Archive | February 2020

Peterloo 200: The Path to Proportional Representation

Feb21

Published by Make Votes Matter and the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, Peterloo 200: The Path to Proportional Representation is a short report making the case for adopting PR in the UK.

The 200 year anniversary of the Peterloo massacre was in 2019. This report was published to highlight that the fight for democracy in the UK has a long history and is far from over.

The report covers the democratic deficit inherent in First Past the Post (FPTP) systems. Your vote may not count at all in a safe seat and the system incentivizes parties to spend nothing on many voters but loads on swing voters in marginal seats. What I didn’t quite realise was how few marginal seats there are, and therefore how few voters are really of interest to parties.

In addition to the democratic case for PR, the report covers a number of other reasons why PR is a better system for most people. Countries with proportional representation have greater economic equality, tend to elect governments that act in the interests of the majority (the real majority, not just a small section of the largest minority), are able to invest in longer term solutions to societal problems because there is much less policy reversal, are more stable societies, and less likely to go to war.

Lastly Peterloo 200 addresses some of the myths about PR, like that countries with coalitions have more elections and are unstable (they don’t, they aren’t) and that the referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) system means that UK voters don’t want PR (AV is not a form of proportional representation).

It’s aimed squarely at Labour members and voters but is packed full of research and facts and is very digestible. Before I read it, I thought that PR was a good idea but didn’t feel that strongly about it. Now, I am convinced this is the way forward.

 

The Balkans 1804-1999 Nationalism, War and the Great Powers

Feb16

Misha Glenny’s The Balkans has been my breakfast book for the last year. Breakfast books are the many large, heavy books I have on my shelf that I can’t commute with so they get read in twenty minutes stints while I have breakfast. Sometimes twenty minutes is enough time to read a reasonable chunk. Other times, when a book is densely packed with facts and ideas, then twenty minutes gets me about five pages. If I’m lucky and really paying attention. The Balkans was very much the latter.

The book is very insightful. Glenny has spent much of his career as a journalist working in the Balkans and is most knowledgeable. The structure of the book is chronological, taking a span of years and addressing what is happening in each of the areas of the Balkans. I hesitate to say countries because, although nationalism has been a driving force behind much of the conflict in this part of the world, the experience of colonialism over this period has meant that the areas known as Bulgaria or Greece or Albania or Serbia (or others) have grown larger and smaller at various times. What becomes evident because of the structure of the book is the near constant experience of war for people living in the Balkans between the mid-19th century and the 1950s. The social and psychological legacy of that is appalling.

Glenny’s lens is one of imperialism. The start of the period he covers is the wane of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. The ways in which they sought to undermine each other or to retain power at the edges of their influence had a destructive effect on the peoples of the Balkans. Interference from the other great powers, Britain, France and Russia, made things generally worse. The great powers only sought to extract the wealth of the area as they did all around the world. Nazi Germany’s interest in the region was marginally more positive in that it had an economically beneficial impact, but following classic colonial policy agriculture was encouraged and manufacturing denied. When the Balkans (mostly) become part of the Soviet Union, it looks much like more imperialism to Glenny. The Balkan countries are treated as bread baskets for Russia and state terror follows a similar pattern to that of earlier empires.

Only a handful of pages at the end are devoted to the events in Yugoslavia after the fall of the Iron Curtain, which was a little disappointing (but it seems Glenny has written more elsewhere on the subject) but the threads of history and the interference of the great powers (preferring to call themselves the international community now but still playing the same game of putting their strategic interests over the lives of ordinary people) are visible.

This was a compelling and often disturbing read that inspires me to learn more about the Balkans. I remain convinced that nationalism is one of the stupidest ideas humanity has ever had. And there’s some stiff competition.

 

The Tiger and the Wolf

Feb5

Adrian Tchaikovsky is fast becoming my favourite author. In The Tiger and the Wolf, the first book of the Echoes of the Fall series, Maniye is a child born to two tribes and beloved of neither of them. In this world, all humans have a totem animal and can shift into that shape whenever they like. Some people are born to parents of different tribes and when they hit puberty have to choose one shape over the other. Maniye can’t choose. She tries to choose the Wolf because that is the tribe she was raised in, and she nearly succeeds, but when she passes the trial she learns her father sees her as his pawn in his war against the Tiger. Maniye flees. She finds the Tiger people, and her mother, whom she believed dead, but realises they are as cruel as the Wolf and she is no more accepted there than she had been in the Wolf tribe.

Most of the novel is a chase, with both the Tiger and the Wolf seeking to capture Maniye and her learning to use both shapes to evade them. Over time the souls within her war with each other and her ability to shift shapes becomes unstable. The wolf and the tiger cannot co-exist. In escaping, Maniye has met people from other tribes, some of which have Champion forms as well as their tribe totem. With the help of a priest of the Serpent, Maniye goes in search of a totem strong enough to hold the tiger and the wolf in check.

Over and above the chase story and Maniye’s coming of age story, The Tiger and the Wolf is a story of a world under threat from a great peril. In the legends of the tribes there are tales of the Plague People and how the tribes fled from one land to this one to avoid destruction. Maniye meets many people on her travels because the priests of the tribes are gathering to share their portents. All understand that something terrible is coming. None know what it is.

I loved this. The writing is great and the worldbuilding is exceptional. It is pretty dark. Few of the characters have redeeming features, many of them are at the mercy of their family and tribe and not free to choose how to act. There are betrayals and reversals and deaths of characters that shouldn’t die. And there is an enormous world-destroying threat coming but the tribes are caught up in their local rivalries and politics to lift their heads up and take notice. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere.