Desirable Edinburgh

In a poll, Edinburgh was voted the UK's "Most Desirable City" to live in. We have "atmosphere," "culture," "cuisine," and "shopping:"

The report said: "Not only does Edinburgh have lots to offer but the city is safe to visit, easy to get around and the local people are helpful and friendly.
"Aside from its entertainment and leisure offerings, it is also considered a city worth investing in."

See the full story here on the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/8199815.stm

Edinburgh Fringe Website Forbids Linking to Edinburgh Fringe Website

From the Guardian, via BoingBoing. Apparently, despite all its hip, cutting-edge, indie image, the Edinburgh Fringe website tries to saddle readers with draconian terms of service that, among other things, forbid anyone from linking to the site. (Or at least they did so recently, until quietly caving in to pressure from the blogosphere.)

Now, Nana and I had a blast at the Fringe last year, but this is just criminally stupid. Isn't the whole point of the Fringe to promote its shows? But apparently folks who wrote these terms of service are so terrified that people will "steal" intellectual property from the site (by linking to it?!?) that they're willing to cripple the site's ability to generate publicity.

Obscurity, not piracy, is the enemy here. This is a bit like deciding to protect your computer from theft by locking it up and throwing away the key. I mean, if you're going to be like that, why have a computer/website in the first place?

Anyway, /rant.

Science Daily says: "Scottish people 'living dangerously'"

From an article on Science Daily, via Fark.com:

Almost the entire adult population of Scotland (97.5%) are likely to be either cigarette smokers, heavy drinkers, physically inactive, overweight or have a poor diet, according to a new study.

From a purely anecdotal standpoint, I'd bet it's the "heavy drinkers" that caught most Scots in this very wide net. But I'd imagine the numbers for much of the US would look similarly grim, just with fewer drinkers and smokers but more overweight, physically inactive, bad eaters.

Then again, 97.5% is a lot of %!

And we have a government!

To briefly recap - in the UK parliamentary system, the Prime Minister is the head of the party with an absolute majority (326 seats) in Parliament. If no single party gets a majority, this creates a "hung Parliament." The parties then enter into negotiations to form a coalition with other parties until the necessary number of seats can be cobbled together.

Britain's last election, as I blogged before, ended in just such a hung Parliament. The Liberal Democrat party had to choose whether to ally with the Conservatives, which would immediately result in a new government, or ally with Labour, which would require a few other fourth-party MPs to throw in their hats. Negotiations were pretty intense. Labour leader and former PM Gordon Brown resigned as head of his party, possibly to give the Lib Dems a way to ally with Labour while plausibly maintaining their position as the party of change. (Brown resigned while I was at work, prompting cheers from certain Labour-supporting employees. Dancing around the office while singing "Bye-bye Brownie" may have also occurred).

Labour labored (har!) in vain, however. The Conservatives and the Lib Dems have agreed on a deal. Much of their platform is available here but some interesting highlights, at least as far as I'm concerned, are:

- eliminating the proposed National ID Card system and the next-generation RFID passports.
- capping non-EU migration. (This may or may not be terribly helpful, as many of Britain's unpopular immigrants are from the EU, or at least aren't here legally in the first place)
- officially pledging not to join the Eurozone
- planning to convert current welfare programs into welfare-to-work (the idea kicked around during the campaign was to strip benefits from anybody able to work who rejected three job offers; not sure if that's what they'll settle on or not).
- reforming schools, particularly by allowing local start-up schools similar to US charter schools.
- retaining Trident, the British nuclear sub program

There's lots more in there but those are some juicy/controversial bits. What will actually be translated into policy is anybody's guess.

A Hung Parliament: What now?

If you've been following the elections on our side of the pond, you may have noticed that it's a particularly significant one over here. Labour have (British English for "Labor has") been in power since 1997, when Tony Blair became Prime Minister and launched what he called "New Labour." His Chancellor of the Exchequer, the guy responsible for economic policy, was Gordon Brown, who became Prime Minister himself in 2007. Brown is also a University of Edinburgh alumnus. In fact, my professor this term advised on Gordon Brown's PhD thesis, on Labour party organizing in postwar Britain. We asked what he thought about Brown. The professor was, shall we say, diplomatic.

In an article I read yesterday making their personal choice for the election, The Economist praised Brown's handling of the recent financial crisis, but pointed out that it's sort of unfair to praise him for doing pretty well in a situation he essentially created by not regulating banks or controlling funding effectively when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. It's like saying, "Wow, you did a great job putting out that fire. Of course, you're the one who started it, or at the very least you're the one who didn't tell people to stop smoking next to the gasoline." The Economist, therefore, went pro-Tory. Tory is the same as Conservative - it's like saying "GOP" instead of "Republican." This party is led by David Cameron.

There is a third party, the Liberal Democrats, but they've been hampered by the structuring of the UK system. If you're interested, read the next paragraphs. Otherwise, take my word for it and meet me again under the *********.

In the US, representation in Congress is first divided by state, and then divided into districts (or, for the senate, just two per state). In the UK, the country is divided into constituencies purely by population. The Parliamentary web site says that there are 650 constituencies for this current election, with about 69,000 voters each. It's a winner-take-all system (called "first past the post" here) similar to the U.S. electoral college.

The Liberal Democrats have a tendency to come in second in very tight races - in Edinburgh South, for instance, the Lib Dem candidate lost by just 316 votes. Currently, the Lib Dems are polling at 22% of the popular vote, which in theory would translate to 130 of 650 Parliamentary seats. Because of these tight losses, they've so far won just 53. Labour's 29% of the popular vote would, in a perfectly proportional system, would win them 188 seats; they have 252. You can see why electoral reform was a major Lib Dem party platform.

A last thought on electoral divisions: England gets 533 of the 650 seats in Parliament. Scotland gets just 59, Wales 40, and Northern Ireland 18. This is a serious thorn for voters outside of England, who will never, even if they all ally with each other, be able to force serious government policy. Scottish anger at this system contributed to devolution, or returning certain governing powers to a local Scottish Parliament, but that's a whole 'nother blog post.

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Welcome back.

The UK Parliament is, believe it or not, even more partisan and party-driven than Congress. The reason is that the Prime Minister, instead of being elected separately, like the U.S. president, is the leader of the majority party in Parliament. (President Nancy Pelosi, anybody?)
David Cameron's Conservative party has a plurality of seats (the most of any party) but even with some returns coming in, will not reach 326, which is needed for a majority.

When this happens in the UK, parties start putting together coalitions. Cameron could ask the Lib Dems to join him, adding their 53 seats to his 306 and creating a majority, but he'd have to give concessions to the Lib Dems to do it. (They might, for instance, insist on important positions in the government, or on Conservatives adopting some Lib Dem political platforms). And looming behind this is the threat that the Lib Dems could take their 53 seats and ally with Labour. It wouldn't at the moment be enough to win a majority, but it might be with some extra parties added in or some new returns. Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems' leader, is therefore a bit of a kingmaker. He has suggested in speeches that he'll go with the Conservatives because of their overwhelming popular vote victory.

There's a lot more to talk about here - what each party stands for (try here or here), listing some wacky UK fringe parties (the Pirate Party - electronic, not eyepatch - or the Monster Raving Loony Party, which supports, among other things, outward-pointed air conditioners to reduce global warming) but my pizza is ready.

Betting on the British Election

If you've been following international news lately, you've probably heard something of the upcoming British general election. This one's a doozy for a variety of reasons, the foremost being that projected success by the centrist Liberal Democrats threatens to upset the longstanding two-party system.

A lot of the recent news, however, has been about the most recent TV debate has shifted the odds in favor of a Conservative (aka Tory) victory. Previously, bookmakers had put their money on a hung parliament.

Which begs the question: how many people actually bet on election outcomes in the UK? I haven't been able to find any hard data, but marketing campaigns by the big gambling chains suggest that they actually expect to make some money off those bets. As an American, this seems kind of odd to me: gambling is really not a huge part of American life, and is usually limited to the more conventional bets and games. But here in the UK, it's hard to walk more than a couple blocks on any commercial street without passing a betting parlor or two, and many of the bets advertised in the window are pretty exotic.

Stranger still is the use of published gambling odds in political advertising. Nana spotted a sign touting a Liberal Democrat candidate's odds as a come-on to potential voters: Labour, it seems, has been claiming that Lib Dem candidates can't win and any vote for a Lib Dem candidate is as good as a vote for a Tory (American third-party supporters will recognize this argument), so the Lib Dems have been very vocal when bookmakers have given them good odds of success.

An interesting bit of bandwagon propaganda . . . but could you imagine an American politician doing the same thing?

Greece Slips Away? And Other Volcano Craziness

Thanks to the eruption of a volcano in Iceland, Nana and I have been in travel limbo for almost a week now, and have resigned ourselves to not knowing before Friday morning whether or not we'll be headed off to Athens that afternoon. But compared to a lot of other travelers, we have it easy: we're at home, and since we're planning on staying with a friend in Athens, we have nothing to lose if our flight is canceled (in the EU, if your flight's canceled, you're entitled to a refund).

Anyway, Nana and I weren't sure if our friends and family across the pond were following the story, so I thought I'd round up a few links on the biggest aviation shutdown in European history.

-Latest from the BBC (with a bunch of further links in the sidebar)
-British Navy plans to repatriate stranded Brits.
-Slate.com on the long-term geopolitical effects.

Long story short, this thing is a huge deal, and there's the chance that continued eruptions in Iceland could make air travel within Europe touch-and-go for months (though intercontinental flights, especially transatlantic flights, should be less of a problem).

Of course, as Nana notes, there is a bright side in the potential for a zeppelin renaissance! (Complete with steampunk styling, we can only hope.)

Bye, bye British Internet

Sorry to be a bit of a downer today, but when you're a book history dweeb living in the UK, and Parliament drastically changes the course of media history in one fell swoop, it's hard not to pipe up.

The skinny: in the rushed run-up to a general election, the UK Parliament just passed the "Digital Economy Bill," an absolute goat-rope bit of legislation that essentially gives copyright owners the power to ban households from the internet with little or no burden of proof. Currently, copyright owners can already blackmail consumers with spurious lawsuits and indiscriminate takedown notices. Now, they can ramp their blackmail up with the threat of revoking your citizenship in the digital world.

Chalk this up as reason #2 why I'm glad I'm leaving in August.

(Reason #1 = more and better jobs elsewhere.)

What's even more disappointing is that the EU Parliament recently stepped back from similar regulations, and over the last few weeks it looked like the UK's Digital Economy Bill might go down in flames.

In other news, this does mean that the US gets to give up the title of "Most Draconian Copyright Regime" for at least a little while, until our Congrescritters catch up with their brethren from across the pond.

You can read more on BoingBoing and the Telegraph.