Democracy - whats the point?

I spoke to a mate of mine the other day and asked him who he voted for in the European elections a few weeks ago. "I don't vote" was his defiant response, as if it was his way of protesting that he believed it didn't make any difference who he voted for.

It's quite sad that in Great Britain only 50% of the population - plus or minus 10% - can be bothered to vote; be it European elections, local elections or even general elections. In the recent European elections it was approximately 40% and in the last general election it was approximately 60%.

Taking the general election as an example: over 20 million people didn't vote.

Why?

Disillusionment?
Protest?
Main parties all have the same policies?
Assumption that Labour would get a majority anyway?

Personally I believe, like my friend said, it's because people feel their vote doesn't really count. What difference will it make to them? Will their lives improve, degrade or stay the same? When the Government says it's pumping money into something, who notices? Who benefits?

I've been thinking about this over these past few weeks as the misdemeanours of various MPs have become apparent thanks to the Telegraph and it's struck me that in the UK we really don't have a proper democracy in the true sense that the people have the power.

Does every vote count in a general election? The answer is it doesn't, due to the First Past the Post system. Let me give a quick example.

In a constituency of 24,001 people, 12001 people vote Labour and 12000 vote Conservative. Labour wins, the Conservative votes are discarded. Now, assume that the first 12001 people that went to the ballot box all ticked Labour candidates. At this point, it really doesn't matter who the other 12000 people vote for because Labour has already won. Therefore it can be said that their votes did not count.

Yes, this can work to the advantage of any party and you could say where one party gains in one place another gains in another place, so it's swings and roundabouts. It's still not a truly democratic and fair system though, because it can be manipulated. If there are two constituencies next to each other whereby one is traditionally weak and one is strong in terms of a party's domination of the vote, parties can orchestrate some voters from the strong constituency to vote in the weak one.

For the past 12 years we've been in a position where Labour, who got only 3% more of the total vote share than the Conservatives in the 2005 general election, have had a huge majority in the House of Commons and therefore you can say that all the other parties and all the other votes were irrelevant.

The result of first past the post is that representation in the House of Commons does not reflect the actual vote. You could have come second or third in the overall vote share yet still end up dominating the House of Commons because you won more constituencies.

I don't believe it's a great system, I don't believe it promotes democracy and lately with Labour's domination in the House of Commons it has given the Prime Minister an almost presidential role, though Mr Brown is falling from this pedestal quite rapidly (if he ever really climbed on to it in the first place).

So what do we need to sort it out?

Michael Jackson coming back from the dead to sing us all into the sunlight?

Kim Jong Il to nuke us into oblivion?

The other popular alternative to first past the post is proportional representation which shares the seats in the House of Commons proportionally to the number of votes for each party.

This means that every vote counts so radical parties, racist parties, one-policy parties and lots of independents will get seats there, and the domination of the big two parties will be lessened.

It sounds good on paper, but in practise it means that anything passing through the House of Commons would be voted on by these minority parties and their votes could make or break the outcome.

Some say that's a good thing, and some don't. The Government is against it: they say it would be a pointless coalition of a large number of small parties that never got anything done. Whilst that might be correct, it would in my view still be more representative than the current system.

It's not something I believe will happen unless the voting figures drop even more than they have already. I do believe that when the Prime Minister calls the next election, we will see a rise in voting simply to get him out but it could easily go the other way.

There can't be many people that still won't vote Conservative "because Thatcher closed the mines", can there?

Vive la Legislation

Lord Steve Carter and Ben Bradshaw have revealed their plans for "Digital Britain".

• Application of a £6 per year phone line tax to fund the 2MBit broadband expansion into rich suburbs.

• ISPs are forced to hand over customer details on request to Ofcom which can be dished out to media conglomerates so they can monitor and sue you more easily.

• All peer to peer is illegal, full stop and Ofcom is tasked with blocking it.

• "Online piracy is wrong" and "unacceptable", and anyone caught "downloading illegally" will be shot at dawn.
  

Superb. Another double helping of spin complete with the bitter aftertaste of legislation. I thought this report was supposed to take us forward. Taxing everyone to pay for old copper wire technology to be rolled out whilst everyone else on the planet is rolling out fibre is a sure fire winner!

If you check out what Ben Bradshaw said in the Commons today, it's clear he was just reading his script and had no idea what on earth he was talking about. Bullshitting it about fibre rollout when it's not even on the radar and there is no incentive for any company to take a lead on it.

I was under the assumption this report might be a really important step in making Britain a digital leader. In fact, having read the report, all it proposes is a new tax and a few analyses. No doubt incorporating more and more reports from Lord Snooty, more taxes and even more legislation.

So, they intend to eradicate their perception of online piracy by providing Ofcom with powers to obtain your personal data from ISPs to give to third parties so they can sue you. Currently this cannot happen due to the Data Protection Act. I really am against this action, as I believe most ISPs are. It's just another step to policing the internet and is a burden they do not want.

We've had Feargal Sharkey on again, totally missing the point and pushing his own agenda to make himself more money from his single hit song. Yes, he is chief executive of British Music Rights: another self serving music lobby group that labels all music downloaders as thieves.

He obviously has no idea of reality when he talks about a small number of people not being happy about this. Nobody is happy about it, because its the music industry pressuring the Government to push legislation through to support their failed business model. We don't need these aging, overgrown, monolithic music companies any more given the other means of distribution for music.

Apparently piracy in the UK costs music companies £175 million. The Government has already handed banks hundreds of billions, so why doesn't he just subsidise the music industry like he does for manufacturing, farming, and so on.

“If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And If it stops moving, subsidise it." - Ronald Reagan

If you download music or movies, the BPI try and convince you that you are wrong, that you are the problem and that you are a criminal. You've no doubt seen the "Knock off Nigel" adverts and associated parodies: likening people that download a few tunes to someone that would rob their grandmother is just bizarre and laughable. It also implies that there's something wrong with doing things on the cheap: something I would vehemently disagree with.

The Government reckon that their measures will reduce "illegal downloading" by 80%, but there is no such thing as illegal downloading. It's like labelling people that buy fake brand name clothes as criminals. They're not. The crime is in the distribution: in the case of file sharing it's the making available of contents and not the downloading of it. For those that use peer to peer, the technology relies on sharing and most peer to peer clients enable sharing by default.

I am sick of people like Feargal Sharkey and BPI boss Geoff Taylor labelling internet users as criminals for downloading something that was available online. I am sick of the Government pandering to these industries. Unfortunately the Government and media lobbies are so far behind on all this, that by the time they legislate for Bittorrent, it'll be yesterday's technology anyway.

I also feel some sympathy for the many businesses that distribute their software and updates using Bittorrent, because they will have to go back to old style leased line technology to provide this to their customers if the Government decide to force ISPs to block it.

I personally believe that these draconian measures will simply benefit other more liberal countries with a more modern attitude to business. Should they ban and block Bittorrent, peer to peer users from the UK will purchase remote servers hosted there in order to operate peer to peer software under different legislation. They will then use a virtual private networking connection in order to download their content from it. In fact, this already happens and is something I certainly would consider if the UK Government bans peer to peer as it suggested in the Commons today.

They should take a look at the case of Comcast in the USA. They blocked Bittorrent and ended up being sued because of it. They lost and the FCC forced them to stop it.

Maybe some day once someone in power actually thinks for themselves and has a background in the subject (rather than getting all their opinions from a board of self serving quango sitters) they will make progressive legislation to improve everything for everyone. This smokescreen only benefits music companies. Everyone else gets taxed or sued.

Vive la Revolution?

So, Lord Carter today will be announcing a £3billion "Digital Britain" project for delivering broadband internet to every home in the UK as well as plans for "combatting" piracy.

Their benchmark for bandwidth is 2Mbit which, yes, compared to dialup is fast but compared to all broadband connections in the UK at the moment is the slowest and is certainly not a speed that will provide good content delivery for much longer than a couple of years.

In some countries such as Sweden and South Korea, the norm is 100MBit with some homes able to have 1000MBit. Investment was placed in better, future proof technology and they are benefitting from the foresight of their Governments by having the means to deliver high speed data into almost any home.

In the UK we are stuck with DSL: if you can get a BT telephone line - which everywhere other than extreme rural cases can - the chances are you can easily get 2MBit already and have been able to for 4 or 5 years. Standard broadband speeds in the UK are between 8 and 20MBit depending on what you want to pay for. Yes, there are a few rural villages that consist of a few giant farmhouses, mansions and barn conversions that are so far away from urbanisation that they can only get dialup, but having seen some sob stories from these people about it my conclusion was that they probably have enough money to buy the entire internet.

So where's the story?

The story, I believe, is that the "broadband in every home" chunk of the forthcoming statement is a whitewash for the underlying business deal that I suspect has occurred between the music industry lobby groups and the Government in relation to the other part of the story.

Remember I said it would cost £3billion for the broadband project? Well, that money has not been allocated by the Government, which means somebody else is paying for it and I believe it's the music industry.

But what would be in it for the music industry? Simple really, the license to continue to bully people into believing that downloading a few tunes turns them into a criminal with the percieved backing of the Government and Police.

I would even go further and suggest that these internet connections that the Government is wanting to put into homes would come with a caveat - that the music industry can monitor them and can freely acquire personal details and surfing habits of users in order to build a case against them.

Currently this isn't possible, because ISPs are not allowed to disclose details of their customers due to the Data Protection Act. Most of them do not want to either. The only reason anyone would even want to pay for a premium 20 or 50 Megabit connection is to download movies, music and games and if ISPs decided to hound them about it, they'd either leave or cut their subscription to a cheaper one.

Richard Branson's Virgin Media is "leading the way" on this so called anti piracy jaunt. Given their love affair with the BPI I was not shocked to hear that they are now promising to disconnect people that they percieve to be downloading copyrighted content.

We already know that the BPI crawls torrent sites, tries to download complete files from people and then sends a threat to Virgin who pass it on to their customer. I have had one myself, and due to my own anger at that and Virgin Media's throttling policy I am now an O2 Broadband customer. I suspect this is how Virgin will continue to determine someone that is using their network for distribution of copyrighted content, but given their acceptance of spying services such as Phorm I would not be surpised if their statement that they will not spy on users is a complete lie.

In fact, Virgin said they wouldn't disconnect users for file sharing less than a year ago but a quick wave of the wallet from Universal and they have gone back on that promise.

Thankfully they are the only ISP as yet that is persecuting its users in this way and actually there are plenty of superior ISPs in terms of performance these days. When I phoned them to cancel I was told all other ISPs throttle like they do and they started offering TV packages and so on. I was leaving anyway.

As I said I am with O2 Broadband (also known as Bethere/Telefonica) now. I was told I'd get 13MBit down my phone line, and I get 13MBit so I am happy about that. I got about 14MBit with my 20MBit Virgin cable line. The big difference is that after 30 minutes of downloading on Virgin, they cut the bandwidth by 75% for the next five hours, completely nullifying the point of having a high speed "unlimited" connection.

Working it out, it appears that in any 5 and a half hour time bracket on Virgin Media, I was able to download about 10GB. 3GB in the first 30-40 mins and the rest across the next 5 hours. On O2 Broadband I can download 26GB in that time and the best bit is I'm paying four times less for it than I was for Virgin Media. Winner!

Drink on the brink

My idea of binge drinking is going to a pub one or two days a week and drinking 8 or 9 alcoholic drinks. I don't know what the Government's idea of it is but today it's rumoured that in the upcoming budget there will be a tax hike on beer, wine and other common alcoholic drinks.

Of course, it's not a straightforward tax on these drinks. Its a tax that they claim will stop binge drinking which apparently is the root of all evil at the moment.

I entirely disagree with that. According to the Government, I am a binge drinker. So are everybody that I know. Other than being on the PC too much, I'm not antisocial. I don't commit crimes. I don't inflict myself on other people. I'm not a lout.

To be honest I can't think of the reason the Government has a bee in it's bonnet about binge drinking. It makes them a bucket load of tax revenue and increasing tax on alcohol will simply make the Government get more tax. A no-brainer really. Social drinkers like most people will continue to go to the pub on a Friday/Saturday night, and binge drinkers/alcoholics will not be affected.

They might suggest that a lot of crime is caused by alcohol fuelled thugs and they are probably right. But even after the tax increases I will still be able to walk into an off licence and walk out with a 3 litre bottle of strong cider for about £1.50. I don't think thugs are buying their alcohol in pubs, bars or nightclubs: you can get 6 litres of cider for the price of a bottle of beer in a nightclub.

A thug will be antisocial whether drunk or sober. Alcohol may cause the thug to go to extremes, but people don't suddenly become violent thugs because they have a couple of beers on a Friday night. They become violent thugs because they skipped school, probably have a single parent, have no prospects and have nothing to lose. I've said it before, but it's the Jeremy Kyle Generation.

I get the impression that the Government either has no idea what goes on, or they invent scenarios to which they refer to when ramming taxes up on things. Like petrol and other fuel and road taxes are being rammed up in the name of something that doesn't exist (climate change). Guns were banned after a lunatic shot up a school in Dunblane, causing gun clubs to be closed and all legal guns to be handed in. Illegal guns, of course, were not handed in and have become massively more common since and crimes involving guns have increased.

Local taxes have increased hugely to pay for services like the Police who don't seem to be arresting any real criminals any more, and to pay for rubbish collection which has gone from weekly to fortnightly and you now have to sort your own rubbish for recycling.

Taxing booze on the basis that thugs drink is just another farce. It simply means they will be even more angry and frustrated because their booze is more expensive.

So they will have to steal more to pay for it.

Brown and Out

There's a brand new Labour reform on the agenda this week, publicised by pensions thief Gordon Brown today. Apparently doctors are going to monitor people that have certain hereditary illnesses in their family to catch any warning signs that they may also be affected by these conditions.

Shame they've been doing it for ages isn't it? It seems the story of Labour is to keep reinventing old policies simply by claiming they are new.