Brown's half full house

The speaker here is Gordon Brown. Plenty of empty seats, eh?

Why I'd pay for free wi-fi

I've been to a couple of conferences this year, and both times looked for cheap hotels with free wi-fi. In Birmingham, I needed to finish the presentation (on spam email), so I needed wi-fi to research aspects of that presentation. I also used it to find out about local eateries. It all worked smoothly.

In Bournemouth, at the Lib-Dems conference, I used wi-fi for similar purposes, but also wanted to use it to synchronise my laptop calendar with the calendar on my iPhone, using Apple's MobileMe service which normally does this automatically. The conference fringe timetable is complex, with lunchtime and up to three evening slots, and perhaps a dozen events in each slot. All to be fit around meals, and meet-ups.

I booked a hotel with free wi-fi, but they'd overbooked and moved me to another hotel where I had to pay online before using the wi-fi. At £10 for a week, that's not too bad. The problems started when I tried to pay.

Of course, to manage paid wi-fi, the providers have to put up barriers between me and the Internet. And, they want me to pay over the Internet using PayPal. When I came to pay, my browser popped up a security warning. The security certificate wasn't a PayPal certificate.

I phoned the provider, and was told that this happens quite frequently, and not to worry because the network was completely secure. That's simply not true. Trivially, nothing is completely secure, but in this case I was being asked to click through known security inconsistencies, and given no guidance as to which invalid certificates I should accept.

Throw in a couple of timeouts, and it took me about an hour, in all, to get connected.

Worse, once I was connected, pretty much any secure service I wanted to use wouldn't work properly. Either I had to click through a security warning, or - in the case of the calendar sync process - the service simply would not work.

So, that's a tenner completely wasted, and I'd have gladly paid more than a tenner (for the room) to get free wi-fi, without the payment system that made this so hard to use. Oh, and I never did get the wi-fi to operate with my iPhone - I couldn't get past the paywall even though you're supposed to be able to use multiple devices with the one password.

Elevated status

The Sussex Express printed my article today. They've managed to describe me as "a Liberal Democrat county councillor for Priory ward, and a Lewes District Councillor".

In fact, I'm a Liberal Democrat district councillor for Priory ward. I'm not a county councillor at all. Never mind.

Interesting to see that Jason Sugarman chose to use the article to undermine trust, by repeating lies about Norman Baker's expenses.

Anyway, in my article, I said you can read more about the turnout stats on my blog. That's all in this post.

Election algebra

I wrote a piece on trust in major political parties for the Sussex Express. Here's some evidence for a few of the claims that I made about the June 2009 elections.

"The press, and politicians have been worried that loss of trust in politics would mean low election turnouts, or a boost to minor parties."

See, for example, The Guardian

"Neither happened in June"

See graph - note the drop of over a million Labour votes. Other parties exchanged a couple of hundred thousand votes each. That's not to be dismissed, but all the four largest parties here, except Labour, polled better than in 1999. The BNP and Greens did get more votes, and 2 MEPs each, but their total vote numbers weren't enough to qualify as a radical breakthrough.

"the low Labour vote let two BNP members get elected."

Although their vote increased nationally, it actually declined in the two regions where they got elected. It's good to see the BNP vote declining in those areas. The Labour vote was down 180,000 in Yorkshire - 11,000 of those votes would have kept the BNP out there. They lost 240,000 in the North West region, 60,000 of those votes (or 5,000 UKIP or Green votes) would have kept the BNP out there. To be fair, other major parties saw significant drops in these two regions, too.

It would be interesting to try to work out some tactical voting strategies for the Euro elections, but it's much more complex than in First Past the Post. You'd need some pretty accurate polling results in your region to work out where your vote would be best placed to keep out the BNP. The answer is you need to place it with a party that has close to identical support, or close to double or treble the support of the BNP. It's definitely a drawback of the D'Hondt method that you can't express preferences.

These were the BNP votes:

	2004	2009
North West	134,959	132,094
Yorks & Humberside	126,538	120,139

Reasons to be cheerful, part one.

Part 1...

We, the Lib Dems, took Bristol. That's England's seventh largest city.

It's odd, by the way, that Bristol was up for election with all the county councils. That's because, legally, it's defined as a county for the purposes of the Lieutenancies Act 1997. It's our smallest county by area.

Here are the largest cities (source Wikipedia) in England, and who governs them. We have a hand in running all of them except London and Manchester.

• London is run by a Conservative Mayor, held to account by a mixed assembly (Con 11, Lab 8, LD 3, Green 2, Nazi 1) currently chaired by Green Party assembly member Darren Johnson. Liberal Democrats run some of the London Boroughs.
• Birmingham is run by a Conservative and Lib Dem coalition, the deputy leader being Lib Dem cllr Paul Tilsley.
• Liverpool is run by Liberal Democrats, under leader cllr Warren Bradley.
• Leeds city council is run but a coalition of Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Independents, led by Lib Dem cllr Richard Brett
• Sheffield is run by Liberal Democrats, under leader Paul Scriven
• Manchester is run by Labour (61 seats), with Lib Dems second (34 seats), and the Conservatives holding one seat.
• And, now Bristol is run by Liberal Democrats, with 36 seats (Con 17, Lab 16, Green 1).
• We also run a number of other British cities, like Newcastle, Cambridge, Portsmouth, Edinburgh (with SNP), Cardiff (minority administration), and Swansea (in coalition).

So, our win in Bristol underlines the fact that we're a party of government, and that we're strong in urban areas. And, there are a number of examples of us working in coalition with others. While we don't seem to have any counties, we do have districts and boroughs throughout England.

Election algebra

I got interviewed for the BBC News web site at conference last weekend. I was quoted:

"Maybe they will have to compromise on some things, but I don't think it is necessary to form a coalition. I don't see why the largest party needs to be the one that forms the government.

. Actually, there's some stuff missing in that quote. What I really suggested was that if a coalition is formed, it doesn't need to contain the largest party. I gave the recent elections in Israel as an example, where there was a lot of talk of a coalition forming around the second party.

Anyway, someone was kind enough to email me and call me a cretin, on the basis of that quote. Using phrases like "completely fail to understand the concept of a democracy". Thanks, Iain, perhaps I'll return the favour some day.

"... based on that quote, you do come across as an utter cretin who's unaware they've just proposed something dangerously undemocratic and illiberal that would involve turning back the constitutional clock to the 18th century. "

he says.

But, now that he mentions it, perhaps there are circumstances under which the Queen might reasonably ask the second party to form a government. Indulge me for a moment, and please try not to blow a gasket, Iain.

Suppose, for example, that party A gets 40% of the vote, and 48% of the seats. Party B gets 55% of the vote, and 46% of the seats in parliament. Which party should form the government? What if supporters of party C (with 5% of the vote, and 6% of the seats) clearly express a preference for B over A in opinion polls.

Now, clearly a constitutional crisis (what Iain fears) occurs if party B is asked to form a government. But, in the figures above, I see a crisis occuring even if party A is asked to form the government.

iBlogger for iPhone

Last time I looked, there wasn't an iPhone app for blogspot blogs. You could, of course, use its web browser, but that's a little slow fir the purpose if you don't have a 3G or wifi connection.

Now, there's iBlogger, which supports a wide range of blogging engines, including blogspot. This is my first post with iBlogger, but I'm expecting it to be mangled somewhat because I need to change a setting on my blog.

It has some nice features. Allows tag management, lets you add links, and will use the iPhone's location services.

Mobile Blogging from here.

Edited to add:

My mistake. It seems I'd forgotten that I've used lifecast before. Lifecast supports picture blogging with blogspot and flikr, which is "coming soon" in iBlogger. iBlogger seems to work better with multiple blogs, though.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]