As many as 10 million voters, predominantly poor, young or black, and more liable to vote Labour, could fall off the electoral register under government plans, the Electoral Commission, electoral administrators and psephologists warned .

The changes will pave the way for a further review of constituency boundaries that will reduce the number of safe Labour seats before the 2020 election.

It's a two stage thing. First shift voting registrations from households to individuals and remove the legal obligation to report. Then measure constituencies by individual registrations rather than numbers eligible to vote, thus cutting down the number of urban constituencies, and therefore Labour constituencies. And the man driving this through is Mr Fair Votes himself, Nick Clegg.

It should be said that if core Labour voters are demotivated then that has a lot to do with the Labour Party: the numbers voting between 1997 and 2001 dropped by around 13%, I think. This is where new Labour's they've got nowhere else to go attitude to their voters eventually got them. many went anyway, and now we have a rightwing government trying to systematically discourage them from coming back.

I'm also not at all sure that if this goes through that it won't rebound on the Tories, who have their own secular decline in voters to worry about. Party loyalties are so generally attenuated these days that it makes no sense for any government to discourage voting.

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1. Sometimes it’s who you don’t vote for that counts
2. Change
3. Dresden.

Associates of Saadi cannot understand why his capture and interrogation would hold any great intelligence value for the British authorities, and are speculating that he may have been a "gift" from the British to the Gaddafi regime.

He came with fugitives in his chain, and the two leaders met in a tent. Interesting the extent of Beijing's co-operation, too.

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But what must the ticket furore look like from an entrepreneurial point of view? There’s an obvious market lesson here. Money – masses of it – has been left on the table. You might wonder if it’s enough for somebody – a television network, perhaps – to think it worthwhile to stage a competitor event to the Olympics. So what would stop a start up event – let’s call it the Spartan games – from getting off the ground?

Venues are not scarce: many cities bidding for the Olympics already have athletics stadia and parks. For example, Rome, which is bidding for the 2020 games, has Mussolini’s stadium and the Foro Olimpico. Say Rome loses its 2020 bid; well, there’ll be a discount to be had. And since in all likelihood the Spartan games will simply not offer things like dinghy sailing and ping pong but will instead offer more athletics – much more – the Spartan games organisers will likely not face problems of needing to find multiple venues, of connecting them, of giving them consistent branding, etc.

No, the main problem I see in getting the Spartan games going is the old problem of mind share: people have to believe that the Spartan games matter. They don’t much believe in the Commonwealth games, or in your regular international athletics. But what the Commonwealth games is missing is countries; whole regions of the globe are excluded. And what regular international athletics is missing – as far as I know – is a decent medals table. Now, the international medals table is surely the key innovation of the Olympics (even if its existence is not officially acknowledged by the Olympic management). The medals table makes the Olympic games matter (no, really, it does). Further, it seems to me that a well constructed medals table absolutely requires opportunities for certain countries to do better than might be expected. And this is where minor sports come in (for instance, rowing and track cycling are where Britain finds its Olympic medals) yet these are exactly the sports the Spartan games will do without. So, what to do?

The answer, I think, lies in recognizing that there is a network of nationally-based training organisations with an orientation towards the Olympics; the existence of these organisations give the Olympic contests the texture they in fact have. And these could be replicated, with strategic intent. Each American NFL team strategically locates its annual training camp so as to maximise fan appeal; likewise, the Spartan games could strategically emplace its own sports academies. Each such academy could have a narrow specialisation; narrower than what we currently see. For example, France might become the location of a pole vaulting centre of excellence. And while of course open to non-French nationals, the Spartan pole vaulting academy – given time – would indeed tend to produce mostly French pole vaulting champions. This solves the medal table problem: the Spartan games can reliably feature winners from many nations, not excluding the rich nations, in fair and open competition.

Step three: profit!
      

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1. Tibet and the Olympic torch – open thread
2. I’ll be darned
3. Europe in 2012?

David Cameron’s constituency is Witney, on the Oxfordshire / Gloucestershire border. This is a part of the world I have some experience of; it’s where some of my family live. I won’t name the village, but Cameron is their MP, and don’t they know it. I’ll try to describe what it’s like around there.

Just as the Distributists would have wanted, a church features centrally in every Cotswolds village; there might also be a common, or some stocks (disused, but cherished). Generally, there’ll be a clear visual hierarchy; it’ll be obvious today, as it would have been three hundred years ago, which houses are supposed to be those of the wealthiest and most dominant. There may be a tract of social housing; but it won’t be central, or in the most picturesque part.

Nothing new in any of that, you might think. But there’s more. The settlement pattern of your typical Cotswold village reflects the historical pattern of English agricultural land tenure; you find houses standing side by side along a central street, each with a strip of land out back. Once, the strips were long and were farmed; today, they are truncated into gardens where some people grow some vegetables. This allows an illusion of self-sufficiency: produce is traded locally, often on an honour payment system (someone puts a basket of tomatoes on their garden wall, and you pay for what you take). But if you did some basic agricultural economics here, you’d quickly show that if the locals tried to eat only what was truly local, and if they tried to pay for it with what they themselves made locally, they’d starve. Despite superficial appearances, they’re just not equipped or organised for that. Artisanal enterprise? There’s a silversmith in Stow-on-the-Wold who might be good for a stirrup cup, but you’ll look long and hard before you’ll find an independent maker and vendor of shoes, saddles, wicker trugs, garden trowels or whatever else it is that’s supposed to be made, sold and used in the countryside.

Even if the locals were equipped as if for the agrarian idyll, I’m not at all sure they’d enjoy it You have to look to what’s not so obvious as you stand in the middle of a Cotswold village: the machinery that makes the whole lot viable and – for some – a lot better than bearable. There are railway lines that make villages into practical commuter settlements, for instance. An older innovation, sure, but the station car parks still fill up reliably on week days. And if trains are not your thing, there’ll be four-lane roads and/or motorways within twenty minutes’ driving time. Either way, you’ll have a car. Further, the blanketing with transport infrastructure means that you won’t just get access to your ordinary high-capital, high-energy, large-scale, globally-supplied need satisfier such as Tesco Extra; interesting retakes on the shed retail concept are also reachable. Daylesford Organic, for instance: a creation of the Bamford family (as in the manufacturer J. C. Bamford). Officially it’s a ‘farm shop’ but it has too many parking spaces for that. What’s more, produce doesn’t just leave the Daylesford Organic farm shop by truck (for the other Daylesford stores, and also for the Ocado distribution centre); it arrives by truck as well: I’m thinking of the Italian olive oil and the Spanish almonds. I don’t know where they get their trugs.

I’ll save the holiday travel habits of Cotswoldians for a later post. I think it’ll be obvious what my point is. Much of what is presented as ‘small scale’ and ‘local’ in the constituency of Witney isn’t small small or local. It’s just more of your aspiration with a countryside theme. The people who buy into Witney are the type who like to patrol the parish bounds with the dogs; they’re usually English-esque – pale, clean shaven and corduroy clad in the case of the men – but they come from all over. And the people who start their lives in the village council estate and then leave; well, they go all over. Alex James, in his extraordinarily creepy 2007 puff piece about the Bamford retail operation, says that “there is not even a hint of the bad things about the world here”. But you can’t start with a visual aesthetic and end up with a social policy. If what you see around Witney is what inspires Blond-ism and hence Cameron’s Big Society, then both of those are just self-comforting fantasy.

PS: check out Tamara Drewe.

No related posts.

The problems we in Europe all now face together (“wir teilen ein gemeinsames schicksal” in M. Trichet’s words) have not arrived just “suddenly one springtime” as it were, indeed they come from afar. Right from the very begining it has been no easy matter for German society to achieve the consensus necessary to accept the idea of participating in a common currency, the Bundesbank has long maintained its by now well-known reservations, while not a few have been the voices expressing the view that having so many diverse countries all sharing the same monetary unit would inevitably create a structure which was too unwieldy to be manageable, and too weak to hold together when the real storm weather came. What was needed, it was argued, was a two, not a one, speed Europe.

Unfortunately, all these simmering issues have once more resurfaced during the last week, over the tricky question of what to do about Greek financing needs, and Germany’s economic and political leadership now seem to be locked in an intense debate about exactly which path to take. Meanwhile Greek bond spreads simply work their way onwards and upwards, while capital flight from Greek bank deposits has forced the banks themselves to go rushing to the government for a further 18.000 million euros in funding just to keep them alive.

The current issue came to a head last Monday afternoon, following a brief report on the Financial Times website stating that progress with the decision on any Greek rescue plan was effectively deadlocked due to the inability of the Germany to agree with her other European partners the precise rate of interest to be charged on any loan to be provided. Ironically it is this single issue which is currently bringing European decision making to a dead halt, and creating a level of uncertainty and debate of such intensity that, if it is not resolved decisively, could bring the very future of the Euro into question. And it is not a trivial matter, since the rate charged will become a precedent, which other, larger, countries can refer to later.

Essentially the problem is this. According to the US economists Carmen Reinhardt a Ken Rogoff (in a widely quoted paper Growth In A Time Of Debt) a potential tipping point exists once government debt breaches the 100% of GDP level in the aftermath of a financial crisis. After this point the impact of additional state spending is, paradoxically, to effectively reduce growth (given the weight of interest repayments, and the additional risk price charged for lending, and the impact of more government debt on investor confidence) and indeed far from helping a country to recover, further borrowing may mean the economy actually shrinks rather than grows.

Let’s take an example. Imagine Greece has debt at the 100% of GDP level (in fact it is somewhat over 115%), and the price investors charge for buying the bonds is around 6% (or more or less 3% more than the German government has to pay to sell equivalemt debt). Now let’s also imagine that Greece has zero inflation and zero growth (they are in the midst of a massive correction which will last some years, so these are reasonable, and indeed possibly even optimistic assumptions). Then Greece will need to produce what is know as a “primary surplus” (or difference between current spending and current income) of around 6% just to stand still, and not see its level of gross indebtedness increase. But Greece, in 2009, had a primary deficit of some 7% of GDP.That is to say, simply to not get more in debt Greece has to withdraw something like 13% of GDP in demand from the economy, and this is massive, which is why all the experts anticipate a sharp contraction in the Greek economy over the next 3 or 4 years, and why rather than looking to domestic demand the Greeks will need to look to exports for support (The US economist Charles Calomiris has an excellent detailed explanation of all this here, while Peter Boone and Simon Johnson dig even deeper here) .

Which is where the European Union comes in. Basically, if Greece has to pay such a high interest rate differential to support such a large debt there is every likelihood she will not be able to continue to finance herself, and default will become inevitable. You can only demand so much effort from the reformed alchoholic before they are driven back to drinking in frustration. On the other hand the EU could help by making the interest rates charged cheaper, but unfortunately there is a 1993 decision of the German constitutional court which makes it effectively illegal for the German government to participate in such a subsidised loan. The IMF can help, they are reportedly willing to make a loan of up to 10 billion euros at very favourable rates, but there are limits to how far they can go, since they cannot justify favouring comparatively rich Europeans when they deny such funding to poorer countries in the third world.

And the quantity Greece actually needs is massive. Initial reports spoke of a total loan of around 25 billion, but this is surely not enough. At least 50 billion will be needed, and some estimates put the number much higher (see Peter Boone and Simon Johnson again). And remember, we are not talking about fancy theories here, all of this is all simple arithmetic: either Greece gets a large, cheap loan, or she will default. They will have no alternative. So European decision making is gridlocked, while on Thursday Greece’s 10 year bond interest rate differential hit record post-EMU highs of 4,63%, and the ineterest being charged was not 6% but as high as 7.51% at one point.

Naturally, if Greece were to do the “honourable thing”, and leave the Eurozone and default, “all would be light”. But they won’t, and there is no good reason why they should do so. Now, enter Professor Starbatty of Tübingen University. He has another proposal. Not Greece, but Germany should leave the Eurozone, and go back to the Mark. And before you start to laugh, you should bear in mind that he is very serious in his proposal, and many Germans agree with him. Indeed so seriously does Angela Merkel take the possibility that any cheap loan to Germany will encourage supporters of Professor Starbatty to go to the Constitutional Court and ask for a ruling that German participation in the common currency is illegal that she has frozen the whole Greek bailout process.

And it is not clear, at this stage what the view of the Bundesbank is. According to German press reports, accepted by the bank itself, the Bank is currently considering an internal report on the rescue loan proposal which states “This agreement of the heads of government, which according to our knowledge has been reached without any consultations from central banks, implies risks to stability that should not be underestimated,” (my emphasis).

And before anyone complains that the Germans are too dependent on exports to the South of Europe to do anything which makes selling these more difficult, please consider that domestic demand growth in all four Southern European members of the Eurozone is expected to be extremely weak over the next decade, while growth in emerging markets like India, China, Brazil and Indonesia is predicted to be massive. The markets are moving, so why not move with them?

Of course, none of this means that the Eurozone, like one of those chemical compounds Angela used to study, is about to fly apart. But we should not underestimate the stresses the currency union faces at this point. As former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff pointed out in the Financial Times this week, “if investors gather with enough sustained force, and if the central bank lacks sufficient resilience and resources, they can blow out a fixed exchange rate regime that might otherwise have lasted quite a while longer.” What the countries in the South of Europe need to give the Germans right now are not arguments about how they would be foolish for them to leave, but arguments about what they themselves are prepared to do to make it more attractive for them to stay. The German giving machine is all done, and the Germans themselves are now more than tired of being continually told they need to pay, pay and pay again for events that now took place over half a century ago. Calling, Berlin, calling Berlin, hello, hello, is anybody there?

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63-65 George Papandreou

65-67 Chaos

67-74 Military Dictatorship

74-80 Konstantinos Karamanlis

80-81 George Rallis

81-89 Andreas Papandreou (son)

89-90 Chaos, 3 failed elections

90-93 Konstantinos Mitsotakis

93-96 Andreas Papandreou (son)…died

96-04 Konstantinos Simitis

04-09 Konstantinos Karamanlis (nephew)

From Oct 09 George Papandreou (grandson)

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Most of the deputy mayor’s speech involved the town’s history, in particular with regard to immigrants – off on the wrong foot with the Vikings, who pillaged, but then doing rather better with Huguenots and so we come to the present day. Very little said about Britain itself – and there would, I imagine, have been even less at a similar ceremony in Scotland or Wales.

Should there have been? I don’t want to go down the road of nos ancetres les Gaulois , let alone some sort of tea tray and Toby jug version of Britain’s history, with Dover Castle, Spitfires and the Great Reform Act all buzzing round the old ladies cycling off to drink warm beer in church. But is there, still, a place for some sort of common national myth? Is national even the right level – or would new citizens and native born ones be better off with local patriotism instead? I’d bet there are more people who are proud to be Londoners than are proud to be British. How does this compare with other countries?

I’m not even going to suggest a common European myth. The mind boggles. But people become citizens for a reason, and it’s not just because they long for the chance to sit in a British jury box – the people I saw seemed to regard their citizenship as a prize worth the gaining. Maybe the British common myth is doing fine among its newest believers, at any rate, without any encouragement.

The issue’s also been on my mind because of the introduction of points-based tests for immigration, which has attracted some criticism. (Its merger with the Tesco Clubcard loyalty scheme is probably only a matter of time.) It’s basically just a formalisation of what pretty much every country does for aspiring immigrants and to be honest I don’t have a problem with it – except that it seems fairly inflexible. How quickly will it adapt to changes in the labour market? At present it’s set up to favour high-skilled high-earners. If you want to adjust overall levels, you can change the threshold score, and a specialist committee will apparently tweak the system to react to any specific shortfalls in the labour market.

This second part is the problematic one. It’s going to be interesting to see the pressures put on this committee when they have to decide whether there aren’t enough bricklayers because a) there’s a genuine shortage so you need to allow in more immigrants or b) employers aren’t paying enough so all the British ones have gone off to work somewhere else in the EU.

Maybe there’s a market solution? Allow employers to buy additional points for their valued immigrant employees, allowing them to stay in the country (and reducing the incentive to employ cheap labour)?

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1:50:46 PM: Interesting talk about internet activism in the Middle East by an inspiring young woman – Esra’a Al Shafei of mideastyouth.com

1:54:44 PM: Esra’a Al Shafei the difference between digital activism in the East and in the West: here people are allowed to say what they want.

2:00:15 PM: Cory Doctorow paraphrased my diploma thesis of 2000 – so there was a way to turn it into a bestseller. Note to self: surfing is on the wave.

2:02:21 PM: Mary C. Joyce explained that online activism was a big thing for Obama, but it wasn’t what the election. The candidate was.

2:03:42 PM: That’s why it probably won’t matter that Angela Merkel has only about 6,000 supporters on her facebook profile…

2:05:16 PM: Later this afternoon, there will be an interesting discussion about an emerging European digital sphere.

2:05:30 PM: BTW, my twitter account is @almostadiary.

2:07:58 PM: But now: political blogs in Germany – and they put that in the agenda without any kind of question mark…

4:42:40 PM: The panel about the European blogosphere with Jon Worth and Jeremie Zimmermann was quite inspiring. Watch out for buses in Brussels.

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1:39:45 PM: Really liked Ralf Bendrath’s talk about emerging democratic structures in social networks with particular reference to facebook. #rp09

1:42:47 PM: The follow-up chat at the Privacy OS subconference was even better – intereresting technology from Kaiserslautern: “Hello world”

1:44:06 PM: Now it’s on to “growing up in the web” – Danah Boyd’s topic without Danah Boyd… let’s see.

2:36:36 PM: The Role of the State in the Digital Society… philosophy or criminology?

4:56:31 PM: Germany’s interior ministery wanted input from netizens but faced opposition due to lost trust that will be very difficult to rebuild. #rp09

6:10:15 PM: The problem is that people aren’t listening to Lawrence Lessig…

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3:21:56 PM: This seriously feels like 300bps. John Kelly of the Berkman center held an interesting talk about link structures in different blogospheres.

3:24:01 PM: He noted the prominence of neo-conservative bloggers in the Arab linksphere as well as the rise of a shiite theological blog cluster.

3:25:46 PM: Luckily he didn’t have much of an idea of the German blogs that he had mapped… that was taken care of in the following panel discussion.

3:27:32 PM: The usual suspects talked about the same things they have talked about since forever. In this case, shift ’09 didn’t happen.

3:29:17 PM: I asked penalist Stefan NIggemeier if he didn’t think it’s boring to keep having the same chat over and over, and he said, “in a way, yes”.

3:31:57 PM: The afternoon panel about “changing media” could have used at least one person with a bit of macro insight… like Thomas Knüver #rp09

3:34:49 PM: I learned about the A&R dropbox at EMI Australia’s theinsoundfromwayout.com at the presentation about hypem.com

3:36:07 PM: And in the end, I realised I may be too old for some things, 4chan for example.

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3. Item