Do the math.

I’ve been searching for an analogy to explain how infuriating it is that political commentators pay so little attention to the massive distorting effect of our outdated electoral system.

Imagine a number of sports reporters turning up to a football match and discovering that one of the two teams has been hit by a flu bug and is unable to field more than three players.  The game nonetheless goes ahead and unsurprisingly it finishes 45-0.

Such is the distorting effect of the imbalance between the two teams, you’d think the report would concentrate exclusively on the astonishing impact of the flu epidemic and that it would be utterly ridiculous to focus all the attention instead on the twenty-seven goals scored by the winning team’s star striker and the overall excellence of their attacking play.

But consider the nature of post-election analysis.  At the election in May, the Conservatives won 36.9% of the votes cast.  As the turnout was 66.1%, this represents 24.4% of the electorate… a paltry share of the vote which enabled the Tories to secure a majority in the House of Commons.

Now, if you follow politics closely then you probably know all that and you may even feel this distortion is acceptable because it delivers strong, decisive governments.  I disagree with you but I accept that it’s a valid point of view.

But – against this background – it is plainly bonkers to conclude that the majority of the British people support a particular Tory policy.

When – as acting leader of the Labour party – Harriet Harman decided to order her MPs to abstain on the Welfare Bill she said it was because the party “needed to wake up and understand the reasons for its defeat, including public rejection of the party’s stance on the economy and welfare”.

It was an extraordinary act of self-immolation.  It cannot even be said with confidence that all of the 23.9% of the electorate who voted Conservative hold that view so it was crazy and cowardly for Labour to wave the white flag on this issue.  And Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall’s decision to toe the party line shredded their credibility in the ongoing leadership campaign.

In reality, the margins between success and failure at the election this year were vanishingly small.

At the 2015 election, a party required 326 seats for an overall majority… and the Conservatives won 330.  That actually means – believe it or not – they would have failed to secure a majority if just 429 Conservative voters in five marginal constituencies had opted to put a cross against the name of the Tories’ main rival instead.

So next time you hear someone drawing confident conclusions about the political appetite of the British people on the back of the 2015 result, keep in mind that the whole outcome of the election could have been changed by considerably fewer people than attended the Vauxhall Conference clash between Bromley and Macclesfield last Saturday… where there were eleven men on each team and no one scored twenty-seven goals.

(This article was corrected after Twitter user @draggingmeunder pointed out that fewer seats needed to change hands than I originally thought.)

The confusion of Adam Holloway’s hair.

On Tuesday, Tory MP Adam Holloway said a curious thing in the House of Commons.

During a debate on the refugee crisis, he said people “have claimed asylum in this country and then they go back on holiday to the places from where they have claimed that asylum. I could not get my hair cut the other day for that reason.”

Alert journalists looked into this curious claim and found it to be ‘a little economical with the actualité’.

Far from returning to the country he fled seven years ago, barber Shivan Saeed was enduring the dubious delights of a weekend in a Great Yarmouth caravan. Understandably, he was a little bemused to discover one of his regular customers had suggested he was dodging the bullets and blades of Islamic State to enjoy a little Iraqi sunshine.

On the Today programme on Friday morning, Adam Holloway demonstrated a worrying relationship with logic when put on the spot.

After Justin Webb posed a question about the discrepancy between his claim and Shivan Saeed’s statement, Holloway began by saying he’d avoided reading the newspaper report because he didn’t want to get into a ‘did she, didn’t he’ argument.

You might have thought he’d welcome the opportunity to clarify and even apologise if he’d got it wrong but, no, he wasn’t interested in getting to the bottom of it.  Fair enough – up to a point – he’s not unusual among politicians in adopting this attitude when confronted with an inconvenient truth.

What followed was really curious though.  “It shows,” he said, “how this whole thing is trivialised, you can’t really speak the truth… if I wasn’t going to invite more tabloid attention, I could give you two other examples from my life where it’s happened.”

So Holloway is blaming the ‘trivialisation’ on the reporters who looked into his claim rather than on himself for trivialising an important issue in the first place.  Then he says he’d be able to offer two more instances of the same thing if it wasn’t going to invite the scrutiny of the press.

Essentially, he revealed himself to be Jay from ‘The Inbetweeners’.

None of this would matter a great deal if Holloway didn’t apply the same standards of logic to the substantive issue… but unfortunately he does.

In the Commons on Tuesday, he made a point that’s been winning him a lot of attention.  There is an absolute  difference, he insists, between a ‘refugee’ and an ‘economic migrant’… but it’s also “possible to be both”.

It’s a claim he reiterated in the Today programme interview despite listening to an excellent piece by the BBC’s Lyse Doucet in which she pointed out that “the world does not fit into those neat binary categories… ‘economic migrants’ and ‘refugees'”.

Adam Holloway makes frequent reference to his own experiences as a reporter as he sets out his argument that the two categories are different and the same simultaneously.  This is the logic of Lewis Caroll and appears to be the outcome of a well-meaning but dim man trying to square a circle.

Interestingly, the MP continually offers an egotistical absolution to ‘economic migrants’ claiming to be ‘refugees’ by pointing out that he – the great white paragon of virtue – would similarly lie if he found himself in their position.  In doing so, he appears to mistake his own condescension for empathy.

Ultimately, it’s hard to unpick what Holloway is driving at but I think it’s this: if a genuine refugee is fleeing from tyranny, he or she should still be prevented from entering Europe if they could also be considered an ‘economic migrant’.

Or – when you break it down – only middle-class refugees should be allowed across the Mediterranean.  Bring us your huddled masses… just make sure they have medical degrees or know how to design a building.

Spoiler Tactics

At the TV Festival in Edinburgh last month, ITV controller Peter Fincham reached out to his rivals at the BBC with a plea to avoid a scheduling clash between ‘The X Factor’ and ‘Strictly Come Dancing’.

Fincham hoped the two programmes could co-exist in a cosy symbiosis with the tiny bird of Simon Cowell’s once-powerful talent show picking titbits from the gigantic hippopotamus mouth of the unstoppable celebrity dance phenomenon.

It was not to be.

If the BBC’s response to the overture could be summarised in a single phrase then the second word was ‘off’ and the first rhymed with ‘pluck’.

It would be easy to dismiss the BBC’s lack of charity as an inevitable consequence of the pressure they’re under the justify the licence fee… one that’s especially relevant with charter renewal discussions leading to all kinds of speculation about the future direction of the publicly-owned broadcaster.

But any such assumption ignores the long history of brinkmanship between the broadcasting rivals and the fact that the BBC were ‘at it’ right from the get-go.

ITV was launched on 22 September 1955.  On the very same night, Grace Archer – played by Ysanne Churchman (pictured above) – was killed in a fire in a highly dramatic episode of the long-running radio soap ‘The Archers’.

As many suspected at the time, this was part of a deliberate bid by the BBC to distract the public’s attention from the new television station.  Documents found many decades later revealed that executive H Rooney Pelletier had written a memo stating: “The more I think about it, the more I believe that a death of a violent kind in The Archers, timed, if possible, to diminish interest in the opening of commercial television in London, is a good idea.”

So don’t be surprised that Danny Cohen – current director of BBC Television – turned down the opportunity to suck on Peter Fincham’s peace pipe… he was merely following a long tradition.

Celebrating Kim Davis’s imprisonment is wrong.

It was easy to feel aggrieved as Kim Davis emerged from her six-day imprisonment to the strains of Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’; with her arms aloft in triumph and accompanied by her husband who looked like he’d interrupted work on a ITV4 series called ‘Hicks and Bigots’ to be by her side.

It was Davis’s refusal to issue same-sex marriage licences that landed her in the clink.  As she’s an elected official, she can’t be sacked for refusing to do her job but – because her conscience dictated that she defy a court order – she can be jailed for it.

With the triumphant crowd waving white crosses and breaking spontaneously into hymns to underline their devoutness to their God and his latest emissary, it’s clear that those unconvinced by the fairness of equal marriage were enjoying the opportunity to vent their feelings.  It was an unedifying sight.

Nonetheless, this doesn’t provide a reason to feel pleased about Davis’s internment. Yes, she should have resigned if she wasn’t willing to execute her role fully.  And, yes, her stance is offensive to those of us who welcome the monumental shift brought about by the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year.  But prison?  Really?

Some of the comments on social media defending her imprisonment use phrases like: “the law’s the law” which is exactly the kind of thing that was being said when gay men*  were being arrested because homosexuality was illegal.

When people are complacently shielding themselves with “the law’s the law” then there’s  probably a miscarriage of justice nearby.

Besides which, this whole episode plays into the hands of the opponents of equal marriage.  What better way to bring waverers on to your side than a handy bit of martyrdom?

But that is secondary to the core issue here… Kim Davis needs to be persuaded rather than coerced and sending her to prison is unfair, Draconian and no one should be pleased that it’s happened.

(* The overwhelming majority of people arrested for homosexual ‘crimes’ were men so please forgive the impertinent absence of women in this sentence.)

A timed device

Yesterday, everyone was expecting David Cameron to make a statement about the refugee crisis. How would he respond to Germany’s bold willingness to absorb as many as 800,000 Syrian and Iraqi victims of the turmoil?

Well, he didn’t.

Instead, Cameron opted to reveal that he had ordered the deaths of two British citizens who had fled to Syria to join Daesh (aka ISIS).  Understandably, the media’s focus switched to the legality of this decision and speculated about future operations of this kind.

As this was a politically difficult revelation, it would be easy to imagine that it was an inconvenient piece of timing for the Prime Minister but nothing could be further from the truth.

Consider this key question… why tell us about this now?  These killings took place on August 21st – two-and-a-half weeks prior to yesterday’s announcement – so why did the Prime Minister decide it was the right time to tell everyone about it?

In part – I suspect – because this announcement meant little attention was paid to the absence of a statement about the refugee crisis while also sending a powerful reminder that some of those engaged in the fighting in Syria mean us great harm.

It was a sly move.  Many of those expressing sympathy for the plight of Syrians and Iraqis forced from their homes are concerned that unfettered absorption of these huddled masses could allow terrorists to slip into the country and Cameron’s spin doctors clearly decided it was time to play to those fears.

The other calculation that may have informed the timing of yesterday’s announcement is the possibility that this news will provoke radicalised youths to bring forward their plans to launch a new attack.

It would be grossly unfair to suggest that David Cameron or the people surrounding him would welcome any kind of terrorist attack on home soil… but I bet they’d give their eye teeth for a credible foiled plot right now.

Comedy Hour

At the TV Festival in Edinburgh the week before last, Kim Shillinglaw – the controller of BBC2 – announced the reintroduction of a comedy hour on her station.

Shillinglaw used broadcasting’s idiom de jour when she said comedy is part of “BBC2’s DNA” and claimed writers and performers cherish the opportunity to have their shows on the channel. (In fairness, writers and performers cherish the opportunity to be on any channel!)

Her audience was given a brief preview of one of the two shows destined to fill this new slot: Danny Baker’s ‘Cradle to Grave’.  It contained a perfectly constructed piece of physical comedy and it was obvious that either (a) it was going to be a laugh riot from start to finish or (b) we’d just been shown the funniest gag in the whole series.

After watching the first episode this week, I suspect it was the probably the latter.  ‘Cradle to Grave’ is a sketch show disguised as a sitcom in which tall tales from Danny Baker’s childhood have been put together without much thought of a narrative arc.

In fairness, the episode was loosely held together by a story about a pair of trousers which had enough shades of light and dark to make an excellent ‘tale of the unexpected’ if Roald Dahl had had the idea before Baker.  Veteran TV director Sandy Johnson deserves a lot of credit for negotiating the narrow margin between the comedy and the tragedy of the material.

But it’s the skill with which he put together the sequence which saw young Danny (Laurie Kynaston) discovering that not all is as he hoped when he goes to see the notorious rock musical ‘Hair’ that should really win Johnson the plaudits.  It creates a whole new dimension to the term ‘slapstick’.

Peter Kay was an odd choice to play Baker’s father and they must have worried on set that the northerner’s cockney accent might turn out to be the funniest thing in the whole programme.  Kay certainly struggles but not so much that it’s a distraction (which can’t be said of whatever it is Martin Shaw is trying to do in ‘George Gently’ – his accent is a much deeper mystery than any of the storylines in the police procedural set in the 1960s).

Kay may have been chosen because of his considerable fan base but his light touch made him completely unconvincing in a bit where he posed as a ‘wife beater’ to save a neighbour’s telly from being repossessed and the scene sank well below the authenticity threshold.

Like ‘Raised By Wolves’ – the Channel 4 comedy based on Caitlin Moran’s childhood – ‘Cradle to Grave’ is a bit of a disjointed mess because of its anecdotal structure but it’s a funny disjointed mess and probably worth persevering with.

The same cannot necessarily be said of ‘Boy Meets Girl’ which occupied the second half of BBC2′ new comedy hour.  This first episode was so consistently unfunny that’s it’s hard to understand why it was made as a comedy in the first place when it clearly could have made quite a sweet drama instead.

Not that the labelling should particularly matter… after all, if it works as a drama, why should it matter if it’s being marketed as a comedy?  Unfortunately, it does matter when it relies on so many comedy tropes.

The story at the heart of ‘Boy Meets Girl’ is both worthy and ground-breaking and this combination appears to have impaired the critical faculties of those who’ve cast judgement on it.  Leo (Harry Hepple) is a hapless 26-year old living in the north-east with his younger brother (Jonny Dixon) and his parents (Denise Welch and Nigel Betts).

When he meets older woman Judy (Rebecca Root), he’s immediately drawn to her and they arrange to have dinner together.  Feeling it important to lay her cards on the table, Judy reveals that she was “born with a penis” and Leo is so unconcerned by this that he scarcely reacts… which turns out to be the most positive response one could imagine.

It’s a lovely depiction of how life ought to be and it’s completely understandable that Rebecca Root who was – like her character – born with a penis, feels it’s an incredibly important piece of television.

While Leo and Judy embark on their affair, it’s left to the bit players to provide the comedy.  To achieve this, the other characters have been drawn with very broad strokes.  Welch – in particular – is a walking bundle of maternal clichés and hard as she tried – and boy does she try hard – she cannot make up for the deficiencies of a script which writers Elliott Kerrigan, Simon Carlyle and Andrew Mettam forgot to make funny.

Comedies often need time to establish themselves but today’s highly competitive television climate they don’t often get it.  ‘Cradle to Grave’ and ‘Boy Meets Girl’ have both been generously received by critics and audiences alike which bodes well for their immediate future.  It’ll be interesting to see if the warm glow they’ve achieved is sustained for the whole of their six-episode runs and whether Kim Shillinglaw is proudly boasting of their success at next year’s TV Festival.

Trollier than thou

Something very strange happened on Twitter the other day: a friend defended Katie Hopkins. And not just her right to exist but her most controversial column… the one in which she said “show me bodies floating in water” to illustrate her indifference to the plight of refugees seeking sanctuary in the UK.

The photos of a small drowned boy which appeared in newspapers and on social media appear to have changed the mood. Despite months of being guided towards the conclusion that everyone trying to cross the Mediterranean is a selfish ‘migrant’ keen to swap their unrewarding lazy existence in North Africa for a council flat in East Anglia, the public have suddenly woken up to the idea that you have to be pretty desperate to place your children’s lives in the hands of criminal opportunists with a rickety boat.

With that in mind, Hopkins’s April 17th column – which was subheaded: “Make no mistake these migrants are like cockroaches” – has been revisited and its author has been more roundly condemned than ever before.  And – let’s face it – that’s really saying something.

Hopkins’s position would appear to be untenable and perhaps her best hope of staying in situ lies in newly-reinstalled News UK chief executive Rebekah Brooks judging it useful to retain the only woman in the UK more reviled than herself.

So it was surprising to see a Twitter acquaintance with reasonable views suggest that following Hopkins’s advice would “deter boats, and hence minimise these kinds of deaths”.

Having looked again at Hopkins’s original piece, the wrongness of this is two-fold… even if – at one level – it is literally true.

First… while using the violence advocated by Hopkins’s to stop traffickers setting sail in the first place to “minimise these kinds of deaths”, this would very obviously be at the cost of other kinds of deaths.  Have you saved a man from being poisoned by shooting him in the head before he’s had a chance to ingest the toxin? Technically ‘yes’ but you haven’t helped much.

Second… in truth, Hopkins’s solution is all about trying to prevent refugees from reaching these shores.  If that’s the only aspect of this appalling situation that bothers you, then you might not find her ideas entirely objectionable but most people now appear to recognise that the refugee crisis transcends narrow self-interest.

Even if your concern for the refugees is outweighed by your fear of their arrival in Britain, there’s still scope to be offended by the deliberate offensiveness of Hopkins’s language.  We all know what she’s up to… her toxic brand is a cash cow and she’s milking it for all it’s worth.

She’s determined to prove she’s ‘trollier then thou’ and has exempted herself from the norms of human decency to achieve it.

To find out if her perspective has any validity, you have to wade through the vileness of the language she chooses…  Hopkins appears to be deliberately evoking Joseph Goebbels’s Nazi propaganda when she describes refugees as ‘cockroaches’ and none of her rabble-rousing invective would be out of place at a BNP rally.

Katie Hopkins’s public persona may well be a fraud – a role she’s created for fame and fortune – but that doesn’t excuse her.  Having set herself up as someone whose mind cannot be changed by the sight of “bodies floating in water”, she could – ironically – do a great deal of good simply by conceding that she was wrong and that the photo of Aylan Kurdi lying dead on a beach had profoundly moved her… as I suspect it has.

But don’t hold your breath – the toxicity of her brand appears to mean more to her than anything… even the life of a young child.

Going through the motions.

It’s long been obvious that airport security has drifted so far from its original purpose that it’s become little more than institutionalised OCD.

We submit ourselves to a series of strange rituals designed – in theory – to protect us from those who mean us harm and collectively overlook the way those tasked with carrying them out have been robbed of any discretion or autonomy.

On Monday at Glasgow Airport, the elderly woman in front of me had failed to separate her liquids from the rest of her luggage. She looked puzzled by the plastic bag she was handed and her arthritic hands made it immensely difficult for her to decant her bottles into it. A female member of the airport’s security staff guided her and saw to it that the task was completed to her satisfaction. The old lady then began shuffling towards the metal detector but the staff on the other side wanted her to remove her sleeveless jacket before she came through. A further lengthy negotiation took place until this information was finally communicated to her.

Among those caught in the bottleneck created by this black comedy, some appeared to be looking at her with daggers in their eyes and – to be honest – this was as understandable as it was unfair.  We’ve learned the arcane rules – goes the logic – why couldn’t she?

Well, okay… up to a point. It’s true that these rules have been with us for a while. The level of scrutiny fluctuates for reasons that aren’t always obvious and new regulations occasionally hove into view only to disappear again when deemed impractical – anyone remember having to demonstrate that your mobile phone was fully charged earlier this year?

And there is something trouble-avoidingly fair about treating every single passenger as an equal threat. No accusations of racial profiling if an arthritic old white woman has to jump through the same hoops as a young Middle Eastern man.

But, does any of it actually make sense? At the point when the woman in front of us was trembling with embarrassment at being unable to put her small bottles of liquid into a see-through bag, had security staff lost their grip on the actual purpose of this task? Or did they actually think she posed a greater risk with her small collection of bottles loose in a tray than she did if said repositories were gathered together in a plastic bag?

Presumably these staff can’t be granted permission to use their discretion because of mission creep. The ‘exceptions’ would swiftly become the ‘norm’ and before long only passengers fitting a specific profile would find themselves being scrutinised.

And we – of course – comply. What else can we do? I offered help to the lady in front of me but she was so mortified with embarrassment, she didn’t even reply. My intervention certainly wasn’t welcomed by the staff marshalling her through and that’s part of the problem here… it feels as though any dissent is liable to win you extra special attention… and not in a good way.

Sharing a platform with undesirables.

During the leadership campaign, Jeremy Corbyn has been attacked for sharing a platform with various people who have unpalatable views.

All those currently pointing their index fingers in his direction and saying “Ah ha… see!” should put their triumph on hold for a moment and ask themselves how they would react if their favoured candidate had been similarly attacked.

Because almost everyone’s response to this kind of attack is entirely dependent on whether it is their man or woman whose reputation is being trashed.

Imagine, for example, you are walking through a busy railway station and you overhear a conversation between two nearby strangers.  They’re talking about the Labour leadership contest and how shocked they are to learn that one of the four once had regular friendly correspondence with Jimmy Savile.

If you are a supporter of one of the candidates then you may find yourself needing to know which of them it was before forming a judgement… and plainly that’s problematic.  (If at this point, you’re thinking that it’s perfectly natural to want to know who it was before making a determination then please go back to the start of this piece and try again.  Repeat until enlightened.)

In practice, significant political advancement is always made by those who are willing to talk to all sides involved in a conflict.  And, funnily enough, those who lead the way are quite often condemned for sitting down with people who hold unpalatable views.

Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Livingstone were vilified for meeting with Gerry Adams in 1982 but without that contact who’s to say we would have had the Downing Street Declaration in 1994 and the Good Friday agreement in 1998?

So this ‘attack’ could just as easily be credit for foresight and courage… as it probably would be if those attacking Corbyn had discovered it was something their favourite had done.