Sometimes people feel powerless, like their individual action does not matter. That is not true, it matters tremendously and it is enormously powerful, I am going to explain one of the reasons why.

When you make a decision it is not just you making that decision, it is also people like you making the same decision for similar reasons. No one exists in isolation or acts alone, every individual is part of many overlapping, interconnected, and interdependent groups, most of which they are not even aware of. When you make a decision you make it based on how you think and what you know (consciously or not). Other people like you will be in similar situations and make the same decision, you make it together.

This means that every action you take does matter because it is not just you, it is people like you doing the same thing. Your individual action might be tiny, but your collective action might be huge. If the only thing stopping you is that you do not think it will make a difference because it is just you, then do it, if you do it then other people will too, if you do not then they will not. You have the responsibility to make the decision and to do the thing, but in doing it, you will not be alone.

There are lots of reasons to vote and this is only one of them, but you should.

There is a dark side to the fact that you are not just yourself, you are a community, and that is that if others control the inputs to your community and target them carefully for every group, then you are not yourself, you are theirs.

Think carefully, think twice, install an ad-blocker and make your decision.

Now that sounds horribly patronising, which it is, and so this academic is going to get off his ivory tower with his simplistic notions and go and do some work.

I am presently coming to the end of a holiday in and around Chamonix in the Alps (first time I have been outside the UK for several years) and this consists of some notes on interesting things I have noticed.

They drive on the wrong side of the road fairly consistently, this takes a while to get used to.

Many toilets consist of holes in the ground, many lack soap and some even sinks. The romans had better toilets well over 2000 years ago, toilet technology has made significant advances in the last couple of millennia why not consistently take advantage of this? They have special ceramic things to go around the holes in the ground, why not use one with a more useful shape?
This is not to say that they don’t also have perfectly good working toilets or even that the good ones are not in the majority.

There is much greater biodiversity on the Alps than on mountains in the Lake District or the Cairngorms (my more regular haunts) many of the flowers are familiar from their use in gardens but I don’t think there is a garden centre in the world large enough to fit all the varieties of beautiful plants that there are in the Alps. There are also many insects I have never seen before a few of which are a little vicious including the very large number of ants which one must take great care to avoid sitting near.
Some of this greater biodiversity might be due to the mountains being younger and so more fertile or due to warmer summers but I don’t think that completely explains it. I suspect the fact that the landscape of the Lake District and Cairngorms being an artificial one created by our destruction of the forests which would naturally cover them has some significant effect as will the grazing by lots of sheep. The beautiful mountain meadows in the Alps are I think more naturally occurring with the trees not covering them because of the ground being above the tree line rather than felling.

I am on holiday with my parents who were last here some 27 years ago which allows them to notice some of the more obvious changes that have occurred in that time. Chamonix is about 3 times larger than it was then. The glaciers have clearly retreated a long way in that time and there is much less snow on the tops of the mountains than there was at the same time of year. Here climate change is an obvious “I can see it just by looking” thing (though obviously this could be a localised thing but for that we know it is a global one). We climbed up to a glacier and touched it, in a “do the things your children might not get a chance to do” and a “pictures or it didn’t happen” frame of mind.

The public transport up and down the valley is free, regular, punctual and really rather nice rendering cars completely unnecessary for the tourist. (Apparently funded by a 1€ a night per tourist tax)

Bread and (real) milk won’t last more than a day necessitating regular shopping, bread purchased in the evening may already be stale :-(. Restaurants may not open until 19:00 which is tedious when you need an early dinner.

The Alps are much more work than British mountains, so much more up, so much more down.
The Alps can get far too hot and it seems for the end of July and early August they do so regularly so perhaps June/early July would be a better time to come. Fortunately they are covered in trees which provide welcome shade and relief from the oppressive sunshine. A few hundred meters above the tree-line it generally gets more reasonable as the temperature drop due to height gain combines with stronger winds.

Gorges la Diosaz is wonderfully cool and reasonably priced at ~6€ and a lovely train journey from Chamonix.
L’Arguille du Midi is extortionately priced ~50€ but you would be hard pressed to find a better view.
Mount Chiref in Italy is much less well signposted than the several mountains we climbed in France/Switzerland which were wonderfully well signposted, still worth the climb.

One of the key differentiating policies between the Liberal Democrats and Labour at the recent local elections was that Labour were considering restricting the proportion of Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) that could occur in a section of road of a certain length. Labour won (at least in my ward) and I think that imposing such a restriction would be a particularly bad idea. Hence it is my democratic duty to try and explain why this is the case and so help prevent this happening. Essentially this proposal is equivalent to a proposal to throw me or people like me out of our houses so I should probably take this reasonably personally.
A House in Multiple Occupation is one in which 3 or more people who are not of the same household are living where household is defined by blood or by marriage or similar.

As I understand it the main reasoning behind restricting HMOs is that they are bad for the community due to lack of involvement by the residents (and perhaps bad behaviour on the part of the residents) and that they tend to be poorly maintained and so be bad for the area (house prices etc.).
Now those things might be true, or at least there might be a statistically significant increase in poor maintenance of HMOs and of lower community involvement by the residents of HMOs or even a higher incidence of reports of antisocial behaviour against people living in HMOs.
While it seems perfectly possible that those things might be the case I have not seen studies that have shown that to be the case I have not seem them (to be fair I have not looked). If there are no such studies then clearly no restriction should be imposed because before you start throwing people out of their houses (or at least saying “no you cannot live there”) you should at least be sure that the reason you are doing that is valid. It would be rather embarrassing to find out that this sort of thing had been done on the basis of a lie.

However even if it is true that residents of HMOs are more likely to be antisocial/anticommunity and take poor care of their property that is still no reason to restrict where residents of HMOs can live. It boils down to a “We don’t want your type around here.” attitude. Sorry I thought we were living in a free society in the 21st century where anyone could come and live next door as long as they are not currently in prison and can afford it. Perhaps if there was some sort of causation between being a bad person and living in HMOs there might be some more justification but even then – really is that the kind of society we want to live in?
So who lives in a HMO, well clearly people who don’t have a big enough household to fill a house or enough money to have a house to themselves and have done so. So mainly single people, probably also mainly young people. So after high levels of unemployment and debt young people are put at a further disadvantage by being discriminated against when trying to find houses to rent not only by the letting agents and landlords who would already much prefer families (and make this clear) but also by their local government. That does not strike me as a good move and seems likely to further alienate a group of people who might legitimately feel let down by society and so rather apathetic about supporting it. There are already quite enough problems to deal with this century without further unnecessary building of inter-generational tensions.

Now I think marriage is important so I would not get married just to be able to get a house but if people start getting told “Well if two of you got married then you could all live here.” some people might decide otherwise. This renders the whole thing unenforcable.

Monitoring which houses are HMOs in order to prevent the concentrations of HMOs exceeding defined thresholds involves some significant bureaucratic overhead which will have its own cost, it also means that the information on which houses are HMOs must be publicly available in order for letting agencies etc. to be able to work this out and hence know who they can rent the houses to. This would be a violation of the privacy of those living in these houses and would be likely to allow targeted advertising (and perhaps political campaigning) based on this information.

So if people are not allowed to live in HMOs what is the alternative? Well they could live in a family house instead. So they could go back and live with their parents (and leave their job, sounds like a great idea) or they could get married but that is not something someone can necessarily do. Or they could live in a house of single occupancy. However that would be a really silly idea.

It is significantly more efficient for a house to have more than one person living in it because then the constant costs of a house (such as kitchen space etc.) can be shared out between multiple people this also reduces the rent, utility bills etc. per person. Leaving more money for other things like saving up for a house or paying off student loans. This also reduces CO₂ emissions and so HMOs help save the planet. There is currently a significant housing shortage in the country and to a significant extent that is due to a reduction in the number of people living in each house rather than to a increase in the number of people. So our current housing shortage could partly be addressed by encouraging people into houses of multiple occupancy or at least to fill spare bedrooms with people.

In summary restricting the number of HMOs is discriminatory, unenforcable, bureaucratic, privacy invading and precisely the opposite of the kind of housing policy we should be encouraging.

So having rejected that policy as a thoroughly bad idea what kind of policies might actually address the problem?
People are more likely to invest in their local community if they feel they have a vested interest in its success and if they do not feel like they are outcasts from it.
If people are not sure how long they are going to be living in a location then it will not feel as worth while for them to get to know their neighbours when they might be moving in a few months or a year. Hence policies which increase peoples assurance that they will be able to stay in their present house long term are likely to encourage community involvement. Policies that make people think they might be forced to move by their local government because of who their neighbours are on the other hand…
Encouraging community is a very important thing to do and a very hard thing to legislate for because fundamentally it is a thing that people need to do collectively. Government can encourage it though and I am sure that there are many things that can be done by government to improve the situation. Society as a whole needs to decide it wants community and then to go out and do that. All of this is hard so we better get started.
Anyone for tea? coffee?

Now I am a floating voter and my final decision will be made in the ballot box on Thursday (though I have a fair idea who it will be for). It is my duty and privilege to vote and to vote for both the best candidate(s) for my constituency and the best party for the country.
As someone who likes to think that they have half a brain I want to be making my decision based not on irrelevant details such as who my parents/friends support. I want to be voting based on the merits of the beliefs, skills and policies of the candidates and on the beliefs and policies of the parties they represent.
Now obviously it is necessary to do some tactical voting under our current first-past-the-post voting system (though hopefully we will have something better before the next election) and so that is another thing to take into account.

The Peterhouse Politics Society held a hustings which I attended and which allowed me to assess the MP candidates in person which was quite useful. I found it ruled out Daniel Zeichner (Labour), I wasn’t that impressed with Nick Hillman (Conservatives) either though he did a better job as a candidate than Zeichner: he was constrained by the policies of his party from doing well in my eyes :-).

I have watched the first election debate and the second election debate and I have downloaded the third debate which I will watch later.

This afternoon I have been experimenting with various websites which claim to be able to help you decide who to vote for. I have found the experience interesting (though it didn’t really tell me much I didn’t already know).

Vote For Policies’ constituency results are also quite interesting as it indicates that the Lib Dems are wrong in their two horse race (between them and Labour) claims for Cambridge. Rather it is a three horse race: Labour, Greens, Lib Dem. Of course this data isn’t that reliable.

The Guardian’s pole of the polls indicates that the Lib Dems have failed to make the breakthrough I might have hoped for.

But in answer to the question it is for me a toss up between the Lib Dems and the Greens who both have a reasonable chance of winning in Cambridge (though the Lib Dems are more likely to win). I think on average I agree with Lib Dem policies more frequently than Green policies (but I consider the environment to be very important) however Tony Juniper is standing for the Greens in Cambridge and he is the most qualified candidate standing. However if I vote Green and they loose then I am fairly sure that the Lib Dems will win instead and that is another result I quite like. I suspect that this is a fairly rare situation for voters to find themselves in. Hopefully we will get STV before the next elections and then everyone will have a better chance of their vote counting.

Today 4th June 2009 is the day of the European (and local council) elections.
This is the first election in which I can vote, and I will most definitely be voting.
If you are reading this and can vote but aren’t intending to I really think you should.

Part of the reason for writing this is to solidify my decision as to who I am going to vote for. Now at all previous elections since 1997 which is the first one I remember I would have voted Labour had I had a vote. At this election I will most definitely not be voting Labour. There are a number of policies on which Labour would have to make U-turns before I would consider voting for them, ID cards and centralised databases of far too much personal data about innocent people are a couple of things which mean that I can’t support them, there are other reasons such as various wars (I marched against the War in Iraq back at the beginning of that whole mess) and their Complete failure to do anything much about the Climate Change.
Now it appears from their election leaflets that the Conservatives are backward looking eurosceptics and as such they won’t be getting my vote either.
Now who does that leave? Well there are a whole pile of loony parties a few I have never heard of and two parties that appear fairly sane and which I have heard of. These would be the Liberal Democrat Party and the Green Party.
Now my father who has voted Labour since forever and been a member of the Labour party just as long is not voting Labour at this election but instead Green. (or at least I think he is). Things have changed.
Now what is the most important issue which we face? The most important issue that we face is Climate Change. Now Blair said that and he was right, but then he was good at talking but bad at actually doing things.
We have until 2015 to cause CO₂ emissions to peak. That is a very tall order but when the alternative is the extinction of 90% of life on earth there isn’t really any choice.
Now I think that the Liberal Democrats understand that the environment is important but will my voting for them tell the other parties how important the environment is?
Now the European elections have proportional representation which means every vote counts in a way that first past the post doesn’t. So I think that for the European elections I will be voting Green.
And then I ask myself the question, how much do I care. And the answer is that I care a lot. I care if people live or die. I care about the future. I am going to find out what happens in this grand experiment we are playing with our world. I am going to see millions of people die due to Anthropomorphic Climate Change in my life time. That is something I can’t prevent. The choice is this: how many millions will I watch die. I live in the hope of a better world. I believe among other things that we should leave the world in a better state than we found it.

And so here at my first vote I shall make a choice between life and death. To that choice I have only one answer Life. For the sake of the children I hope to have one day. For the sake of my family and friends and of their children. For my own selfish sake and because one of our fundamental responsibilities is the stewardship of this planet.

I think I shall vote Green twice once in the European and once in the Local Elections.
I shall never give up hope, even through the horrors we will witness in this century we can make a better world. I care enough to cry for, I care enough to live for, I care enough that even this coward will stand up and be counted.

VOTE: For Life, Freedom, and Democracy.