An electoral first for Iceland

 The final vote in Saturday's election is not yet in, but it is already clear that there will be a preponderance of women members in the new Althing. This will be a first for an elected national assembly, in Europe at least. It also appears that the  ruling coalition has slightly strengthened its position. Euronews reports: 

Iceland’s coalition government appeared likely to continue after voters rallied around the political centre in a volatile parliamentary election. The outcome may become historic: The incoming members of parliament were 54% women on Sunday morning, when nearly all votes had been counted. If the number holds, Iceland’s Althing parliament will have a female majority for the first time. According to data compiled by the World Bank, no country in Europe had ever passed the symbolic 50% mark, with Sweden leading the way with 47% female MPs. Polls had suggested a victory for left-leaning parties in the unpredictable election, which saw 10 parties competing for the Althing’s 63 seats. Instead, the centre-right Independence Party took the largest share of votes, and there were big gains for the centrist Progressive Party.

[Later] Not so fast. The final count shows that males will still predominate - just. Reuter says:

  

a recount of votes on Sunday showed there will still be more men than women in the chamber, state broadcaster RUV reported.

One wonders whether Iceland will still beat Sweden, the previous record-holder.

Stop demolishing buildings, say engineers

 The Royal Academy of Engineering, which one might have expected to have an interest in lots of new building, has set that aside in the interests of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. BBC reports:
Britain’s top engineers are urging the government to stop buildings being demolished. Making bricks and steel creates vast amounts of CO2, with cement alone causing 8% of global emissions. They say the construction industry should where possible re-use buildings, employ more recycled material, and use machinery powered by clean fuels. They are concerned about "embodied emissions", which is the CO2 emitted when buildings and materials are made.

A stitch-up which even Kigali would be ashamed of

 There is a lot to criticise in the way A Killing in Tiger Bay was presented. The intrusive, portentous music, the repetitions and the gimmicky way in which the testimony of the main protagonists was produced had me shouting "get on with it!" at the telly. It was a two-hour series, or maybe even a three half-hour series, of programmes stretched to three hours. For all that, even those who had followed news of the investigation of Lynette White's murder must have been shocked at some of the revelations, and those who came new to the case must have been devastated. Five young men, who were guilty only of petty crime and being non-white, were blatantly framed for a murder which early, admittedly scant, evidence clearly showed was committed by a single unknown white male. One accused and four "witnesses" had been harassed and coerced into giving false evidence, against not only the spirit but also the mandated practice of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. 

The lives of five young men, even of the two who were found not guilty, were permanently blighted and those of several family members cut short by the effect of the longest-running criminal trial in England and Wales. On top of that, even after the perversion of justice had been exposed by the legal appeal - only obtained by persistent campaigning by family and friends of the accused - the police officers concerned, named by the TV programme, were not convicted of any offence. Finally, a shadow of guilt ("no smoke without fire") was only finally removed by the use of DNA matching and thus identification of the real killer.

Three other unsatisfactory murder investigations by South Wales Police come to mind. In 1985, two men were wrongly convicted of the murder of the manager of a sex-shop in Swansea. Closer to home, the court threw out charges against a man accused of a murder in Skewen in 2008. Between those two came the case of Dai Morris, who was convicted of the Clydach murders in 1999 and who recently died in prison. Whether he was or was not responsible, the dubious use of character evidence in the trial may have significantly swayed the jury. We are promised a TV documentary on this case, possibly looking at new evidence, later in the year. Given the revelations of A Killing in Tiger Bay, one cannot take the verdict of the programme-makers for granted.

We are assured by the current Chief Constable, and his predecessor, speaking at the end of A Killing in Tiger Bay, that South Wales Police are totally reformed. 

How long will our EU legacy last?

 We are still reaping rewards from our membership of the EU nearly two years after Brexit. For instance, in New York a few weekends ago, a Brit for the first time lifted the American lawn tennis trophy for women. Emma Radecanu was only a UK citizen because her father is a Romanian and EU membership gave him the right to bring his family here. Her mother's origins in Hong Kong would not have been good enough. A Labour government saw to that, in spite of Paddy Ashdown's urgings, heartfelt and, as it has turned out, far-sighted. 

Another instance is the energy-efficiency ratings of our domestic appliances. Brenda Boardman was the person who pushed this valuable measure through in the UK, but was quick to point out in her interview by Jim Al-Khalili on Radio 4 this week that the initiative came from Europe. It is clear from the disorganisation of COP26 that the benefits of a clear anti-global-warming strategy are already being dissipated by the Johnson government.

 

 Late last week, the government declared its intention to eliminate preferential voting for police and crime commissioners and for mayors in England and Wales. Not only did they carry out this threat yesterday, they also used an arcane mechanism (an instruction to the Bill committee) which inhibited detailed consideration of the changes. There were weighty contributions to the debate from Cat Smith for Labour, Brendan O'Hara for the SNP and Alistair Carmichael for the Liberal Democrats, but Caroline Lucas (Green) summed up the situation rather well:

Today, we are faced with yet another example of a Government with absolutely no respect for democracy, demonstrated both by this process and by the use of it in relation to a policy change of such huge electoral importance.

Ironically, the Minister who tabled this instruction—the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith)—was the very Minister who recently criticised the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) for using this little-used mechanism himself. The irony is compounded not least because the hon. Gentleman used it as a Back Bencher, with few other options at his disposal, faced with a Government blatantly leaving the issue of suspending Parliament out of a Bill that should have included it. By contrast, in this case, the Government of the day are abusing parliamentary process in two ways: first, they did not give notice of this extension of the scope of the Bill; and secondly, there is no good reason for using this instruction mechanism in the first place.

That raises questions as to why this attempt to foist the undemocratic and unfair first-past-the-post electoral system on mayoral and police and crime commissioner elections was slipped in as quietly as possible. For example, why was this silently published on the day of the reshuffle? More substantively, why did the Government not include this issue in the Bill in the first place so that the principle could have been debated on Second Reading?

Frankly, the disrespectful nature of this instruction is compounded by the fact that this is an Elections Bill—a Bill of constitutional importance, which requires those in power to behave with the highest respect for due process in order to protect our democracy and trust in Government. Anything else looks like rigging the system to the Government’s own electoral advantage. Extending the use of first past the post, and stripping out the proportional aspects of mayoral and police commissioner elections are not changes that should be bounced on MPs of other parties with no pre-legislative scrutiny or discussion.

Since 1997, every new representative body in the UK has been elected using an electoral system other than first past the post. We have had two decades of experience with PR systems in devolved Assemblies, mayoralties and local government. Now, suddenly, we have this blatant abuse of parliamentary procedure to allow the Government to scrap the PR systems that we have. Instead of the surreptitious use of this last-minute instruction, we should have had pre-legislative scrutiny so that we could properly explore on a cross-party basis the serious concerns that first past the post is unfair, unrepresentative and undemocratic. It is unfair and unrepresentative because it regularly delivers powers to those who win only a minority of the popular vote, ignoring the number of votes cast for smaller parties, and undemocratic because it promotes voter inequality, giving disproportionate power to swing voters in marginal seats and encouraging the belief that voting never changes anything, which is dangerous for participation in our democracy.
[...]
When we teach young people about what the suffragettes went through to get the vote for women and how important it was to vote, it really would help if we could tell them that we had a system now where their vote actually counted. That means that the Government of the day should be treating any change in the law on our voting systems with the respect that it deserves. The fact that the Government are not going to through the normal due legislative process with this change rings major alarm bells. Second Reading debates exist for good reason; they are a high-profile part of the scrutiny process, and I can see no good reason why we were not allowed to scrutinise this outrageous proposal then. How different it would feel if we had a Government who were pluralist, open, willing to engage in dialogue with all people and parties, and willing to improve our democracy with a commitment to fairness and to increasing wellbeing for all citizens.

In May, the Tories lost 11 of 13 mayoral elections, all under the supplementary vote system, which allows voters to express their top two preferences. Now they want to change these elections to first past the post, but without any normal scrutiny. We can only conclude that they are seeking to do this unfair thing in an unfair way because they understand that when elections are fair, they tend to lose.

I trust that the Liberal Democrats will, when they next have the power to influence legislation, rather than merely restoring the supplementary vote, scrap these superfluous posts altogether.

Bonfire of the standards

 Back in 2018, the talk from Brexiteers was not of reducing standards when we left the EU, but of improving on them. For instance, Michael Gove in evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee in July:

Gove told MPs that the opportunity for ministers to set different standards to those enforced by the bloc would “unquestionably” lead to tougher regulations being introduced, claiming that many “pro-leave” politicians took their stance in the 2016 referendum partly due to the appeal of setting stricter controls than the EU.

In February, Boris Johnson had said that "Britain may choose to remain aligned with European Union standards for some products to help trade after Brexit". I also have the distinct impression that the prime minister had aspired to build better on EU legislation once we were out of the Union. No doubt many wavering Conservatives had been persuaded to back Brexit on the basis of such hopes.

The Act made sure that EU regulations and standards would continue after Brexit. But that was all thrown up in the air in the Commons last Thursday. The newly-appointed Paymaster-General, Michael Ellis, stated:

First, we will conduct a review of so-called retained EU law; by this, I mean the many pieces of legislation that we took on to our own statute book through the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. We must now revisit this huge but anomalous category of law, and we have two purposes in mind. First, we intend to remove the special status of retained EU law so that it is no longer a distinct category of UK domestic law but is normalised within our law with a clear legislative status. Unless we do that, we risk giving undue precedence to laws derived from EU legislation over laws made properly by this Parliament. The review also involves ensuring that all courts in this country have the full ability to depart from EU case law according to the normal rules. In so doing, we will continue restoring this sovereign Parliament and our courts to their proper constitutional positions, and indeed finalise that process.

Our second goal is to review comprehensively the substantive content of retained EU law. Some of that is already under way—for example, our plans to reform Toggle showing location ofColumn 1149inherited procurement rules and the plan announced last autumn by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor to review much financial services legislation. But we will make this a comprehensive exercise, and I want to make it clear that our intention is eventually to amend, replace or repeal all retained EU law that is not right for the UK. That is a legislative problem, and accordingly the solution is also likely to be legislative. We will consider all the options for taking this forward, and in particular look at developing a tailored mechanism for accelerating the repeal or amendment of retained EU law in a way that reflects the fact that laws agreed elsewhere have intrinsically less democratic legitimacy than laws initiated by the Government of this country.

We also intend to begin a new series of reforms of the legislation we have inherited on EU exit, in many cases as recommended by the TIGRR report. Let me give some examples. We intend to create a pro-growth trusted data rights regime that is more proportionate and less burdensome than the EU’s GDPR—general data protection regulation.

On the last point, the government should be aware that weakening data protection may make exchanging data across the EU-UK border more difficult and thus inhibit some types of business.

Emily Thornberry for the Opposition posed key questions:

First, why do the Government believe that signing a veterinary agreement with the EU is incompatible with their ambitions to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership? Secondly, if the answer is that joining the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership requires them to diverge from EU standards in relation to food safety, which is the only logical explanation for the comments that Lord Frost has made, can the Paymaster General tell us which specific standards they plan to diverge from?

But answer came there none.

Now we learn that Johnson and Raab are intent on finally carrying out the threat initiated by Theresa May, to scrap all UK human rights legislation.

AUKUS removes last excuse for retaining Trident

 It has been obvious for some time that the UK's nuclear missiles have been no deterrent to the military actions of a resurgent Russia and certainly not to terrorism. The only nation which might be deterred from military expansionism by atomic weapons is China and, though we should all desire the continued independence of a liberal, democratic, Taiwan, the fight for it would be best conducted by Pacific nations. Now that Australia has come on board as a fellow atomic-powered submarine power with the US, there surely is no point in maintaining our own super-submarines based half a world away from where they would be needed. While Australia's boats are being built, we could even lease our Trident fleet or even attach boats and men to the Australian navy.

Australia's subs, though powered by American nuclear reactors, would be conventionally armed which in itself casts doubt on the need for atomic overkill as a deterrent. 

 

The Mont Cenis Tunnel

On 17 September 1871, the Fréjus Tunnel, also known as the Mont Cenis Tunnel) was opened to traffic for the first time, facilitating a new era of interaction between France and Italy. It had taken only 13 years to construct as against an estimate of 40 years, thanks largely to such innovations as pneumatic drilling machines and dynamite. The tunnel was the first great tunnel through the Alps. (There is more on wikipedia)