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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » MPs’ proxy voting can and should go further
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » MPs’ proxy voting can and should go further
Parliament took another small step towards the 21st Century last month, when it voted without opposition to allow MPs who are new parents to nominate a colleague to cast proxy votes on their behalf, meaning that they can more meaningfully take maternity or paternity leave without having to worry too much about the effect that doing so would have on the government’s majority.
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Not for some Remainers. And Brexit happens when they ignore that voice. Do I win the competition to get Brexit into the thread?
One MP voting for another is clearly not ideal and potentially open to abuse. It would have been better to leave the MP responsible for their own decision and allow them an absentee vote (which is effectively what is happening anyway, aside from the transfer in responsibility).
Ed Sec Hinds was recently given a big up by JRM, according to one pb poster.
The education secretary will promise to cut teachers' workload in an attempt to resolve a recruitment crisis in England's schools.
Damian Hinds will tell head teachers that there will be no more new changes to primary tests, GCSEs or A-levels.
For five successive years, recruitment targets for teaching have been missed
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-43345857
We did try to tell Gove's pb fan club that while he was arguing about the history syllabus with actual historians, he'd taken his eye off the ball. No-one was doing the day job so he left behind a shortage of teachers and a shortage of school places.
Interesting article, Mr. Herdson, but I vehemently disagree with one implication. The notion a parliament should be demographically representative of the electorate is daft. Do we want half of our legislators to have below average intelligence? Are there sufficient numbers of the obese to accurately represent modern Britain?
Err;I thought some at least of our posters thought that was already the case!
There is a considerable benefit to having a parliament that includes many voices from people with many different experiences. While we shouldn't fetishise, for example, a 50/50 male-female split, nor would it be healthy to have it 80/20, say.
https://twitter.com/sunpolitics/status/972366511229886464?s=21
I agree that appointing a deputy would be an inherently risky thing: there'd need to be clear and robust safeguards. That's why I suggested a confirmatory vote in the Commons and time-limits. But I've not given those things deep thought and I'm sure the safeguards could be improved upon.
Maybe two months before the exams start I would have the marking criteria, for example. Instead we have OFQUAL frantically rewriting it after they realised that their former chief was so thick she had actually made it easier to get a top grade than a pass.
And the thickhead in question is now head of OFSTED - a non-teacher and cataclysmically incompetent administrator. What could possibly go wrong?
A more general leave-of-absence rule is likely to be one of those things that sounds like a good idea in theory, but could work differently in practice as party management get involved in things. How would an independent MP be replaced, for example?
I absolutely do not buy the concept that demographic representation is good or bad in and of itself, and it is not something we should aim for. Merit should be the only factor. Politically correct box-ticking leads to idiots like Sayeeda "militant secularists" Warsi getting promoted beyond reason.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/26/technology/amazon-go-store/index.html
This was a motion passed by St Ives CLP and will be “put to the leadership”
Instead, Britain needs to give much greater incentives for employers to train staff, particularly those with lower levels of education. Governments of all stripes have tried solving inequality by bunging money at the poorest - and that’s no bad thing - but the best long term fix for the poorest is to make them more valuable. Helping them get more valuable skills would assist with that.
It’s crackpottery pure and simple.
Secondly, some very clever people are talking about this idea wrt AI.
It's more interesting that you think.
Except, of course, the average domme doesn't charge £10bn a year.
Putting together a pre-season ramble. I may have one more, depending how markets etc look ahead of the season's start, then it'll be the three articles per weekend format you all know and love/despise/ignore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Alba
Incidentally, pretty much all 1200 workers at the warehouse are East European, to the extent a Romanian asks him what an English bloke is doing working there.
Countries belonging to Nato don’t routinely put up a flag or Nato sign next to their national flag. Does that diminish them?
If the EU made a rule that only the EU flag could be flown when a member state’s PM went abroad, do you think that (a) countries like France would agree and (b) having the EU flag only would diminish or enhance a country’s stature?
a) point and laugh at St Ives CLP or
b) say, with a wink "Wait for the next Manifesto, comrades..."
For one thing, they are hardly infallible. Our local store has them (admittedly, it's a Morrisons), and tills are often out-of-order - very annoying when there's a queue. Or if you are buying a bottle of wine, and you have to wait for the one member of staff dealing with eight tills to come and do an age-check. Or worse, if it's alcohol or something else with a security tab that has to be taken away to be removed.
For another, it can make fraud and shoplifting easier.
And another: in our local store, it actually takes longer to purchase things early in the morning (say before 07.30) as they often do not have any non self-service tills open, and that makes things difficult if you are not just buying a pack of sandwiches and crisps.
Going into the personnel issues: AIUI staff are already fairly flexible; they do not always work on tills, and are often stocking shelves, moving baskets, dealing with customers etc at slack times. reducing the amount of staff reduces the amount available to do these tasks.
Some of these are implementation issues; however most are fundamental to such automated systems. This does not mean that they cannot be made to work; just that it is not simple, and often not to the customers' advantage.
(As an aside, a shop assistant in a local co-op told me that the most shoplifted items are alcohol and baby formula, often at the same time. I can only hope that they do not mix them.)
But if we do not tax robots, should we subsidise them instead?
Is Bill Gates suggesting we tax computers ?
Technological shifts and the impact on employment are clearly an issue that needs consideration. Increasing the running cost of (presumably) more productive capital is rarely the right answer
Or they like the idea.
We need a parliament filled with MPs who not only look after the interests of the group they belong in (or groups, if you believe in intersectionalism) , but who are able to balance them against the interests of others outside that group or groups.
Besides, automation increases productivity and productivity drives wages higher. The fabled mass unemployment is always predicted and never comes.
1. Insert card.
2. You are asked in the voice of an adenoidal teenager "How much?"
3. Hand appears out of "machine", proffering the amount required.
Vote winner!
When I used to have a vote (I was disenfranchized by the Labour Party because they suspected people like me might vote Tory) I had a proxy vote because risked taking too long to snail-mail my ballot to me in Japan. So the ballot would go to my brother, who would scan it and email it to me, and I'd make whatever mark on the ballot paper I wanted and email it back, and he'd attempt to reproduce it and return it. This was functionally identical to me sending a scan of the ballot directly back to the returning officer, except for the fallback position if I failed to return it, which would have been a no-vote, as opposed to the paper being returned marked in some way by a small child with a crayon.
I know there are a bunch of potential security issues about voting over a communications channel, but having a proxy still preserves all the same security issues, because you have to communicate the vote over the channel to the proxy, plus you have the extra trust issue with the proxy.
Just let the MPs vote online already.
No wonder self-scan and the like are becoming more common, ;et alone internet shopping and delivery. It's a stupid outdated way of running our lives.
Edited for typo.
Just have them video a segment saying the proposition and 'aye' or 'nay', and have that put in the official tally as the MPs trudge into the lobbies.
Vote Loser
https://twitter.com/SJAMcBride/status/972404548965892096
I think there's obviously something in that - as we know, when you poll voters on specific issues they're quite susceptible to how questions are phrased and easily swayed by obvious lies, so there's clearly a strong case for having some indirection.
I quite like the idea of replacing that role with Liquid Democracy where people own their own votes until they delegate them to somebody else, so if you end up with someone representing a lot of people as MPs do it emerges from people's preferences rather than being something the system forces on them. But I think it needs to be proved in practice at other levels before you start experimenting with it for nation states.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-43345857
At the heart of the problem is the OFSTED based accountability regime which makes school managements paranoid about being caught out with inadequate quality control processes. As a result, too many schools have burdensome target setting, monitoring and reporting systems but with non-existetent analytical skills with which to drive meaningful improvement.
Plenty of work has been done in this area, both by The DfE (Teachers Workload Challenge) and the Headteachers’ Roundtable:
https://headteachersroundtable.wordpress.com/alternative-green-paper-2016/
It just needs OFSTED to issue a very simple inspection guideline to the effect that any school found not to be implementing effectively a workload reduction programme will be rated as “needs improvement”.
https://twitter.com/faisalislam/status/972403811099774976
The result is system gaming of epic proportions, and I say that having 22 years of sales experience
The problem with your suggestion on OFSTED issuing new guidelines is that it doesn't follow its own guidelines. For example it said it didn't need to see lesson plans - and then criticised any teacher who failed to produce them.
(Lest this sounds like sour grapes, I should point out I was inspected last year and was rated Outstanding for every one of the three mentions I had in the report.)
As each vote takes place the robot electronically seeks constituents views and votes accordingly. True democracy enabled by technology. Vorsprung Durch Technik. Government by the people, for the people.
http://enormo-haddock.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/after-testing-thoughts-for-2018-season.html
And I agree that replacing OFSTED with a system whereby best practices are spread under the auspices of a teachers’ professional body is an interesting idea (as suggested in the Headteachers’ Roundtable paper).
If it is to go ahead I suggest that, in order to maintain the MP/constituency link, the proxy should be the runner-up to the MP in the previous GE.
It's all window dressing for the voters. And how often do you hear of voters actually listening intently and saying "I'm convinced, I'm going to tear up my Socialist Worker card and vote for this Rees-Mogg fella."
It's a variety show. An audition for the top job. Mrs May never shone in any debate I've ever heard, so it shows how important parliamentary debates are. Michael Foot was a good debater, but it meant little - his scruffy clothes were more telling.
And I agree with much of ydoethur's responses, but with a couple of caveats. OFSTED aren't the whole problem, by any means, and also when it comes to individual school inspections, one has to take into account that there is a considerable variation in the quality of inspectors.
If the Mercs win comfortably in Australia, then it’s going to be 2014 all over again this year.