Archive for Keir Starmer

An Island of Strangers

Posted in Literature, Politics with tags , , , on May 13, 2025 by telescoper

In the light of Keir Starmer’s deplorable Faragist rhetoric about Britain becoming an ‘Island of Strangers’, and the obscene deportations and detentions without legal process of immigrants in the United States, I thought I’d repost this speech from the play Sir Thomas More which is widely attributed to William Shakespeare. It’s from Act 2 Scene 4, at which point in the drama Thomas More (who was then London’s Deputy Sheriff) is called upon to put down an anti-immigration riot in the Parish of St Martin Le Grand, that took place on 1st May 1517. In reality  More’s intevention wasn’t effective, and it took the arrival of 5000 troops to disperse the mob.

As well as being powerful for many other reasons, this speech especially fascinating because a hand-written manuscript (thought to be by Shakespeare himself) survives and is kept in the British Library.

The backdrop to this story is that, between 1330 and 1550 about 64,000 immigrants from all across Europe came to England in search of better lives. Locals blamed them for taking their jobs and threatening their culture. Tensions reached breaking point in 1517 and a mob armed with stones, bricks, bats, boots and boiling water attacked the immigrants and looted their homes.  Five hundred years on, and we still haven’t learned.

Here is the text of the opening part of the speech ‘This is the strangers case’. 

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another….

                                       Say now the king
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

Better an Island of Strangers than an Island of Starmers, I’d say…

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Opinion Polls, Exit Polls and Election Results

Posted in Politics with tags , , , , , , , , , on July 8, 2024 by telescoper

It has been quite an eventful week for voters either side of the English channel. In the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party were victorious in the General Election, turfing out the Tories after 14 years of misrule, while in France a left-wing coalition managed against the odds to beat Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Rally into third place in their runoff election. In both elections tactical voting clear played a big role. In France many third-placed candidates of the centre or left stood aside to help defeat the Far Right. What happens now with regard to forming a government is anyone’s guess, even for people who know far more about French politics than me.

In the runup up to the UK general election, opinion polls had Labour much further ahead in terms of popular vote. As it turned out, however, Labour won 411 seats on a share of the vote of just 33.7% compared to the Conservatives 23.7% and a smaller number of votes than in 2019 when they won just 202 seats. The UK system is not proportional – and doesn’t pretend to be – so this kind of outcome is not surprising. Pundits have rightly pointed to the fact that the far-right Reform party got 14.3% of the vote which undoubtedly took seats from the Tories, but only managed 5 seats and that Labour profited greatly from the collapse of the SNP vote in Scotland.

There are other factors, however. One is that the turnout was 59.9%, well down on 2019 (67.35). That may well be partly due to voters generally not being enthused. But there may be more to it than that. The last time the turnout was below 60% in a UK general election was in 2001. In that year, Labour were miles ahead in the opinion polls so I suppose many Labour voters thought the result was a foregone conclusion and didn’t bother to turn out. It seems likely to me that there was a similar effect on the Labour vote this time. Rather than merely predicting the final result, opinion polls often influence it.

Another factor is that there may have been higher levels of tactical voting, especially with Labour voters switching to the Liberal Democrats to remove the Tory. That might account for why the LibDems did so well. Opinion polls play a role in this too. Yet another is that Labour lost several seats to Independents, standing against the stance on Gaza, and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn won his seat standing as an Independent.

That brings me to the exit polls in the UK and France. Here the projections, the first released at 10pm on Thursday and the second at 9pm on Sunday:

Both are pretty accurate, but I’ve always been annoyed by the way the UK exit poll projection (left) is presented as a point estimate without any indication of the uncertainty (which must be considerable, especially for the smaller parties). The final results were Labour 411, Conservative 121, Lib Dem 72, Reform 5, SNP 9, Plaid Cymru 4, Green 4.

The French method of presenting the results (right) is much better in my opinion. In this case the results were 182, 168 and 143 respectively – all within the range presented.

I have to say that I greatly prefer the voting system used here in Ireland to those deployed in either France or the United Kingdom. Elections here are held under Proportional Representation (Single Transferable Vote) which seems to me a very sensible system. One ranks the candidates in order of preference; you can rank all the candidates or just some. In the system employed here in Ireland, votes are progressively reallocated in various rounds until one ends up with the top n candidates to fill the n available seats. The STV system involves a quota for automatic election which is N/(m+1) + 1 votes, where N is the number of valid ballots cast and m is the number of seats in the constituency.  To see why this is the case consider a four-seat constituency, where the quota would be 20% of the votes cast plus one. No more than four candidates can reach this level so anyone managing to get that many votes is automatically elected. Surplus votes from candidates exceeding quota, as well as those of eliminated candidates, are reallocated to lower-preference candidates in this process. This system returns representatives with a local constituency connection but is also (approximately) proportional.

One problem with the First Past The Post system deployed in the UK is that if a Reactionary party (Reform) gets 5 seats while a Progressive party (Green) gets only 4, the former gets all the press coverage and the latter gets none..

P.S. I didn’t vote in the UK general election, but the four constituencies in which I lived before moving to Ireland (Cardiff West, Brighton Kemptown, Broxtowe, and Bethnal Green & Stepney) all voted in Labour MPs.

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