telephone charity fundraising.  The principles are the same: people like the idea of giving to charity, but often are reluctant to open their wallets.  What you need to do is give them a reason to do something they like the idea of doing anyway.  Voting Yes to independence is very much in the same vein.

'Yes' is gaining ground for precisely this reason.  As Douglas Alexander wrote the week before last in The Guardian, 'Scotland’s yes campaign has been based on emotion, not fact', which is precisely the 'No' campaign's problem.  When trying to get people to increase their giving level, you had to create an emotional hook, and create a space in which they could do something they liked the idea of doing, but which other factors inhibited them from initially agreeing to.  'Yes' has successfully created the emotional hook for Yes, and network effect is creating the space. That's why 'No' will not be able to regain the momentum.  I'm not yet convinced it will be enough to carry Yes over the line, but it is going to be very close even if they don't.

Will Scotland be pushed into what Quebecers call a 'neverendum'?