May 2, 2012

London has an election coming tomorrow, and your intrepid blogger has a vote.

As is his wont, he has decided to go through the candidates, and openly muse about why he should (or shouldn’t) vote for them.

We began this in part one, last week, with an intention to follow with parts two and three. But we ran into a problem: time and space.

After writing about Boris, we found ourselves with over 1,000 words (and not happy with the result). That still left two candidates. With obligations eating into our time, a deadline of election day (tomorrow), and other decisions that need to be made about tomorrow’s vote … well, we are revisiting our approach.

Here are our choices for mayor, ranked, with the reason for the ranking.

#1: Brian Paddick, Liberal Democrat.

The performance of the Liberal Democrat party as part of a coalition government has left me rather cold to casting votes in their favour. But, as described last week in Part 1, I am quite impressed with Paddick’s position, leaving him in top spot.

#2: Siobhan Benita, Independent.

Benita has some good ideas, but I remain unconvinced that she has the ability to actually make them a reality once in office. Her plans extend well beyond the mayor’s remit, and I have doubts about her ability to actually achieve what is laid out in her manifesto should she be elected.

#3 Ken Livingstone, Labour.

Ken, of course, was the mayor of London for two terms (2000-2008), and prior to that had served as the leader of the Greater London Council. Ken cares about the city. He has accomplished some fantastic things as mayor, particularly around public transport.

Of course, he has also had his share of missteps and controversy. I’m not sure I particularly like Ken.

#4 Boris Johnson, Conservative.

The incumbent, I have previously written (and deleted) 1,000 words on Boris’s campaign.

It comes down to this: Boris is running on his record, but he has done (almost) nothing during his time as mayor. He promises to do (pretty much) a further nothing for the next four years. It’s impressive that he manages to stretch that nothing into a nine-point plan, and a massive manifesto.

He is not a bad mayor, but he is not a good mayor. It seems to be more of a platform to give him visibility and exposure before an eventual bid for the Conservative Party leadership. One gets a sense the man is biding his time.

Between incumbency, competence, and being the only real right wing choice available (see below), Boris is probably back for a second term.

#5 Jenny Jones, Green Party.

My opinion of Jenny Jones, Green Party candidate for mayor, was built from a short conversation witnessed on Twitter. Being asked her opinion on science, and its impact on government policy, Ms. Jones replied that she was a big fan of science. Her opposition to genetically modified food, she continued, was based on her own study of ancient plant life.

The belief that knowledge of ancient plant life provides understanding of the crossroads of farming and genetic research in the twenty-first century would be a worrying trait in a mayor. This inablity to recognise the limits of her own knowledge reveals that she cannot be trusted with office. The mayor has to be able to know when they have reached their own limits, and seek advice. They then have to be able to judge the quality of that advice.

At #5 on our list, Ms. Jones is the first candidate who we believe would actually be a bad mayor.

#6 Lawrence Webb, UKIP.

Mr. Webb and the UKIP released a one page manifesto. Seriously. It’s shorter than this article. It’s in point form. Anybody who votes UKIP in the London election needs to have their head examined.

Last: Carlos Cortiglia, BNP.

Mr. Cortiglia probably has a more developed plan than Mr. Webb does, but given that he represents the BNP, I will not do him the favour of giving it any page views. I am not searching for it, linking to it, or typing the url in browser.

How will we vote?

You might think this answer is above – we have Mr. Paddick first, through to Mr. Webb in 6th. All ranked.

But voting for the mayor is more complicated — we get a first choice, and a second choice. And the strategy begins.

Idealism VS Realism

Our first thought is for our second vote.

In an ideal world, our second vote would clearly be for Ms. Benita — she is our #2 choice, and if Mr. Paddick is not crowned the winner when the votes are tabulated, Ms. Benita is our next candidate.

But in the real world, everybody in London knows that the next mayor will either be Boris Johnson or Ken Livingstone. Having a second vote – and no more – creates the temptation to jump Ms. Benita in the queue, and vote for my preferred candidate amongst the two likely candidates, giving the nod to Mr. Livingstone.

Here lies the quandary.

This evening, I’m leaning towards being realistic. London will be better under Livingstone than it would be with a second Johnson term; I have the power to affect that. On the other hand, it irks me that I have to rank my third choice second.

Wishful thinking VS Wishful thinking

Having chosen my second vote, it is time to pick who comes first.

My first, last and only thought had been that it would be Mr. Paddick. I like his platform best of the candidates, and am willing to look past his unfortunate reality television shenanigans and the party he represents. I see him as being best of the bunch.

And then I read the how and why of a friend’s vote, and I must admit it strikes a chord. If my real vote, the one that counts, is for Ken Livingstone, then what is my first preference?

For Mr. O’Malley, the answer is the hope that people see a large number of Green votes, and think they need more Green Party-like policies to appeal to voters like him. He doesn’t have to worry about Ms. Jones’s ability to do the job, because she will never have the opportunity to do it.

So I now have two options for my first vote.

On one hand, I can list Mr. Paddick. The wishful thinking here is that something crazy happens and Paddick manages to win. That’s very much wishful thinking, as he is currently polling in fourth place, with 5% of the vote.

On the other hand, I can list Ms. Jones, despite the fact that she is my #5 choice, and I believe her not to be competent. She’d be a horrible mayor. And I can engage in the wishful thinking that her estimated 6% of the vote will somehow influence more mainstream politics.

This evening, I stand by the principle that my #1 vote should be applied to the person I think will be best in the role, but if I wake up tomorrow, dreamy-eyed and believing that a vote for Green will plant an environmental seed in some dirty capitalist or unionist heart, that could change.

May 31, 2011

You aren’t going to think less of me if I can’t do this by myself?

Back in November, I was going to write an article for the Big Bad Blog about the week during which Maggie was born. The problem was that I did not intend to write a chronology, but about some of the things that bothered me in the lead up to Maggie’s birth, and the insight that crystallized over the course of the week. The final and most profound moment for this was when Karen said the words above, or something like them. This was the last gasp of our approach of “doing things naturally”. Avoiding painkillers was abandoned in favour of accepting the help and expertise of people who dedicate their lives to helping women in labour, and do their best to make them comfortable and safe.

The moment in which I realized that all those blog articles and books that push an agenda of avoiding doctors and pain relief on women are not encouraging them to take control of the situation, but often actually counsel them – perhaps not intentionally – to avoid help. We would not dream of raising Maggie without the help of family, teachers and doctors. Why would we want to be so stubborn about her arrival?

My planned article would lack impact, I thought, if people lacked the full story. The story was Karen’s, and I waited for her to blog it, herself … but said blog never arrived. I soon realized that Maggie would not allow the time for it, and filed my article under “contemplated, but never written.”

But occasionally I read something that triggers a huge amount of anger. Last week I read this article by Mayim Bialik which was sufficiently triggering for me to write this.

Bialik is not just your average 1990s television star to find a bit part on a much better television show twenty years later. Between the two, she studied neuroscience and received her PhD. This suggests that she ought to have some well-developed critical thinking muscles. And this is, I think, part of the trigger for me. It is not just another article — it is written by a celebrity, published by MSNBC, and stamped with the three letters “PhD” after her name to lend authority.

Not that expertise in neuroscience gives insight into birth, but … there you go. Bialik makes a series of statements that hurt my head, and make me angry. Initially, I was going to rebut the article point-by-point, but after typing a couple thousand of non-constructive words, we have decided to touch on the one thing that angered us the most, and then try to move on quickly to more constructive writing.

The pain

While Bialik’s strange desire for the safety (and society’s sexual stratification) of the early 1800s left us aghast, and her describing precaution as hysteria-inducing — yes, she used the word “hysteria” — was baffling, it was the alleged logic surrounding her rejection of anesthesia that really got me fuming, and brought Karen’s words at the hospital back to mind.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we are of the opinion that drugs should be the bastion of last resort. It is unquestionably healthier to avoid drugs (and their potential side effects) while other means of pain relief are exhausted. But Bialik goes further than this when she states that she is against medicating for the emotions of birth (her words, not mine).

She does not appear to recognize physical pain, or the difference between physical pain and emotional pain. Instead, this Doctor of Neuroscience tells her readers that if they take medicine for the pain, it will dull the emotions of the experience.

Bialik is practically telling women to accept the pain, or risk the emotional bond they have with their child.

To top it all off, she suggests homeopathy — water that is supposed to remember things and have magical properties as a result — as a potential pain relief option.

Physical pain and emotional pain are, of course, two different things. None of the drugs offered at the hospital for pain during childbirth are anti-depressants (to my knowledge), and suggesting otherwise is bizarre, off-the-wall, and makes me wonder where she got that from. Citations are absent, of course. I speculate that they are non-existent, but cannot, unfortunately, prove such a negative.

You probably don’t think less of me for taking ibuprofen and a muscle relaxant the other night, so I might sleep through back pain. You probably don’t think less of yourself for having an anesthetic during dental work.

Karen practiced techniques from Juju Sundin’s book for months before the pregnancy, every night. The techniques were fantastic, and worked very, very well — we highly recommend the book — but after sixty hours of regular contractions, they weren’t enough anymore.

Strangely, we love Maggie anyways, and Maggie loves us. This is not because we were lucky that pain medication did not lessen our emotional bonds, but is instead because pain medication does not impact emotional bonds in the way Bialik’s language would suggest.

The points that should be made

With that behind us, we will now try to move on to writing something constructive about the subject. It would be nice to see some sort of article that actually makes important points to people who are planning to have a baby outside the hospital.

The article I have in mind would be well-researched. This is not, however I did do a boatload of research a year ago, when exploring our options for Maggie’s birth. Here is some advice gleaned from having been down this road before:

Make sure your midwife is qualified

Who certifies midwives? Does your midwife have the appropriate certification as a medical professional? In the UK, most midwives work for the National Health Service (NHS), which presumably only employs certified doctors, nurses and midwives. But if you are hiring somebody privately, you should make sure they are qualified.

We are under the impression that, in the United States (which is the source for most of the traffic to the Big Bad Blog), untrained and uncertified midwives are — for reasons unknown — allowed to call themselves “midwives” and deliver babies in people’s homes. We would recommend that you stick with the certified variety.

Make sure your Midwife is insured

Here in the UK, there are both public and private health options. Private midwives in the UK are unable to get insurance. This means that insurance companies have calculated the average payout they would have to make per midwife, added enough to cover their costs (lawyers, actuaries, etc.) and a tidy 10% profit … and came up with a number so high that it was not worthwhile to sell to private midwives.

Insurance companies are essentially professional risk assessors who care only about profit. If they refuse to insure somebody, or price the insurance so to be impossibly expensive … that tells you something.

Make sure your midwife is connected

One of the great things about the UK is that the midwives work for the NHS, and are part of the same system. Our GP’s clinic has a midwife’s office in it, where Karen went for most of her pre-natal checkups. They are connected with the birthing centre, where we planned to have Maggie, and the hospital, where we went for ultrasounds, and where Maggie was ultimately born

All of them, part of one system, acting in concert.

It is easy to have confidence in the birthing centre, when it is attached to a hospital that has amazingly high success rates for live births (“success” meaning a mother and baby who survive the experience) … and does not consider the birthing centre to be a separate entity.

You should make sure that you have the same thing.

Not necessarily an NHS, of course — that might be a bit much to accomplish in nine months, while pregnant — but all your care providers need to be working in concert. They need to know how each other work, and hand everything off smoothly. They need to have a protocol, and be comfortable with each other.

It’s no good to have your midwife dump you in an ambulance, heading to the hospital, if things go wrong. She needs to be linked to the hospital. They need to know you’re coming, and be ready for you, knowing exactly what has gone wrong.

This, to me, seems to be the biggest trouble in the United States with midwifery — from what I read, this relationship is rare. There is no way that home birth — or even a birth centre birth — is safe without it. It would be like driving without a seat belt.

Have a contingency plan

As much as her article as a whole rubs us the wrong way, we agree with one of Bialik’s axioms: Giving birth should not be treated as an accident waiting to happen.

The medicalization of birth has been a wonderful thing. It has made the process so abundantly safe that people like Bialik can claim — without sounding foolish — that we would be better off in our living rooms without any medical people present. To welcome the child into our world, surrounded by our things. When the child has arrived, we want her to have arrived home, instead of having arrived in a place most of us prefer to avoid.

And those things would be wonderful, and women should strive for them.

At the same time, anybody with any sense makes contingency plans. As a fencing coach, I never planned my practices as an accident waiting to happen. As a tournament organiser, I never planned a tournament as an emergency waiting to happen. But I always had a plan in case it did.

Looking after the students/competitors. Calling the ambulance. Giving directions. Where would the ambulance arrive? What is the shortest path to the gym? Failure to make such plans is negligent and ensures that there is never an emergency: either everything goes as planned, or there is tragedy. The danger in saying “birth should not be treated as an emergency” is that people might read “full stop” at the end of the sentence.

Have a contingency plan. Know the contingency plan. Make sure your health providers know the contingency plan. Being prepared for the worst is different than assuming that it will happen. If you have good health care providers, they will probably already have one drawn up, know it by heart, and give it to you when you broach the subject.

Bridging the divide

For some reason there seems to be a war on out there.

There are people who insist that childbirth should be “natural”. By which they mean not-in-a-hospital. And free of intervention, by which they mean free of the-interventions-that-they-don’t-like. Bialik, for example, thinks that pain relief is bad … unless the pain relief happens to be baths, hypnosis and homeopathy.

The reaction to this from critical thinkers and medical professionals (who are not, unfortunately, all critical thinkers) is to take the other extreme. Ignoring the actual source of the desire for a “natural” experience, and the reason for the resonance of the “natural” approach, they extoll hospitals for their success rates (where “success” is measured in the resulting alive-ness of mother and baby). They become even more clinical in an attempt to prove their superiority.

The actual issue of course, is not that women want to return to nature. It is that the doctor does not have a relationship with an expectant mother, but with his or her patient. Years of medical training teaches doctors to view them this way, and the environment – a hospital – only serves to exaggerate it. On the other hand, the mother/midwife relationship, in the home or a birthing centre, creates an entirely different sort of atmosphere.

Doctor/patient relationships usually resolve around two archetypal interactions: identifying and resolving health problems (an interaction which dominates at the hospital), and the mitigation of potential future problems.

But the pregnant woman defies these conventions. She does not have a broken leg or ruptured spleen – her pregnancy is not a problem. Her child is not a potential problem to be mitigated. When she steps into the medical world, however, she gets forced into its paradigm — the pregnancy is viewed as a condition. The treatment culminates in the removal of the baby from the womb.

Instead of sniping back-and-forth about things that are not an issue for anybody but the most hardcore fanatics on either side of the debate, it would be nice to see people recognize the actual issue and move towards a resolution that can capture the safety of a medicalized birth, while removing the associated paradigms that focus on pregnancy as though it were a condition to be treated.

In the UK, the NHS is making some headway here — the birthing centre that we (almost) used is a great example — but I do not think they understand the problem. It is simply a government agency responding to the natural birth lobby while attempting to minimize liability.

Imagine what could be accomplished if the real goal – birth which is empowering, comfortable, and safe – were recognized.

February 14, 2011

Here in the UK, there’s a referendum planned for May 5th. That referendum is to decide whether the country should swap the current voting system (known as “first past the post”) for a new system called “Alternative Vote”, or AV.

While the question “why should I care?” is (perhaps) a good one, here at the Big Bad Blog we think a move to AV would be a good idea.

What is AV?

Currently, with First Past the Post (FPTP), when an individual goes to vote they are given a ballot. They mark their most preferred candidate on that ballot, and that’s it. Whichever candidate receives the most votes wins the election.

With Alternative Vote, instead of marking only their most preferred candidate, voters would mark the candidates in order of preference. A candidate needs 50% + 1 vote to win, and if none of the candidates win on the first ballot, the candidate with the fewest votes is dropped and the vote is re-tabulated. This continues until a winner is identified.

Why is AV good?

AV does two things, both of them positive.

The first of these is to correct the problem known as “strategic voting”. In a multi-party system, it is inevitable that strategic voting will occur. Traditional supporters of the Liberal Democrats will support a Labour candidate because she is the best chance of beating the local Conservative. A supporter of the UK Independence Party will throw their support behind a Tory candidate in a tight race with Labour because they understand that their party sits on the fringes and has no real chance of winning the seat.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we have a problem with strategic voting.

The need for voters to vote strategically starves parties that are not traditional powers of votes, volunteers and candidates. People who might normally support such parties are instead driven to support the Labour or Conservative parties because they see one of these two parties as the lesser of two evils.

And it’s pretty shitty to have to vote for evil, even if it is the lesser one.

But the alternative (in first-past-the-post) is that votes are split, potentially allowing for a candidate who opposes the majority viewpoint of his constituents to represent them as their member of parliament.

Luckily, the second good thing about AV is that it presents the best opportunity for an MP to represent the majority of their constituents.

This dichotomy of the split vote versus the strategic vote creates a political landscape in which changes are both rare and small. There are no primary elections (like in the US) in which a party can find itself being redefined (as with Tea Party Republicans) or rejuvenated by a young rising star (as with Barack Obama igniting the Democratic grassroots in the 2008 US Presidential election), so a two-party system does not work. Instead, “third” parties must siphon sufficient votes for the big parties to reflect on their political ideologies.

Consider this scenario:

A constituency in which 70% of the population is left wing, 30% are right wing. All 30% of the right wing votes always go to the Conservative candidate, but support amongst the left wing is split as follows:

25% Labour
25% Liberal Democrat
20% Green Paty

In the First Past the Post option, supporters of these parties have two options: they can (artificially) marginalize one of the parties, but win the election (via strategic voting). Or, they can battle it out for supremacy, but ultimately be represented by a Conservative MP (who, with 30% of the vote, has more support than any of the other three parties).

In the current system, either the voters who would vote for the most marginal of the three left-wing parties (the Greens, in this instance) decide to vote differently, marginalizing the political impact of their vote; or the vote is split, and a left-wing constituency is represented inaccurately by a right-wing MP.

Neither of these is desirable. Strategic voting disregards the impact that votes for third party candidates has on majority candidates.

And split votes directly violate the spirit of democracy, as candidates with similar (but popular) ideologies lose to those with less popular (but more unique) ideologies.

In our above scenario, the Green Party would be dropped after the first round with AV voting — given that they are a left-of-centre party, their votes would likely go to the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, and eventually one of them would likely be pushed past the Conservative party and take the seat. The left-wing constituency ends up with a left-wing MP.

All the parties would see that a significant minority (20%) voted Green, and will try to adjust their own politics and policies to attract those votes in the next election. And the Green party would see that they are actually only trailing the Labour party (who eventually win the seat) by 5 points — not 30 or 40, as previously thought — and perhaps even become more relevant in local politics for that constituency. (And, if repeated in sufficient constituencies, nationally.)

Why people think AV is bad

As with everything, there are many out there who do not agree with the Big Bad Blog on this issue. They trot out several talking points, but none of the arguments move the Big Bad Blog much. We explore them here.

There is one that I see that is actually scary: It undermines the “one person, one vote” principle of democracy.

This, however, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Alternative Vote actually represents. Run-off elections are not uncommon in many parts of the world, and they make sense — if there are a minimal number of votes that must be won, the top candidates are retained (the bottom candidate(s) cut), and the populace is polled a second time.

The Alternative Vote simply streamlines this process to be included in the original ballot.

In our above example, imagine that the 20% of Green voters have their second choice split as follows:

• 10% – Labour;
• 5% – Lib Dem;
• 5% – Tory.

Bringing our new totals to:

• 35% – Labour;
• 35% – Tory;
• 30% – Lib Dem

Some people now claim that those who voted Green have voted twice! This is unfair!

They are right – those people have voted twice. But it’s not unfair, because so has everyone else.

What happened was actually a run-off election. The Green candidate was struck from the ballot, and everybody’s top choice (without the Green candidate) was counted again.

Other arguments are equally weak:

The BNP will get more votes under AV. This is almost certainly true, as some BNP supporters likely vote strategically. But trying to silence a political party should not be the basis under which democratic institutions are built. The BNP would also receive fewer votes if those who vote for the BNP were all shot. This does not make shooting BNP voters to be a reasonable – or democratic – suggestion.

AV is complex. Rank these fruits according to your personal preference: Apple, Banana, Orange, Pear, Strawberry.

You might have had trouble deciding whether you like pears more or less than bananas, but here at the Big Bad Blog, we strongly doubt that you found the exercise hard to follow.

What is complex is trying to game the system by, say, ignoring your second choice for your third so the third choice doesn’t go out on the second ballot. FPTP, on the other hand, is easy to game — if you’re on the left, vote for Labour; on the right, Conservative.

At the Big Bad Blog, we do not want a system that is easy to game, so this “complexity” does not really worry us.

The Alternative Vote is a step towards Proportional Representation. This is simply blatantly untrue. The Liberal Democrats — who are the party that has pushed for AV — want proportional representation, but have settled for a referendum on the alternative vote instead. Because of this, “AV is a step towards PR” is argued.

But AV is actually a FPTP system — it is just such a system with run-off votes, instead of one that causes strategic voting, vote-splitting, and MPs with less than 30% of the vote to head off to Westminster.

How will people vote?

With that said, despite our belief in the superiority of the system, we are expecting the vote for AV to fail for several reasons.

Quorum is unlikely to be met. The Lords have rightly set a quorum for the referendum to be binding. Given that voting is the mechanism by which a democracy is run, it makes sense that the means by which the vote is carried out should not be changed by a small group.

But that very quorum is the thing most likely to cause it to fail. We suspect that most voters are simply voting for a Prime Minister, or voting for the ruling party. They put an X beside what, to them, represents David Cameron or the Labour party, and are done with it. As such, they do not much care whether MPs from individual constituencies broadly represent the overriding political leanings of said constituencies. It is too abstract.

So there is a strong possibility — perhaps even a probability — that quorum will not be met.

The recent election had a 65% turnout, but that was the highest turnout in over a decade for a general election. By-elections, European Parliament elections and local elections tend to get lower turnouts.

It is easy to see how the referendum might not achieve quorum on this basis.

Even if it does, we would have to wonder how the vote would go.

Power in the UK traditionally swaps back and forth between the Conservative and Labour parties. Excepting National/Coalition governments, this has been going on since 1922. More recent history shows the Conservatives gaining power in 1979, and finally being kicked out in 1997 by an electorate in a vote that was more an indictment of the Tories than it was support for Blair’s New Labour.

That Labour party, of course, stayed in power until 2010, where it was voted out. Again, I say Labour was voted out in favour of the current Conservative-led coalition, not that the coalition was voted in. The recession, never-ending wars in the Middle East and an expenses scandal were the root causes of change, not a change in the political philosophy of the electorate.

And Thatcher’s Tories? The beneficiaries of out-of-control inflation in the late 1970s and the “winter of discontent” that preceded the election. And the Labour government prior to Thatcher? A majority of three seats, which took two 1974 elections to achieve.

So both the Labour and Conservative parties do well by the status quo. One left-of-centre party, one right. When the public grows dissatisfied with one, they move to the other. Under the current system, a vote for a third party is thrown away – little more than an act of protest without any real impact.

So the Conservative and Labour parties do not want AV, at all. And neither do their hardcore supporters. Without AV, they get to set the entire political agenda – voters choose between the agenda on the right (Conservative) and the agenda on the left (Labour), without much input into either. AV would change that, and force the mainstream parties to speak to issues in a manner that resonates with the public.

But these parties are also the most popular in the country, with the largest support bases. If they agree on an issue, it may be decided — there is a good chance that people who vote Labour or Conservative in most elections (which is most people) will vote “No” simply because this is what those parties want.

So who will vote “yes”? Supporters of fringe groups will, as will those — like your blogger — who feel that democracy works best when MPs best fit the political views of their constituency.

Unfortunately, we appear to be outnumbered.

January 12, 2011

Politicians in the United Kingdom, it seems, have an obsession with the word “fair”. We here at the Big Bad Blog humbly beg them to throw the word out.

An introduction to fairness: The 2010 Election

We first noticed the heavy use of “fair” due to its central importance to the Labour election campaign in 2010. The Labour manifesto was titled A future fair to all. Gordon Brown’s introduction to the manifesto said the following (emphasis mine):

Our aim is a modern, progressive Britain based on fairness, respect, decency and openness.

“Fairness”, you will see, comes first, followed by other nebulous qualities. They argue later that they would “be guided at all times by a sense of fairness”.

The Liberal Democrats, presumably not wanting to be thought of as “unfair” by comparison titled the four sections of their manifesto “fair taxes”, “a fair chance”, “a fair future” and “a fair deal”. A couple of choice bits from the introduction in the Lib Dem manifesto from 2010 (emphasis mine, again):

This election can and must be a turning point for Britain. This must be a moment of great change, so that we emerge from the recession as a fairer, greener, stronger and more united society.

“Fairer” is, again, first — presumably indicating that it is more important than having a green or strong Britain. Additionally, they title the second part of their manifesto’s introduction “bringing back fairness”.

At the time, this looked like two progressive parties each trying to persuade the progressive voters (who are the majority in the UK) that they will make the tough decisions “fairly” when implementing austerity measures that all three parties agreed were necessary. The Lib Dems, naturally, also took a pot-shot at the then-governing Labour party by indicating that things were not fair at present, and that fairness was something that needed to be brought back, as Justin Timberlake once did with “sexy”.

Fairness continues unabated

The election came and went, and we at the Big Bad Blog assumed that the word “fair” would disappear from politics. The fight between the UK’s two progressive parties over who would make the cuts most fairly was lost to the Conservatives, who appeared to have no intention to be fair at all but instead intended to be decisive. Or so it seemed.

But with the introduction of austerity measures came the word “fair” again, louder and more often. “These cuts are fair”, trumpeted the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government. “And these, and those.” “The VAT rise is fair.”

“Not true!” shouted the opposition. “Those things are not fair at all!”

Can we stop, now?

It boggles our mind. The arguments occurring regarding the austerity measures ought to be in regards to the impact that the changes have on individuals, communities, and the country as a whole, not on whether or not they are “fair” to people. Fair is a comparison.

Budgets are being trimmed across the board, and this has an undeniable impact on people’s lives. There is less money for housing, to pay for student’s university tuition, or to help the disabled. Why are we asking if that sounds fair?

We should be asking whether we are making a University education less attainable for some segments of society, and whether doing so is harmful to Britain’s overall competitiveness in global markets in the long run. Whether we are forcing poor into unacceptable living conditions. Whether we are denying the disabled full participation in society.

These things, you might argue, are about whether or not the cuts are fair. You would be wrong.

Cuts and tax rises are unfair. Always. They involve the government taking something away — be it a benefit or money. And people who live paycheck to paycheck, or who are dependent in some manner on the service being cut, will be put in difficult situations.

This is unfair. Life is unfair. The world is unfair. Move on.

So the Big Bad Blog proposes the following to UK politicians:

Stop using the words “fair”, “unfair” and “fairness”. We understand their place in an election campaign, but you are not currently standing for election (or re-election).

More particularly, to the Conservatives currently in power: You are governing. That means making difficult decisions — and such decisions are termed “difficult” precisely because there is no way to make them that is fair to all those that you govern. I know that the Liberal Democrats put the word “fair” all over their election manifesto and are now in a coalition with you. This does not mean that you have to trumpet everything you do as being “fair”. You won the most seats because people felt that austerity measures needed to be taken decisively. You did not win a majority because they did not trust you fully. When you term an austerity measure to be “fair”, everybody knows that you are lying. Nobody expects you to be fair, but a bit of honesty might go a long way.

So do not try to defend cuts as being fair.

Instead, say “yes, it’s terribly unfair. We are looking forward to having the deficit under control so we can correct the situation. But right now, it is necessary.”

Not everyone will agree with you, but that’s just politics.