This is an amazing animation of a short talk by David Harvey, on the theme of “What Next After Capitalism”.

H/T Kester Brewin.

Here’s one way to look at the results from the General Election:

Doesn’t look that equitable. Not just to the Lib Dems, but also to those parties who are missed off entirely, like UKIP.

Here’s a different view which just focuses on those parties who got 1% or more of the vote:

This again shows the Conservatives and Labour benefitting, and the Lib Dems, Greens, UKIP and BNP all losing out.

Whilst First Past The Post is easy to understand and links very nicely to local boundaries, this is clearly a long way from being entirely fair.

But this raises two questions:

1. Would a balanced parliament really hurt us?

BBC’s news site has an interesting set of Lessons from New Zealand in art of coalition building. They quote the Director of the Institute of Policy Studies as saying:
“We’ve managed perfectly well with our new electoral system, and many would say that it’s been an advantage to have that system because it has generated a better policy process, a more representative parliament and probably better policy outcomes …”

2. What to replace First Past The Post with?

There are lots of forms of PR, and they will create different outcomes. Since 1996, NZ have used a form of PR called Mixed Member Proportional system (MMP). In the UK it tends to be known as Additional Member System (AMS). According to Wikipedia’s entry on MMP, this is what the Jenkins Commission recommended for the UK some time back. And it’s already used for elections to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and the London Assembly. It’s also used for elections to Germany’s federal parliament.

So maybe it’s a fairly straightfoward choice after all?

I regularly get frustrated with the poor quality of mass-media news. They seem to continually go for the easy surface stories, rather than the deeper stories that really chart what’s going on.

Stocki gives a recent example of this from his own experience in NI. He concludes:

the Press do not use the power of their prophetic potential but instead fall for sensationalising news that they could actually play their part in eliminating.

So hooray for the exceptions, like the BBC journalist Mark Easton’s who writes excellent longer-term analysis on his blog.

ITV are soliciting questions for Thursday’s Leaders debate … I’ve just used this simple tool to send my questions to the organisers … you should too!

Whilst driving around on holiday we heard an interesting episode of Radio 4′s Thinking Allowed (or is it Thinking Aloud?). It explored how UK society is working out how to have various faith communities living alongside ones of no faith, despite the strident claims of the New Atheists (like Dawkins, Atkins and Dennett) that religion would be dead by now. (Now available to download.)

The discussion of religion by these Atheists always feels shrill and unrealistic to me, and I doubt they convert many believers to their view. I suspect this is partly because they don’t understand its true nature, never having properly seen “it from the inside”. (Attending regular “acts of worship” at a school is absolutely no stand-in for the experience of a believer.)

One of the guests, the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan pointed out that the atheists argue for a secular state, but are wrong to assume that this means one without religions. Secularism has historically been about the separation of government from any particular faith. This allows for religious freedom, rather than forcing all citizens into believing in no God or a particular one, and is surely the more helpful (not to mention necessary) way forward in the challenges of this age.

(But this always reminds of something I find paradoxical. The founding fathers of the USA based the constitution in part around this secular split, whereas the mother country had then (and still does today) elements of religion embedded in the laws and practices of the country. So why is it that religion plays a much prominent role in public life in America than in Britain?)

Some of the guests usefully explored the way the atheists don’t understand religion, showing that they often miss its community aspects. Particularly where a faith group is in a minority in a place, the community aspects can be as strong as the faith itself.

Sometimes the community can be so strong as to require separation from people who aren’t in that same ‘tribe’. This is largely true of Hassidic Jews, some Christian groups such as Plymouth Brethren, and also strains of Islam (here I didn’t catch the group name). One mark of such groups is that they tend to control education of the young to avoid them learning about other religions or points of view (such as we see in some Christian communities in America over human origins). This, Rebecca Goldstein helpfully defined, is what is religious fandamentalism, not just holding strongly to religious faith and/or practice.

So, the general election was only announced yesterday, but I’ve already had two emails about it. Rather telling or advising me who to vote for, they were reminding me what questions I should be asking the candidates.

I wonder just how many other e-things I’m going to get in the next 4 weeks?

First up, enjoy this very clever comment on the BNP, by errr Nick Griffin himself at Question Time:

And then if you fancy doing something similar yourself try Speechbreaker, using material from the party conferences.

This is amazing: in one picture the world’s multi-billion-$ income, gifts and spending. Puts wars, education, and bailouts into uncomfortable perspective … and reminds me to pray more for Godly Wisdom for our leaders …

Go see the Billion Dollar Gram:

Five months late, but this interview between the FT and Bono ahead of the UN sessions reviewing progress on the Millennium Development Goals, is interesting if only for this quote:

AB: What will you actually be doing in the days ahead?

Bono: A sleepless cocktail of rabble-rousing, meetings with politicians, chief executives, faith leaders and NGOs. People such as Nicolas Sarkozy, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania and Gordon Brown.

AB: What exactly happens in the meetings you have with these world leaders?

Bono: Judo in a suit.

No, seriously, this and the set of blog posts are an encouraging and well-written read, if rather full of statistics.