Who dominates the EU voting system?

At the weekend, a neighbour complained that her problem with the EU was “the way it’s run entirely by Germany” (“especially after what they did in the war”).

Another of my friends has commented on his Facebook timeline that the UK is always “quickly outvoted” (not borne out by our success rate, but never mind…).

In the European parliament it’s tricky to define what it means for the UK to win or lose a vote, because voting tends to be along the lines of party blocs rather than national lines. If the bloc the UK’s Conservative MEPs belong to abstains, the one our Labour MEPs belong to votes one way, and the bloc our UKIP MEPs belong to votes the other, which way did the UK vote?

It’s simpler – sort of – for the Council of Ministers. There, each country has effectively one representative, so it’s easy to define how the “UK” votes. But the rules for a majority are complicated, to make sure small countries such as Malta don’t get power out of proportion to their size but also don’t get bullied by the big players. One country, one vote would give small countries disproportionate power, but weighting the votes to effectively give one EU citizen one vote would let the representatives of the most populous countries ignore the little ones, and that’s unfair too. (Actually, it’s provable that any system would be unfair – the EU, just like the UK, simply has to choose the unfairness it can best live with.)

There are mathematical techniques for assessing the relative power of voters in complex voting systems. It’s not as simple as looking for simple majorities. If, for example, in the UK Labour got 45% of the parliamentary seats, Conservatives 45%, Liberal Democrats 6% and others 4%, Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats would all have equal power (and the others have none). Any two of those three could force a measure through (or block a measure); no one of them could do it alone (all this is ignoring backbench rebellions).

So instead of using simple counts of numbers, we need to use a voting power index, which measures how much power a voter has to actually sway the outcome of a vote. Voting power indexes are tricky to compute, but fortunately the Vienna University of Economics and Business has done it for us.

So who holds the power? Here are the power weightings for the most common system used in the Council of Ministers. France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom are in equal first place (with Spain and Poland close behind). Far from being a minor player, being pushed around, we’re one of the biggest players – we’re one of the ones doing the pushing.

Edit: Incorrect references to the Council of Europe corrected.

France	29
Germany	29
Italy	29
Un. Kingdom	29
Spain	27
Poland	27
Romania	14
Netherlands	13
Belgium	12
Greece	12
Portugal	12
Cz. Republic	12
Hungary	12
Austria	10
Sweden	10
Bulgaria	10
Denmark	7
Ireland	7
Finland	7
Lithuania	7
Slovakia	7
Luxembourg	4
Cyprus	4
Estonia	4
Latvia	4
Slovenia	4
Malta	3

Do equations show that large scale conspiracies will quickly reveal themselves?

I’m currently reading Ben Goldacre’s I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that, and had just read the piece about research showing that we tend to overlook holes in evidence if the evidence supports our preconceptions, when a link to an article claiming “Large scale conspiracies would quickly reveal themselves, equations show” appeared in my Facebook feed. “Physicists decided to test whether some science-related conspiracies alleged to exist were in fact tenable. The answer – they’d all have given themselves away in less than four years”, the article claimed. “Well, that supports my preconceptions”, I thought. “I wonder whether there are any holes in the evidence”.

Well, there are certainly some holes in the Science Daily reporting of the work – “physicists” turned out to be only one physicist, Dr. David Grimes, he turned out to have considered more than just science-related conspiracies (although he does state a particular interest science-related ones), and he theorized three closely related models, not just one as reported by Science Daily. But the original paper is freely available online, and is easily readable for those of us not daunted by a few statistical distributions. And it’s in a peer-reviewed publication, too, which is encouraging (though not as carefully proof-read as it might have been – I was amused by the suggestion of “a small devious cohort of rouge scientists”).

Dr. Grimes suggests that the chance of conspiracies being exposed by whistle blowers, as a function of time, is likely to follow one of three distributions, the choice of which depends on factors such as whether new people are recruited to the conspiracy and whether existing members are “rapidly removed due to internal friction or otherwise” (the plot of quite a few murder mysteries).

He then examined three conspiracies that have been exposed, used those to calibrate his model, then used the calibrated model to estimate how long it would take for various conspiracies to be exposed – that the moon-landings were faked, climate-change is a hoax, vaccination is dangerous and that a cure for cancer is being suppressed by vested interests.

I can see a few problems with this that could possibly be fixed, but one problem that I think holes the work beneath the waterline and sinks it completely.

Let’s look at some of the relatively fixable issues first.

1. Dr Grimes has calibrated his models, but he hasn’t verified them. The claim that the exposure of conspiracies will follow these models is purely theoretical and unconfirmed, and because of (3) below is likely to be over-simplistic.
2. Three sample points is nowhere near enough to calibrate three models, even if they are closely related, particularly as it’s not clear why those particular cases were chosen.
3. The models take no account of social differences in conspiracies, such as how cohesive the group of (supposed) conspirators are, how severe the consequences would be for a whistle-blower, and so on. Credit to Dr. Grimes – he does acknowledge this, noting that the model ” does not consider the dynamics, motivations and interactions of individual agents”. I would add “or groups of agents”, to cover the case where disparate communities – media, police and politicians, for example, or Templars, Rosicrucians and Freemasons – are presumed to have colluded in the conspiracy. There are good statistical techniques for dealing with these sorts of biases, which I expect Dr. Grimes knows as “a physicist and cancer researcher at Oxford University”, but if he needs any help I’m sure his fellow Guardian journalist Dr Ben Goldacre could give him some pointers.
4. The work seems to overestimate the effect of exposure. Dr. Grimes recognizes that “[t]he grim reality is that there appears to be a cohort so ideologically invested in a belief that for whom no reasoning will shift, their convictions impervious to the intrusions of reality” but actually a plausible response of the conspiracy theorists is that the conspiracies have been exposed (after all, how else would the conspiracy theorists know about them?) but the whistle-blowers have been discredited or ignored. And that response can’t be dismissed out of hand: in the case of the Hillsborough Disaster the conspiracy to cover up culpability for the deaths of 96 people and injuries to a further 766 persisted from 1989 to 2012 despite the refusal of many people with first-hand knowledge of what happened (the Liverpool fans present) to participate in the conspiracy from the outset. Zero-day whistle-blowers, if you like.

The fatal flaw, though, seems to be that the work assumes conspiracies that have been exposed are representative of all conspiracies. Again, to Dr. Grimes credit, he acknowledges this as an issue, but claims that because of pessimistic estimates elsewhere the resulting bias is not significant (unfortunately, without some way to estimate how likely exposure of conspiracies actually is there’s no way to tell whether the pessimism of Dr. Grimes’ estimates swamp the selection bias or the selection bias swamps the pessimism of the estimates) and because “even relatively small conspiracies (such as Watergate, for example) have historically been rapidly exposed” (but how can he know how many relatively small conspiracies have not been uncovered?).

But “how likely exposure of conspiracies actually is” is what we’re trying to find out. If we use it as an input we just get our assumption fed back to us as a result – Dr. Grimes’ argument is circular. If it is the case that most conspiracies are not exposed, the sampling bias could be severe, and a more accurate calibration of his model would give far lower likelihoods of conspiracies being exposed (or make such calibration impossible, because how could you get useful data on conspiracies that have not been exposed?) In short, if you assume that conspiracies are very likely to be exposed, Dr. Grimes’ methodology will tell you that conspiracies are very likely to be exposed, because the pessimism will swamp the sampling bias. If you assume that conspiracies are very unlikely to be exposed, Dr. Grimes’ methodology will tell you they are very unlikely to be exposed (or at very least, will not tell you you’re wrong), because the sampling bias will swamp the pessimism. The methodology simply feeds your preconceptions back to you as results, and so tells us nothing.

Well, not nothing: it tells us what Dr Grimes’ preconceptions are. They’re the same as mine. Which at least gives me a little bit of echo-chamber gratification, but isn’t much practical use.

More good than bad

Well, what a day to start blogging.

I spent the evening performing and MCing at a cabaret in memory of my longest standing and closest friend, Derek Collins, unaware of what was developing in Paris.

Profits from the evening went to a charity that had given Derek a lot of help. That’s not why I took part in the cabaret: I committed to it before I knew that would happen, so I’m not going to claim any credit for my charity work. But the event raised a bit of money for the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), which was a nice side-effect of what we – well, at least I – just did for fun and in memory of Derek. Hopefully it will help make someone’s life a little better.

All the news tonight is of terror and atrocity, which given the events of the night is completely right and proper. And of course, a little amateur cabaret in a cellar in London isn’t going to make the news anywhere.

But I wonder how many things happened this evening that made the world – at least somebody’s world a better place?

How many people dropped a few coins in a charity box?

How many people put their arms around someone who was hurting?

How many people made a meal for someone who was unable to do it?

How many people performed some random act of kindness?

How many people made the world better this evening?

If we add it all up, I’m convinced that the tiny acts of unreported good would far outweigh even the worst atrocities we see on the TV, read in our newsfeeds.

So while my thoughts are with those who have been injured, the loved ones of those killed, and those who will probably suffer in misdirected reprisals, I also remember this:

The news might tell me the truth, but it doesn’t tell me the whole truth.

Even in times of darkness, the good outweighs the bad.

Schoolboy Dream

This is my personal favourite of the song lyrics Derek Collins wrote, under the pen-name of David Anthony.

Schoolboy Dream

I looked into his eyes as he turned towards the mirror
And he couldn’t really hide it, ’cause the pain was getting clearer;
As you turned to shut him out of yet another situation
He said something in a murmer, then went off towards the station,
And I tried hard not to listen, but I’m sure I heard him say,

“If I thought it was more than a schoolboy dream,
A trick of the sun on a silver screen,
If I thought it was more than a wish from a well,
I’d be walking beside you today.”

He went from town to city in some desperate search for freedom
And he sang his song for ladies who would never really need him,
But their eyes would always draw him on like storm-lights in a harbour,
And he’d always come down crying on some dirty sidewalk later.
And if they ever stopped to listen, then I know they’d hear him say,

“If I thought it was more than a schoolboy dream,
A trick of the sun on a silver screen,
If I thought it was more than a wish from a well,
I’d be walking beside you today.”

The highway twists and wanders like some Eden-seeking serpent,
And night comes down to drown him in its all-concealing curtain.
And once again he’s drawn into another world of vision:
A murder on a hilltop and some distant sense of mission.
And talking in his sleep, the lady thought she heard him say,

“If I thought it was more than a schoolboy dream,
A trick of the sun on a silver screen,
If I thought it was more than a wish from a well,
I’d be walking beside you today.”

In Memoriam: Derek A Collins

A sad note on which to start a blog, but my longest-standing and closest friend died in August. I had the chance to speak to his daughter earlier this evening and got permission to post the eulogy I gave at his memorial service. Well, the script I prepared for his eulogy. I did deviate from it a bit, but this is what I planned to say.

I had wanted to pepper it with quotations from Irish poets, so I had spent the previous few evenings reading Seamus Heaney and WB Yeats. I didn’t find anything suitable, but it was a measure of the man that even after he’d gone he prompted me to read some wonderful poetry.

How does one describe what a close friend for almost fifty years means to you? Well, begin at the beginning I suppose, and for Derek – Degs – and me the beginning was a cloakroom at Wade Deacon Grammar School for Boys in Widnes, where both of us were hiding from bullies.  We quickly discovered that we were both “swots”; a terrible crime in school in the 1960s and the main reason we had to hide from bullies. We found ourselves kindred spirits from the start – similar taste in music, in TV programmes, in philosophy (well, what passes for philosophy when you’re 11 and 13).

One thing that was clear about Degs even then is that he was passionate about what he believed in, and he wasn’t shy about speaking to strangers – I remember him shouting “Jesus loves you” to passing strangers from a car window. Yes, we were proper evangelical fundamentalists back in our teens and twenties, something you’d hardly associate Degs with in his later years. He also made things happen: he was instrumental in getting a Christian Union set up in the school.

After we finished school, Degs always had his ear to the ground for good evangelical fun, be it tent missions, concerts, preachers, or a tiny Christian festival he persuaded me to go to in 1975 in a field in Odell, Northamptonshire. One stage, a couple of burger and doughnut vans: the second ever Greenbelt, a festival that became a spiritual home for Degs (as it was for myself); a festival that started questioning the simple certainties of the faith it started with at about the same time as we did, and moved with us to a faith that was more questions than answers, a faith built of hoping and yearning for something better, and built of trying to bring that about. When the festival started exploring LGBTQ+ issues, and allowed a “safe space” to be set up for “Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Christians and their friends”, there are no prizes for guessing who was there from day one, running the bookstall. There’s no separate “safe space” now, because the whole festival is a safe space, and Degs was a part of that from the ground up. He was due to be there last weekend, and his absence left a big hole in the festival for many of us.

Sadly, in his college days, Degs started to suffer the health problems that dogged him all his life. He was diagnosed as diabetic, but not before the symptoms had made him fall so far behind in the course that he had to rusticate and then drop out. It was a huge disappointment to such a natural academic to have that strand of his life cut off, although he did manage to pick it up again much later and get his degree in Irish Studies.

While I was at university, though, Degs often came down and slept on the floor of my room. After a while, though, I noticed he was spending a bit less time with me, and a lot more with a Modern European Studies student called Jan. It was the start of something wonderful, and if you’ve been following Degs’ page on Facebook you’ll have seen the embarrassing photos of me as best man at their wedding.  One thing led to the usual other, and along came Katy, at almost the same time as my son David came along, so as well as everything else we had in common, Degs and I faced fatherhood at the same time too. Katy: he was so proud of you and loved you so much. I know he used to say that for your 18^th birthday he’d buy you a ticket to anywhere you liked, as long as it was one-way, but he knew what he was doing. I’m sure it’s clear to you that he wasn’t getting rid of you. Anything but: he was giving you the independence you needed, and I know how close you’ve stayed. And when you thwarted his plans for a dynastic marriage to my David – by marrying someone else – I can’t imagine how you could have made a choice that pleased him more. With Ant, and the rest of the Coggins clan, he discovered that the sort of close community that Liverpool had left behind and that he dreamed of in Ireland was alive and well in Thurnscoe, and that you’d made him a part of it. I saw him buzz with excitement when he talked about it. So Ant, although I expect you married Katie to make her happy, I want to thank you for making Degs happy too.

Degs work situation was always unstable. He moved from job to job, cigarette factory to corner shop, but every now and then he managed to get something that involved being surrounded by books. Those who helped sort out his house are probably wincing at the memory, but Degs did like to be surrounded by books. CS Lewis said, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me”. Degs could just as easily have said that. The only jobs I heard him be enthusiastic about involved books or other publications, whether it was working in a bookshop in Liverpool, managing a Christian bookshop in North London, working in Mowbrays near Oxford Street, the bookroom at the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland, the bookroom at the London Centre for Spirituality, and others I’ve probably missed; sorry, “old men forget”.  But again, his health was to keep him from things he loved. Back trouble meant he couldn’t do stock work, and later his diabetes took its toll on his eyesight, and he struggled to read and type. And yes, that did get him down, and I understand he suffered from depression. So what does a person like Degs do when they get depressed? Mope? Become maudlin? Well, I never saw it. Instead,  he co-found a theatrical performance group addressing mental health issues, that’s what they do: Lithium Laughter. Once again, Degs saw a need and made things happen.

At this year’s Greenbelt, Kate Bottley said, “God does not want to water us down, he wants to use the best and worst of us. He wants us to be more authentically ourselves.” Degs didn’t need that advice. I’ve never known anyone who was as authentically himself as Degs was. Completely without façade, uncompromisingly himself. And I’ve never known anyone else as warm and natural with strangers as well as friends, who could talk to anyone and put them at their ease. At a folk festival last year, Degs and I were both impressed by one singer. I got her autograph on a copy of her CD that I bought. Degs got her email address and phone number! Woe betide, though, anyone who tried to bully or cheat him or those he cared about – the rest of us learned to just stand back and watch the fireworks.

Degs spoke sometimes of a vision of Heaven that he ascribed to Pete Hammond, though I learn that Degs adapted it and made it his own. He imagined being greeted at the pearly gates by Jesus, who would say something like, “Hello, mate. Sorry about all the crap. Come on in and have a pint.” Well, when we raise a glass to him later – or a mug of tea, he’d be happy with that – I hope he’s out there somewhere raising a divine jug of Heaven’s finest to us, too.

“Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”

2015-09-05