Mathematics

What would Parliament under STV look like?

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This image shows what an STV-elected House of Commons would look like.

As I said in my first posts, I am a believer in the [[Single Transferable Vote]]: it devolves power to the people, is preferential, and is proportional. I’m voting for AV as it does the first two, but I really want the third as well. But we can’t win them all. Indeed, as recent polls show, the No campaign — which has been running mostly on the “you’re too thick to count to three” message — may scupper the chances for even AV.

The Electoral Reform Society did some research into this, but I found the results somewhat… strange. In Brighton, which has a strong Green Party presence, no Green candidate was elected under the ERS’s calculations. So I decided for myself, in my free time, to do a simulation for myself.

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Anthropomorphic climate change and the 1998 myth

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As someone who goes through politics news often, the subject of climate change comes up quite often: how bad it is, does the data fit, and so forth. But even on a story about the Liberal Democrats as a whole, some people, often right-wing, will attack the party on its green credentials. This stems from a belief in climate change is a “hoax” of sorts. Like this comment on a Telegraph article:

Yeah, Chris Hunhe off to Cancun, tilting at windmills, saving the planet.
Didn’t you know that we’ve had no warming since about 1998?
The Man-Made global warming idea is just a scam.
And you wonder why the LibDems are held in contempt.

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