Debating the Alternative Vote (AV) at the LSE

I find LSE events bit of a mixed bag but a debate on the Alternative Voted tempted me out for the evening. Or rather, to stay out, as I was spending the day doing bits and pieces in London anyway.

As with the recent debate at UCL, it was held in an impressive lecture theatre, this time it was the New Theatre in the East Building. A change for me as I'd previously only been to the Old Theatre and the Newer Theatre (real name the Sheikh Zayed Theatre).

I arrived just a little early so I sneaked in to the student bar, The 3 Tuns, to celebrate Paddy's Night with a £2 pint of Guinness, about half the usual Richmond price. That's what I call a good deal!

The debate took the usual format with two speakers each for and against the motion, Should we say Yes to AV?

In favour of the proposition were Katie Ghose, Chief Executive of the Electoral Reform Society, and Helen Margetts, Professor of Society and the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute.Opposing them were Mark Wallace, experienced political campaigner and former Campaign Director of the Tax Payers' Alliance, and James Forder, Fellow at Balliol College Oxford.

Our chairman for the evening was the LSE's Professor Simon Hix. More on him later.

With such a high-powered set of speakers I had high expectations for the debate.

These were soon dashed.

Katie Ghose opened the debate with the usual bland promises, such as AV would make MPs work harder, but with no evidence or even a reasonable hypothesis as to why this might be the case.

We also heard the old deceit about AV producing majority support for MPs.

In response, Mark Wallace, calmly and comprehensively demolished every pro-AV argument that we had heard and summed this up well by calling AV a false promise.

And that's the real problem. Lot's of people want AV for all sorts of reasons, like hard-working MPs, and they will all be disappointed if we get AV as it can deliver none of these.

Helen Margetts gave us a PowerPoint presentation that tried to explain why FPTP is no longer suitable and while there was some merit in that argument there was none in the subsequent claim that AV would fix the faults. For example, we will still have a high proportion of very safe and reasonably safe seats where MPs will have a "job for life".

My hero of the evening, James Forder, took an analytical fact-based view of AV's faults. He even used some of Helen Margetts' presentation to make his points, replacing her flawed reasoning with something logical.

Our chair became bit of a problem. Professor Simon Hix made it clear early on that he was for AV and he intervened in the debate on that side. I was seriously tempted to write to him complaining about his behaviour but I got my revenge when I found this video on YouTube, where, just a few months ago, he explains why AV is a poor substitute for FPTP.





Some other good points were made against AV during the debate.

AV would deliver beige MPs as all three main parties, already fairly similar, will move even closer into the safe territory in the middle, scared to offer views that could be considered extreme buy either Left or Right.

By treating all preferences equally AV tells us nothing about how voters actually feel. If I vote Green then Labour, is my Labour second-preference vote a strong left-wing vote or a tactical anti-right one?

The pro-AV vagueness aside, this was a good debate conducted in good spirit and was fair use of a spare evening.

That evening got even better when the No to AV camp won the debate on a show of hands at the end.

Clay Shirky's shaky launch of Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky has been making noticeable waves in the internet world since his 2008 book "Here Comes Everybody" and now he is making waves across London for the launch of his latest book "Cognitive Surplus". I joined in the wave at the LSE and was looking forward to hearing Clay give a longer talk than the ones I had heard at TED etc.

I had been to talks at the LSE before but this was my first time in the impressive New Academic Building. It lacks the character of the old building but it more than compensates with its comfort and facilities.

I went straight from work expecting there to be bit of a queue and was pleasantly surprised to be ushered in to a second row seat about half an hour before the talk began. An opportunity to read a little more Mark Twain.

After a brief introduction, Clay spoke for about half an hour opening with his theory on Cognitive Surplus using the Wikipedia story as an example.

Other stories followed on how the internet is enabling the motivation and time that people already had to create things of communal, public and civic value.

They were good stories and were well received by the (mostly student) audience but they were old stories familiar to those of us who have dabbled in web2.0 in recent years.

They were also disconnected stories and it was not at all clear what hypothesis they were trying to prove, if any.

New book, old stories, no insight.

Tim Harford entertains

I know of Tim Harford not from his column in the FT (which is the basis of his new book) but from the only mainstream programme that covers mathematics, More or Less on Radio 4.

An opportunity to see Tim speak at the LSE at a free public meeting seemed to good to miss, so I didn't.

You might have expected an economist speaking at an economics school to say quite a lot about economics but what we actually got was some pretty slight statistics on the subjects of happiness, dating and food and drink.

There was not much to challenge the grey cells but the talk we did get was well rehearsed, well delivered and entertaining enough to justify the time spent consuming it. If that has got you excited then you can listen to it here.