Generalising

The lowest vote share a party has taken in a general election and still held a majority is 38% – the Conservatives in 1923. Labour formed a minority government in 1929 on the back of 37.1% of the vote share; and a minority government again in February 1974 on the back of 37.2% of the vote. …35.3%, in 2005. Goodness, do I feel a bit silly for missing that one – thanks cim for spotting it.

It’s likely that whatever result we get on Thursday, we’re going to break that record; barring a sudden Conservative surge, a hypothetical narrow-majority government will have the lowest share of the electorate’s support any majority government has ever had. A minority Conservative government – if the Lib Dems pass up coalition – would quite possibly, again, have the lowest level of support recorded for a sole party in power.

Reassessing: on current polling, it’s likely the Conservatives will either form a majority government on slightly above the 2005 vote-share, or potentially a minority government – if a Lib-Lab coalition fails – on slightly below it. Not the best of omens for making sweeping changes, but it’s remarkable to see the dramatic difference – in seat numbers and in general perceptions of strength – between what the Conservatives would get with 36% tomorrow, and what Labout got with 36% half a decade ago.

From the Guardian, musing on the handy symbolism of coalition colours:

It’s maybe worth noting that, in the international nautical code, a striped blue-and-yellow flag means “I require a pilot”; two red and yellow triangles, “man overboard”.

Why stop there? There’s a whole alphabet of symbolism:

• A large blue centre with yellow lurking around the edges: “Keep clear of me; I am manoeuvering with difficulty”.

• Equal blue and red (!): “I am altering my course to starboard”.
• Equal yellow and blue: “I wish to communicate with you.”
• Red cross on yellow: “The way is off my ship” – I am not moving and you may pass safely.
• Red and yellow stripes, closely mingled: “I am dragging my anchor.”

The jokes write themselves, really – especially the first and last ones.

It doesn’t just work for coalitions, either: solid red with a swallowtail indicates “I am taking in, or discharging, or carrying dangerous goods”. There is no solid blue flag – presumably it doesn’t show up well at sea – but the various blue-and-white permutations are rather unfortunate. A blue square on a white field indicates “I am moving backwards”, whilst a white stripe over blue is “I am leaking dangerous cargo” or, indeed, “I am on fire”. White and blue checked is simply “negative”, and a blue cross on white is, appropriately, “Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals”. Red surrounded by blue is, fittingly, “I require medical assistance”.

The Lib Dems come out perhaps the best of a bad bunch – solid yellow indicates that “my vessel is free of disease and I request permission to enter harbour”.

Of course, combinations of flags could mean things as well. A Lab-Lib coalition might reasonably be represented by BO or BR – red dominant over yellow – representing, respectively, “We are going to jump by parachute” and “I require a helicopter urgently”. Maybe it’s a fairer coalition – OR, a bit more evenly split, means “I have struck a mine”… and reversed, it’s “My propeller shaft is broken”.

Perhaps, on the whole, this is something that does not bear looking into too closely.

From the Guardian:

Last weekend The Observer revealed that Philippa Stroud, the head of a thinktank set up by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith (the Centre for Social Justice), and the Conservative candidate for Sutton and Cheam, has been trying to drive demons out of lesbians, gay men and transsexuals. (…)

Question one: Why hasn’t Cameron asked for Stroud to be deselected and distanced himself from her thinktank?

Last week, the Tory leader said that he decided to suspend Philip Lardner, the Conservative candidate for North Ayrshire and Arra, “within minutes” for writing on his website that he thought homosexuality was “not normal”. Lardner also opined that “most people” consider homosexuality to be “somewhere between unfortunate and simply wrong”. A hate-soaked, erroneous diatribe, but compared to Stroud he looks like Peter Tatchell. Why the discrepancy? How can abusing young people with extremist religious practices be less incriminating than words?

I fear the answer to that one is cynically pragmatic: the Conservative candidate in Sutton and Cheam needs a mere 3,000 votes to take the seat from the Lib Dems. (Electoral Calculus give her about a one in three chance)

Meanwhile, the erstwhile Conservative candidate in Ayrshire North would have needed to take about 11,000 votes from Labour – and not lose any to the SNP, who were neck and neck with him. (Electoral Calculus gives him about a one percent chance)

Far be it from me, of course, to say that whether or not David Cameron gets distressed by bigotry has anything at all to do with whether it’s likely to cost him an extra seat…

I think it’s immoral, I _know_ it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.

It’s illegal, see. It’s illegal because of International Copyright Law. This has initial caps so those of us who aren’t lawyers may sit back and go “oooh! ahhh!”, except, not. I could go into the whole doctrine of fair use, of parody, and could discuss the simple fact that copyright law is certainly not international – it’s different by jurisdiction, but I’m sure you knew that and, let’s be honest, I could probably write my entire thesis on the subject of fanfiction and the law and oh, look, OTW already have.

But, I don’t know, it just seems to me that Gabaldon’s major gaffe here is very much commercial. As someone comments on fandom_wank, what’s she gonna do? Chase down every instance of fanfic on the internet and thus implicitly condone the ones she misses? And of course, telling her fans, who buy her books, the fact of the wee stories they wrote on the internet makes her want to throw up is very sound commercial sense, oh wait I might be lying there.

Then there’s this:

While not all fan-fic is pornographic by any means, enough of it _is_ that it constitutes an aesthetic argument against the whole notion.

As I say, I’ve unwillingly read a certain amount of fan-fic involving my characters, and about three-quarters of it is graphic, badly-written (of the “his searing touch blazed its way up the silken skin of her thigh to the secret depths of her ecstasy” type) masturbatory fantasy. I mean….ick.

She said that. I mean, seriously, seriously, she actually said that.

From Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, pg. 237 [British edition]:

Percy’s own cold hand slid down between them, grasped him. Cold as the touch was, it seemed to burn. He felt the seam of his breeches give as Percy shoved them roughly done and wondered dimly what he would tell Tom. Then Percy’s prick rubbed hard against his own, stiff, hot, and he stopped thinking.

From pg. 294:

“Did you ever wonder what it’s like?” [Percy] asked suddenly. “To be flogged?”

Grey felt a clenching in his stomach, but answered honestly. “Yes. Now and then.” Once, at least.

Percy had been kneading one of the red baize bags, like a cat sharpening its claws. Now he let it fall to the floor, and took up the cat o’nine tails itself, a short handle with a cluster of leather cords. “Do you want to find out?” he said, very softly.

“What?” An extraordinary feeling ran through Grey, half-fear, half-excitement.

“Take off your coat,” Percy said, still softly.

I don’t, alas, have my copies of the other books, or I could treat you all to more in the way of sexual fantasy. Believe me, there’s more.

Also? She writes books, right. Enormous doorstops of books about Love! And Time-Travel! And Men In Kilts Called Jamie Fraser!

Poor, dear, Jamie McCrimmon. S’all I’m sayin’.

The Cabinet Secretary prepared a paper earlier in the year on the transition periods between governments, including the process for a hung parliament – it’s been published here.

The key quote is: “Where an election does not result in a clear majority for a single party, the incumbent Government remains in office unless and until the Prime Minister tenders his and the Government’s resignation to the Monarch. … As long as there is significant doubt whether the Government has the confidence of the House of Commons, it would be prudent for it to observe discretion about taking significant decisions, as per the preelection period. The normal and essential business of government at all levels, however, will need to be carried out.”

In other words: whatever happens, short of a clear majority, Brown remains in power until the dust settles.

As to just how the dust settles, this summary points out an interesting wrinkle: the Lib Dems have a system in place to control how a coalition is decided upon. Clegg would need the explicit support of three-quarters of the MPs and of the party executive; failing that, he could appeal to a special conference, and need a two-thirds majority there; failing that, he could take it to a ballot of all party members. I can’t see it ever dragging on that long, but it is interesting to know that it’s not simply a matter of the party heads making a decision and then moving swiftly on to government.

A graffitied campaign sign spotted whilst cycling to work this morning:

Oddly enough, I think this is the first graffitied poster I’ve actually seen this time around. Perhaps Oxford has a more consensual approach to campaigning…

This one is more for my reference than an actual recipe, but. Some months ago Andrew’s grandmother very patiently taught me how to whip cream. (After expressing mild astonishment that I didn’t even know you could whip cream. I don’t even know what I thought. Maybe one udder full-fat, one skimmed, one whipped?)

Anyway, I’ve been waiting to have a go at it myself. And it appears, contrary to every recipe on the internet, it is not that hard to whip cream through trial and error. I bought ordinary double cream, fished out my flatmate’s very nice Ikea whisk, and whisked. And whisked, and whisked, and whisked, and whisked. And got bored, and switched to a fork and took the bowl through to watch ten minutes of Deep Space Nine.

Nothing doing. I changed back to the whisk – apparently, you cannot do it with a fork, but you can do it without an electric mixer. Within about thirty seconds, it had turned pleasantly solid and fluffly. I chopped some strawberries into it, and they aren’t very nice – it’s only April, so they’re imported and a little tasteless, even though it was such a sunny day they were half price – but I am ridiculously pleased with myself.

That is all. Next time I will do it with someone else in the house – Andrew is away – so I am not loser girl eating her way through an entire bowl of whipped cream all by herself.

Oh my god. Remember I said I was slow-roasting tomatoes? Well, today I had the afternoon off school and resolved to try it.

Oh, oh my god. I had no idea how this was going to work, but the tomatoes just came out of the oven and they taste like…. well, the original author described them as “twenty feet tall and made of sunlight”. The taste is indescribable: sort of sweet, sort of sour, sort of like the best pizza you ever had, sort of like dessert and somehow still savoury. It’s utterly delicious.

I altered the recipe slightly, as expected: my tomatoes took not quite six hours, not the recommended seven, and that includes twenty minutes earlier when my flatmate wanted the oven for a pizza. (I suspect this shorter time is because it’s a fan oven, and obviously all ovens are different, etc.) Despite the ridiculously long cooking time, they’re very simple: ten minutes’ preparation time, maximum, and although you should check them every so often just to check they’re not turning into little red leather scraps, but essentially it’s easy peasy.

I have this feeling I’m just going to eat them out of the jar, rather than use them in actual food, and that they might be gone tomorrow. I had no idea how much to start with, so guessed 750g of baby plum tomatoes: this has yielded one not-very-large jar (that is already looking depleted, sigh).

Mmm. Tastes like summer. And speaking of summer, it’s coming; the birds are singing, the glass is green, I’m drinking smoothie out of a wine glass and my landlord’s cat has just bounced through the window. Life’s good.

Via BBC: Could we live without flights?

I love the image at the top of this article. No, I really do; it’s gorgeously windswept, it reminds me of Shetland and other places marked by great distance. It’s an oddly bittersweet image, I think, but the article tends more to the sweet. It concludes that Britain would suffer in a world without air travel – it would suffer in terms of its tourism, food and business – but not as much as you might think. Which is interesting: it’s certainly interesting to learn that, for example, most of the tourism revenue in the UK comes from domestic holidaymakers, even if they don’t make up the bulk of the tourists, and for another example, that most of Britain’s food, even its fruit and vegetables, comes by ship, with figures of one and two percent given for the proportion of British food that is actually flown in.

But it’s a little unforgivable to then move on to the topic of people living near airports now getting more sleep, and conclude that everything in the garden is lovelier than expected in the post-aviation world. What about the people who didn’t arrive here head-first? If there were no more air travel, how could I ever go home – how could I ever attend a family wedding or visit a new baby or take my grandfather out for tea? How could you live in a world that had become so much more frightening, so much more implacably, devastatingly large overnight?

And more than that: we wouldn’t go anywhere, and the world wouldn’t come to us. Part of the reason Britain is not all-white, all-homogenous is air travel – people come, and work and dance and live and cook in new ways – and you can imagine that stopping, peeling away in layers from life as we know it until, as the BBC article notes, without even realising the implications, it’s 1950. Flying is wonderful, and it’s not just because of mangoes in supermarkets. It’s the reason there are people to buy them.

Liberal Conspiracy, I’ve noticed, are quoting the YouGov polling figures in full – not just the headline percentages, but some of the subsidiary questions. (14/4; 18/4).

The one that interests me is the “likelihood to vote” question. Last week, 65% of those polled said they were “absolutely certain” to vote; this week, 68%. Now, these percentages are probably overoptomistic – people do like sounding politically involved and keen when asked questions, and there are of course no shortage of people who intend to vote, but get stuck in traffic coming home from work, or come down with the flu, or simply forget.

If we assume everyone overestimates their willingness to vote by ~10%, then we’re looking at an expected turnout of 75-78%. (If we assume they overestimate by ~20%, then we’re looking at an expected turnout of 66-68% – less remarkable, but still better than recent standards)

I wonder if we have the polling likelihood question from previous years, to compare the actual result and see what our modifier should be…

(Also: it’s interesting to see the likelihood of voting ticking up along with the recent swing to the Lib Dems. Cause or effect?)