If you refuse, you lose your benefits and/or head.

It has come to my attention that some people do not think about how things will look. I mean, what would we think of this behaviour from, say, the host nation of Eurovision?

A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.

I think it’s a bit despotic. An absurdly rich woman who is head of state simply because her dad was has been thrown a £3 billion party at the citizens’ expense, spent the afternoon heading a £12 million flotilla, while on the banks, the pageant was helped along by poor citizens working in shitty conditions for no money and against their will.

I realise it’s not quite as bad as I make it sound, but it’s very nearly that bad. Like when Amazon deleted 1984 from everyone’s Kindle. Seems like it’d be quite easy to forsee how this shit might look when it inevitably gets out, and maybe think, you know what, just this once maybe we’ll pretend to be mature adults. You know — purely in the interests of avoiding bad press.

You have a moral duty to punch David Cameron in the face.

Every so often, David Cameron walks around a building, followed by news crews. Nobody ever punches him in the face. Some people might call this “admirable restraint”. I call it a shameful dereliction of their moral duty.

I don’t just mean because he deserves a smack in the mouth, although obviously he does. Eric Joyce was arrested recently for punching some Tory MPs in the Commons bar, and I remember thinking I would find it very difficult, if I worked in a building full of Tory MPs, not to punch a few (although I see why Labour took the whip away from him: clearly he can’t be trusted with it).

I can’t imagine why Cameron would want to stroll through my office followed by news crews, but if he did, I would not feel comfortable not shouting at him — aside from the lost opportunity to improve the world, it would make it seem like I support his policies. So before the visit, I’d spend ages trying to figure out what I should say to him. This would make me despondent and angry, until the alternative — simply punching him in the face — seemed more attractive.

The thing is, though, that punching him in the face is the better option. I could rant at Cameron until blue in the face — a perfectly constructed stream of vitriol and rage, full of clear, accessible and well-argued points — but probably nobody would hear it except for him, and he’d ignore it. But if I lamped him, right in the middle of the stupid, smug playdoh lump that passes for his face, then I think I’d get to write a long article in at least one major newspaper explaining exactly why I did it. I’d get to speak directly to the public in a way ranting at him couldn’t accomplish.

This is my point: you — each and every one of you — has a clear and immutable moral obligation to punch David Cameron right in the chops, the next time you see him.

Do not let us down on this.

Leave Stephen Hester alone.

That Stephen Hester, eh? Who does he bloody think he is?

His base salary is £1,220,000, and he’s been offered a bonus of £963,000. Ed Miliband said

It’s just not fair, it’s not right, and it’s not the bankers paying their fair share. … I don’t think he should be getting his bonus, you know the state still owns a share in the Royal Bank of Scotland, tax payers are still, you know, footing the bill for what’s happening at the Royal Bank of Scotland. If responsibility means anything, I don’t think he should be getting his bonus.

I think this bonus sounds totally reasonable. If you combine it with his salary, Hester’s remuneration comes to £2,183,000. The profit of RBS in 2010 — and bear in mind that in 2008 it posted a record-breaking loss of £24,100,000,000 — was £2,100,000,000. That’s just under one thousand times as much as Hester earned this year, and represents a Hester-led increase of £26,200,000,000 per year. Paying a couple of million for that is just good sense. I don’t know how much of the £2.1 billion profit RBS reinvested, but as 83% shareholders, one presumes the Treasury is getting a significant dividend here, and presumably Hester (unlike, say, Lord Ashcroft) pays income tax, so realistically we’re only giving him £481,500. And since we only own 83% of the bank, we are only giving him £399,645. That is a pitiful amount in the context of running a bank, and if that’s what the board of directors thinks is a sensible offer to keep Hester at his desk and working hard then it seems downright stupid for some MP to assume he knows better and try to block it.

Another person hired to turn around a worrying financial trend was David Cameron, and while RBS has turned a £24 billion loss into a £2 billion profit, the UK has plunged into a second recession because Cameron ignored all economists’ advice and cut everything that he, a rich idiot living in a palace in the country somewhere presumably, didn’t personally use. If anyone should have his salary withheld, it’s Cameron. Perhaps, then it isn’t simple maturity which is preventing Cameron from attacking Hester, but a weird self-interest. In either case, though, it annoys me that Miliband is capitalising on this. He said,

It’s a disgraceful failure of leadership by the Prime Minister. He’s been promising for months action against excessive bonuses, executive pay, and now he’s nodded through a million-pound bonus. He’s also been lecturing shareholders about how they need to be more active in holding executives to account.

Stephen Hester oversaw the recovery of RBS from the brink of bankruptcy to a £2 billion profit. He is not one of the reckless, irresponsible lunatic bankers who caused the recession, so blocking his bonus holds nobody to account. If anything, it shows that bonuses are unrelated to performance and you should just do whatever you like. It’s just petty-minded, pantomime-villain-of-the-week bullshit. RBS is a bank, ergo Hester is a banker, ergo he is evil, ergo he should have no tax money.

The fact is, though, it isn’t tax money. It’s the profits of a bank. It’s half of a tenth of a percent of the profits of a bank. This man is not a public servant. He’s a businessman. And it’s absurd to compare his pay to MPs and civil servants when he could very easily clear out his enormous desk and go get a job at some other bank, still get his £2 million paycheque, and leave RBS to flounder back into loss taking all our investment with it.

And maybe he still doesn’t deserve his bonus, and maybe the board of directors did get it wrong, but that doesn’t make the standard of debate which has so far surrounded that possibility any better.

This is as close as I’m getting to blogging about this.

I’m not going to get involved in the fucking stupid “rape debate”. It’s not a debate. There’s no debate. There’s everyone in the world sensibly agreeing that there are different severities of rape, all of which are really very bad, and a handful of imbeciles pointlessly bleating tautologies at them, while almost the whole of Westminster rallies around trying to pretend that anyone had done anything wrong because attacking and apologising are both easier than having anything as dangerous as a policy.

So instead I drew a picture. I hope you like it or have the emotional wherewithal to ignore it and get on with your day.

Can AV elect a second- or third-placed candidate?

Under First Past The Post (FPTP), everyone picks their favourite option, and the one with most votes wins. Simple, right? Under the Alternative Vote (AV), the one with fewest votes is eliminated, and this process repeats until one candidate has a majority — or until only one candidate is left; it makes no difference. No2AV will tell you that this can hand victory to the second- or third-placed candidate. But what does that mean? The winner is by definition the first-placed candidate — what they mean is that AV sometimes returns a winner who would not have won under FPTP. The Yes campaign will tell you that that is sort of the point — if AV always returned the same winner as FPTP, nobody would care which we used.

The thing is, elections are so engrained in the public consciousness that it’s hard to dislodge the idea that after one there’s a very clear “best candidate”, and any system that doesn’t elect that person is fundamentally broken. But is that true?

And what if there was more than just FPTP and AV on the ballot this May?

What if we added Runoff Voting? This is the system used in France, whereby the two most popular candidates after round one face a second round, the winner of which is duly elected. We could also add Approval Voting. This is essentially exactly the same as FPTP, but you’re allowed to vote for as many options as you like. Lastly, we could add Range Voting. With Range Voting, you can score each option, usually out of 10 or 100, and the one with the maximum score is the winner. There are still more options, but let’s stick to these five for now.

Let’s ask an imaginary population to vote on which system they want. The population is made up of:

40 “Reds”. The reds like FPTP, but would settle for Approval. They’ll have no truck with numbers or multiple rounds.
21 “Yellows”. The yellows would like Runoff voting, and would be happy enough with AV. They would settle for Approval, but not Range or FPTP.
20 “Greens”. The greens would like AV, and would be happy enough with Runoff. They too would settle for Approval, but not Range or FPTP.
19 “Blues”. The blues are desperate to have Range voting, but otherwise have identical preferences to the greens.

Let’s assume nobody votes tactically.

Clearly, FPTP has most votes. So that should win, right?

Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. “Having the most votes” is only how you win under FPTP. If we used Runoff voting, the red and yellow vote would get FPTP and Runoff into the second round, where the blues and greens would side with Runoff, granting it a 60:40 win.

This graph shows an interesting fact: even though FPTP got the most votes in the general ballot, the population as a whole prefers Runoff. But what would happen under AV?

In round one, Approval voting would be eliminated, as nobody voted for it. In round two, Range voting, with only the 19-strong blue vote to its name, would also be eliminated. In round three, with Range gone, the blues vote like the greens, taking AV up to 39 votes. This puts Runoff into last place, and it is eliminated. Round four, therefore, is between AV and FPTP. The reds stay loyal to FPTP, but the yellows, greens and blues all prefer AV, which wins with a 60:40 majority.

Again, it is clear that the population as a whole prefers AV to FPTP. In fact, the population as a whole also prefers Approval to FPTP. This is a serious flaw with FPTP: it is possible for the “Condorcet Loser” to win. The Condorcet Loser is any candidate who would lose a two-horse race against each of the other candidates. (In our hypothetical example, however, Range Voting is the Condorcet Loser and so FPTP has not messed up as badly as it might.) AV and Runoff voting are immune from electing the Condorcet Loser, because such a candidate would by definition be defeated in the final round (if they got there).

Let’s have a look at the less well-known systems now. Range Voting is the only system to measure strength of feeling. I mentioned earlier than the blues are desperate for Range to win — so they rate it a 10. Then, they rate AV 3, Runoff 2 and Approval 1 — as do the greens. The greens have opted not to give the full 10 points to any system. That is their right. The yellows vote in a similar way, giving Runoff 3 points, AV 2 and Approval 1. The reds give 3 points to FPTP, and two to Approval. Anything I haven’t mentioned gets zero points.

In total FPTP has 120 points, all from the reds. Approval has 140 points, from everyone. Runoff slightly beats it with 141, from the yellow, green and blues. AV does a little better with 159, from the same ballot papers. But the sheer strength of feeling from the blues is enough to hand Range Voting the win, with 190 points.

Even though the majority would rather have anything but Range Voting (i.e., it is the Condorcet Loser), the theory goes that Range would make the most total happiness, albeit concentrated in a small minority of voters.

Lastly, what would happen under Approval Voting?

Only the reds approve of FPTP. Everyone else approves of AV and Runoff voting. Range gets only 19 votes, from the blues, but since everybody would be happy with Approval voting, it scores an easy win.

All five systems have elected themselves — and yet the voters’ preferences are the same in each case. Obviously this population was engineered so this would happen, and it’s very unlikely in real life. But it should illustrate some of the problems with the current system, and indeed with all systems. It is mathematically impossible to design a system without tactical voting.

Here is the issue: looking at the voter’s preferences, I don’t think there’s a single system that clearly ought to win. No2AV would tell you FPTP should win because it “came first” in terms of first-preference votes, but 60% of the population would rather have Alternative, Runoff or Approval Voting, and it’s hard to argue that democracy dictates that they mustn’t.

This makes designing a fair system almost impossible. For example, a criterion mathematicians use to judge voting systems is “independence of irrelevant alternatives”. Range and Approval Voting satisfy this criterion: if any losing system were removed from the ballot, it would not affect the scores for the remaining ones and the result would be the same. Under FPTP, removing Runoff Voting from the ballot would hand the victory to AV. In this example, AV would elect itself with any combination of opponents, but this is not generally the case.

Even though all five systems elect different winners, none of them is inherently biased. Nor do any of them give any voters more than their fair share of sway over the result, whatever No2AV might tell you. Nor, whatever Yes To Fairer Votes may have you believe, are any of them a panacea that will automatically usher in a “new politics”. We simply have to agree a system beforehand, so that going into the election everyone knows the rules. That way, while the result may not be popular, at least everybody can accept that it is fair, and knows that they have a chance to do something about it the next time around.

Can AV rob a rightful winner of victory? Yes. But so can FPTP, and and at least AV will never elect the single least popular candidate.

Next he’ll be telling us that AV causes autism

The BBC have the text of Cameron’s anti-AV speech on their website. Mark’s already pointed out a rather stupid argument contained within it, wherein Cameron takes the most deliberately opaque paragraph from the most protracted explanation of AV that he can find, reads it to the crowd once, then says “do you understand that?” It’s dishonest, and it’s not the only thing about his speech that is dishonest.

[AV] will make some votes count more than others. … Supporters of unpopular parties end up having their votes counted a number of times, potentially deciding the outcome of an election, while people who back more popular parties only get one vote.

Why? Because if you vote for a mainstream candidate who is top of the ballot in the first round, your other preferences will never be counted. But if you vote for a fringe party who gets knocked out, your other preferences will be counted. In other words, you get another bite of the cherry.

I don’t see why voters of the BNP or Monster Raving Loony Party should get their votes counted more times than supporters of the Conservatives or for that matter Labour or Liberal Democrats.

The idea that everyone has an equal voice and an equal vote is deeply enshrined in our existing electoral system. The principle of one person, one vote is what makes our democracy fair. AV flies in the face of that.

The whole argument (which also forms David Allen Green’s attack on AV) seems to be based on a superficial and inaccurate conflation between a preference and a “vote”. It is taking a major failing of FPTP — that it doesn’t give you a say in whether you have a Labour or a Tory MP if you support the Lib Dems — and making it out to be not only reasonable but vital. You can’t make that case if you understand AV. AV is an instant run-off system, in which each voter gets one vote in each round. Being forced to switch to a second choice isn’t the same as having an extra vote, and only a liar or an idiot would say that it was.

Not only that, but it seems he tries to imply that AV would rig the ballot in favour of the BNP, even though later on he criticises it because it “will not increase the chances of smaller parties winning a seat. On the contrary, it could harm them.” He aims to show that AV is good for the bad kind of minor party but bad for the good kind. It’s dishonest.

Also dishonest is a recurring theme in Cameron’s speech, which says that:

AV is completely the wrong reform

That

Roy Jenkins, who chaired the Independent Commission on the Voting System, said: “On its own, AV would be unacceptable because of the danger … it might increase rather than reduce disproportionality.”

That

AV is a system that no one actually wants.

That

One of the board members of the Yes Campaign once said: “I’m sorry but I’m no fan of AV”.

That

last April, even Nick Clegg called it a “miserable little compromise”.

…and I couldn’t help thinking, maybe that’s why the Liberal Democrats actually campaigned for the Single Transferable Vote. AV is a halfway-house between FPTP and STV, a “miserable little compromise,” if you will. Cameron used his majority within the coalition to argue them down to AV, and now he’s using the weaknesses of the very compromise he forced on them to make sure they don’t even get that.

And then he has the nerve to say

The point about AV is that even the people calling for it really want something else, whether it’s a regional list system or the Single Transferable Vote. For most of them, it is their fourth, third, or at best second choice. And, as so often happens in elections using the AV system, on May 5th they want their second preference to come first.

I’m sorry. When it comes to our democracy, Britain shouldn’t have to settle for anyone’s second choice.

Am I alone in thinking that’s totally disingenuous? This is the one issue where the Tories and the Lib Dems openly disagree, and the Conservatives have managed to turn it into a battle between their position and a compromise between the two — and then attacked the new Lib Dem position for being a compromise.

It’s a really nasty trick to pull, and I think if I was Nick Clegg I’d be seriously questioning whether I could really trust my coalition partner — especially since Tory support has dropped to the point where they might lose an early election.

For completeness: they also have Clegg’s pro-AV speech which I’ve skimmed and seems a bit over the top but at least mostly honest.

How to Choose This May

Which is better, First Past The Post or Alternative Vote? A lot of people are arguing about exactly that, and as well as spouting all the usual bullshit, I think they’re getting quite a long way ahead of themselves. First, we need to define “better”. I think it boils down to this:

Your best strategy should always be to stand for election, and failing that, to vote for candidates in the order that you like them.

It turns out, though, that it’s much more complicated than that, to the point that there’s a whole branch of mathematics just for this. So, there’s already a list of criteria that good electoral systems should satisfy. They have fancy names and, because I think this stuff is interesting, I’ve paraphrased a few from Wikipedia:

The Condorcet (Winner) Criterion: if one candidate would beat each of the other candidates in a two-way poll, this candidate must win the election.
The Condorcet Loser Criterion: if one candidate would lose to each of the other candidates in a two-way poll, this candidate must not win the election.
The Consistency Criterion: imagine splitting the constituency in two. If both new constituencies would elect the same person, that person should also win in the real election.
The “Independence Of Clones” and “Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives” Criteria: if a candidate joins the race who is a clone of an existing candidate or who isn’t going to win, it must not affect the result.
The Monotonicity and Participation Criteria: in different ways, these essentially say that a candidate must never lose an election because you voted for them.

Now you have to decide which you think are important. You can’t have all of them. But decide now.

I think consistency is nice, but not a deal-breaker. Independence of clones and of irrelevant alternatives are pretty important. Everybody loses when a crap but distinctive candidate wins because several competent but similar ones split the sensible vote. I think the others, though, are really important. You can’t have someone lose an election despite being more popular than every other candidate. You can’t have someone win an election by being less popular than every other candidate. And you sure as hell can’t have someone lose an election who, had you not voted for them, would have won.

You may have different opinions about the above. Again, I encourage you to decide now, because in a moment I’m going to tell you which voting systems satisfy which criteria. No cheating, now.

Here are the ‘answers’:

	First Past The Post	Alternative Vote
Condorcet Winner	Neither
Condorcet Loser	No	Yes
Consistency	Yes	No
Clones	No	Yes
Irrelevant Alternatives	Neither
Monotonicity	Yes	No
Participation	Yes	No

I don’t know about you, but this table surprised me. I’d have got the left column pretty much bang on, but I honestly thought that Alternative Vote would get a tick for “independence to irrelevant alternatives”, and I was utterly convinced it would pass the Condorcet winner test. I was dead wrong. That Alternative Vote failed on the last two criteria was less surprising, since I’d never considered them before, but still a major shock — under the new system, you might be better off not voting! Sure, a vote for a rank outsider is a bit of a wasted trip under First Past The Post, but at least it won’t do any harm. Under AV, it just might.

Looking outside the two options we’ll be given in May, is there any system that won’t punish me for voting or for standing for election? Well, no. Range Voting seems pretty good — it fails the Condorcet criteria, but only when the preferences are so close it arguably shouldn’t elect the Condorcet winner — but nobody’s invented a voting system that ticks all the boxes above. It may well be impossible. I said this stuff was interesting, not uplifting.

I really thought this post would be strongly defending Alternative Vote, but now I don’t know what to think. I still think AV is better than First Past The Post, but I’m not thrilled with either. I think Alex Foster’s case on the Pod Delusion, that a vote for AV sends the right message to politicians, and that anyway AV is a useful first step towards genuinely better, multi-member or proportional systems, is the clincher. If we have any form of Proportional Representation, it’s much less important if the local MP is arguably not the most popular one on the ballot.

The main point, though, is that it matters how we ask the question. There have been four polls about AV. In three, the actual referendum question was used:

At present, the UK uses the “first past the post” system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the “alternative vote” system be used instead?

All three said that voters would slightly prefer AV. The fourth poll, by YouGov, used this question:

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat government are committed to holding a referendum on changing the electoral system from first-past-the-post (FPTP) to the alternative (AV). At the moment, under first-past-the-post (FPTP), voters select ONE candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins.

It has been suggested that this system should be replaced by the Alternative Vote (AV). Voters would RANK a number of candidates from a list. If a candidates wins more than half of the ‘1st’ votes, a winner is declared. If not, the least popular candidates are eliminated from the contest, and their supporters’ subsequent preferences counted and shared accordingly between the remaining candidates. This process continues until an outright winner is declared.

If a referendum were held tomorrow on whether to stick with first-past-the-post or switch to the Alternative Vote for electing MPs, how would you vote?

In this poll, “no” won. The anti-AV Labour MP Tom Harris summarised this as

The more AV is explained to voters, the less they like it.

Not meaning to patronise the general public, but I think Harris has massively overestimated their grasp of game theory. You may notice that support for AV was not much lower in YouGov’s poll than in the others. Certainly not enough to account for the increase in opposition to the change. Harris presumably thinks that around a fifth of the people who hadn’t previously thought about AV have read this précis, usefully evaluated the proposals, and decided, on balance, that monotonicity and participation are too valuable to lose. I think they’re just put off by long-winded explanations. It sounds complicated and offers no obvious benefits. It isn’t even obvious that it works at all. Nobody would support AV based on that synopsis except logicians and the insane. You might say I’m underestimating the public, but I include myself — I totally misjudged AV when given roughly the information in YouGov’s question.

In short, having a referendum on a question of algorithm design is a terrible idea and nobody would do it if they honestly thought it mattered a damn whether we use Alternative Vote or First Past The Post, but luckily, it doesn’t. They’re both total pants. Neither reliably elects the most popular candidate, both can be manipulated, and both promote unhealthy two-party dominance. Ignore the maths. Ignore the pros and cons of what you’re actually being asked about. None of that matters. For once in your electoral life, you’re free! Vote for ideology. Vote for vague emotional ideals of “hope” and “change”. Vote with your heart.

Because that’s how this result is going to be treated in Westminster and in the media, and because fuck it, you might as well.

The ☒ Factor

In the “finals” of The X Factor, you generally get three or four vaguely passable singers, a lot of dross, and a Jedward of some kind thrown in for comic effect.

In round one, you’ve not properly warmed to any of them. You’re not sure who’s the best. But Jedward are fun, and it’d be a shame if they went out in the first round, right? What I’m saying is that Jedward are likely to get the most votes in the first round. Some other act leaves.

This continues until some time towards the end, when Jedward crash out. It might be because people have had their fun and want a serious competition now, please, but I think John Sergeant-gate taught us that it isn’t always that. No, the thing that stops Jedward is simply that the taking things seriously vote is spread less thinly with each departing act. By the last few weeks, each remaining serious act has more support than the loyal band of novelty supporters.

The point is that even if Jedward are the most popular act in round one, and nobody changes their opinion between then and the grand final, Jedward still lose. That is because The X Factor operates a bastardised “run-off” voting system: excepting when the record company disagrees with the public vote and stages a judges’ vote-based intervention, every round the loser is eliminated until one act has more than 50% of the vote (or in this case until only one remains).

People say the public won’t understand the Alternative Vote system. Alternative Vote is an “instant run-off” system: it’s exactly like the voting in The X Factor, except that to save time, you write down your preferences in week one and ITV remember them and each week, casts your vote for your favourite remaining act. I put it to you that the British public already has a good grasp of run-off voting.

The Mass Libel Reform Blog — Fight for Free Speech

I don’t normally do this sort of mass-blog thing, but I’ll make an exception for this: today is the first anniversary of the report Free Speech is Not for Sale, which highlighted the oppressive nature of English libel law. In short, the law is extremely hostile to writers, while being unreasonably friendly towards powerful corporations and individuals who want to silence critics.

The cost of a libel case is staggering, even compared to fighting other sorts of court case and especially compared to libel cases in other countries. In fact, the cost can be 140 times that of a similar case in Europe. This wouldn’t be so bad, but (in part because the onus in an English libel case is on the defendant to prove what they say is true) a libel case brought against you is very difficult to win, and even if you do then you’re only likely to recover 70% of your costs. Simon Singh’s recent libel victory cost him personally £60,000, and prevented him from working for a full year. Most bloggers, who aren’t backed by publishers, simply can’t afford to win these cases, much less lose them, and can therefore be effectively silenced by the mere threat of a libel case — even when they’re obviously and demonstrably right. There is no right to free speech under these laws, and large organisations both know and exploit that fact.

This worries me as an English blogger, but the internet allows bloggers to reach a global audience, which gives the High Court in London a global reach. Anyone can be sued in London if their writing is available in England, and they routinely are — why bring a libel case anywhere but the most claimant-friendly court available? Had president Obama not signed the SPEECH Act into law, blocking oppressive foreign libel rulings from being enforced in the US, American newspapers would probably have blocked British readers from their websites rather than risk being sued here.

You can read more about the peculiar and grossly unfair nature of English libel law at the website of the Libel Reform Campaign. You will see that the campaign is not calling for the removal of libel law, but for a libel law that is fair and which would allow writers a reasonable opportunity to express their opinion and then defend it.

The good news is that the British Government has made a commitment to draft a bill that will reform libel, but it is essential that bloggers and their readers send a strong signal to politicians so that they follow through on this promise. You can do this by joining me and over 50,000 others who have signed the libel reform petition at http://www.libelreform.org/sign.

Remember, you can sign the petition whatever your nationality and wherever you live. Indeed, signatories from overseas remind British politicians that the English libel law is out of step with the rest of the free world.

The above is adapted from, and contains big, unedited chunks of, a template sent to bloggers a few days ago.

In Defence of the BBC’s Election Coverage

Since it’s now a bit more than three months since the election and the BBC still haven’t got round to replying to my email about the coverage, here it is in isolation:

Thank you for your impartial coverage of the general election which focussed on the important parts rather than frivolous nonsense.

This was exemplified by your coverage of the two high-profile Liberal Democrat losses, Dr Evan Harris and Lembit Opik. While large photos of each outgoing MP were on the screen, you rightly ignored Dr Harris’ place on the Science and Technology Subcommittee. You rightly paid no heed to his campaigning against religious interference in abortion law. You wisely didn’t mention his campaigning against NHS spending on unproven and disproven forms of alternative medicine. His work on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was surely dismissed, as was his outspoken opposition to the sacking of Professor Nutt. I thought you might have been taken in by his campaigning to reform our absurdly draconian libel laws, but no. Not you. With your superhuman wit and journalistic integrity you cut straight through all that tedious bullshit and reported the far more important fact that Mr Opik might have had sex with a minor pop star.

Twice.

Sirs, I salute you.