• Recipes | Doctor Who | BBC America
  Doctor Who recipes. Really. (And I do have a copy of Gary Downie's magnum opus on my shelves as well.)
  (tags: doctorwho cooking)

The former Unionist politician, Bill Craig, has died at the age of 86; see standard and surprisingly brief obituaries, no doubt written twenty years ago, by the BBC (with bonus video), the News Letter, the Belfast Telegraph, and the Guardian. Craig last won an election in 1975, wound up his political party in 1978 and fought his last election in 1982, and from the brevity of the obituaries so far (we may get more from the right-wing London papers) has clearly been written out of the standard summary of Northern Irish history.

But he was, for good or ill (let’s be clear – mostly for ill), a more important figure than that. We remember the DUP as having been historically the junior of the two Unionist parties until they overtook the UUP a few years ago; but from the mid-1970s perspective, the DUP were level pegging not with the UUP but with Craig’s Vanguard movement/party. In the 1973 Assembly election, Craig won seven seats to Paisley’s eight; in both of the 1974 Westminster elections, he won his own seat in East Belfat, Robert Bradford’s in South Belfast and John Dunlop’s in Mid Ulster, three to Paisley’s one; and in the Convention election of 1975, though Vanguard polled slightly less than the DUP, they won 14 seats to the DUP’s 12. Perhaps significantly, it’s difficult to rate the party’s performance at the 1973 local council elections, as many councillors elected as ‘Loyalists’ or ‘Unionists’ seem to have drifted in and out of Vanguard; other parties were more disciplined about who was in and who was out.

Craig was, however, clearly better at the tactics than the strategy. Having played a key role in provoking confrontation with Nationalists in the 1960s and in rousing the Loyalist masses to bring down both the original Stormont in 1972 and the power-sharing executive in 1974, he allowed himself to be trapped by Paisley as an apparent compromiser at the Convention in 1976, and Vanguard split, Craig carrying a minority with him (his deputy leader being one David Trimble) while the more hardline majority group, naming itself (with no apparent irony) the United Ulster Unionist Party, was led by the former Vanguard deputy leader Ernest Baird (with Reg Empey as its own deputy leader). Neither faction did well in the 1977 council elections, the UUUP winning a mere 12 seats out of 526 and Vanguard only 5; Craig and Trimble wound up Vanguard and rejoined the UUP at that point, while the UUUP staggered on until 1984. Both Trimble and Empey went on to lead the UUP; Baird died back in 2003, and Craig last weekend. 

For all its rather unpleasantly uniformed thuggish glamour, Vanguard was in some ways a broad church, and Craig himself was a bit of an internationalist. His wife was German, and taught her native language to adults at QUB (her students including both my father and James O’Fee, whose mother had served as a Vanguard councillor). Craig campaigned in favour of the UK staying in the European Economic Community (as it then was) in the 1975 referendum, and was nominated as one of the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 1977 until he lost his East Belfast seat (to Peter Robinson, by 64 votes) in the 1979 election. Back in the 1970s, neither Ulster Unionists nor Westminster Tories had yet become hypnotised by the sterile nationalism and Euro-phobia that both are obsessed with today, and there was a Unionist worldview that quite sincerely saw no inconsistency between fighting off Rome Rule at home and collaboration with European allies abroad. In fairness, Irish nationalism was a very different thing back then as well.

It’s a little startling to discover that I have actually got through an entire category of this year’s Hugo nominations already. For the last few years, the Doctor Who episodes which made the shortlist shared their billing with episodes from other TV shows which I had not seen; this year, the two extras are a 15 minute animated film and a YouTube video, so I can jump right in and allocate my votes.

5) Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury. This is a joyous celebration of fandom and of the life of one of the great survivors of sf. I loved it and am glad it has been nominated, but I will give it only my fifth preference. I am enough of a diehard Who fan to rank the Who episodes higher, and much though I enjoyed this, I don’t think it represents the best of short form dramatic sf in the year 2010.

I was also at first a bit confused as to whether it was really eligible. The Hugo Awards site states that "While the World Science Fiction Society sponsors the Hugos, they are not limited to sf. Works of fantasy or horror are eligible if the members of the Worldcon think they are eligible." This is all very well, but it’s really difficult to see how Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury qualifies as a work of fantasy or horror, let alone sf, at least as those terms are usually understood by fandom.

However all is made clear by the WSFS constitution itself, which expands eligibility for the shorter BDP category to "Any television program or other production, with a complete running time of 90 minutes or less, in any medium of dramatized science fiction, fantasy or related subjects" – and lust for Ray Bradbury is very definitely a related subject; the possibility that people might someday want to nominate a dramatic presentation on a subject related to sf or fantasy, rather than one which is sfnal in itself, perhaps did not occur to the writers of the Hugo Awards site, and I can’t really blame them – I would have thought it vanishingly unlikely myself before this came out last August.

4) Doctor Who: A Christmas Carol. Don’t get me wrong – this was a lovely episode of Doctor Who and just right for Christmas evening. But as a work of SF, I think the other nominees are better.

3) Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang. This will probably win, but I’m ranking it third. I hugely enjoyed it, especially Amy’s "Something borrowed – something blue" line at the end, and it was far better disciplined than most of the Russell T. Davies season finales, but that is not setting the bar very high.

2) The Lost Thing. I hadn’t read Shaun Tan’s book, and saw this only after the hype about it winning the Oscar for best Animated Film had died down, but I thought it was beautiful and heartily recommend it – a story of a boy who finds a Thing, half hermit crab and half giant coffee pot, on an Australian beach and then tries to find a home for it. Really rather special.

1) Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor. Yes, I do plan to give my first preference to the writer of The Tall Guy, Blackadder, Mr. Bean, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and The Vicar of Dibley. (Not forgetting his first great work with The Heebeegeebees.) I thought this was the outstanding Who episode of last year, the best since Blink, and my biggest difficulty in deciding which others to nominate for the Hugos was a fear that if I nominated any of them, Vincent might be crowded out. But luckily we got through that stage OK; hopefully the Alternative Vote will see the award go where it ought.

So, am I mad? Or just deluded?

i) births and deaths

26 April 1928: birth of Donald Cotton, who wrote The Myth Makers (1965) and The Gunfighters (1966) as well as the novelisations of both stories and of The Romans (1965), three of the best Who novelisations in the range.

26 April 1975: death of Kevin Lindsay, who played Linx in The Time Warrior (1973-74), Cho Je in Planet of the Spiders (1974), and Styre/The Marshal in The Sontaran Experiment (1975).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

26 April 1969: broadcast of second episode of The War Games. The Doctor and friends, including Carstairs and Lady Jennifer, escape in an ambulance but are confronted by Roman soldiers.

26 April 1975: broadcast of second episode of Revenge of the Cybermen. Harry and Sarah are on Voga; the Doctor tries to repair the transmat; and the Cybermen arrive.

26 April 2002: webcast of “Death Comes to Time Part 2”, twelfth episode of Death Comes to Time.

• Archbishop of Canterbury's Easter 2011 sermon
  Quotes Doctor Who (specifically "The Happiness Patrol"). Really.
  (tags: doctorwho religion)
• The Political Studies Association
  Alan Renwick's analysis of the Alternative Vote as an electoral system.
  (tags: avreferendum)
• LotR re-read: Concluding Thoughts | tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts
  Kate Nepveu has finished re-reading The Lord of the Rings.
  (tags: tolkien sf)
• The Valve – A Literary Organ | The Shakespeare-didn’t-write-Shakespeare crowd
  Oxfordian madness and Adam Roberts.
  (tags: shakespeare)
• In Which I am Unconvinced by The Daughter of Time | Super Doomed Planet
  Wesley Osam looks at Richard III and Josephine Tey.
  (tags: history)
• jblum: Doctor Who 6×01: The Impossible Astronaut
  Long but profound analysis by Who author Jonathan Blum.
  (tags: doctorwho)

I think this will prove to be the gateway moment. There will be a certain number of people who watched the first part last week and gave up, finding it all too confusing; but I think anyone who stuck it out to this week’s episode will now be hooked for the rest of the series. (I noticed that we go straight into the opening titles this week, no concession for anyone who didn’t catch it last time.)

I thought this was a better piece of television than last week’s first episode. We have Daenerys taking the first steps to becoming more sexually and politically confident; we have Catelyn setting off down the Kingsroad herself to warn her family of the danger that awaits them; and we have the crucial moment of the beheading of Sansa’a wolf, the result of a childish squabble which escalates to a political crisis, and also echoe the beheading at the very start of the story.

Once again, Peter Dinklage as Tyrion is barely in it but is brilliant. Michelle Fairley and Sean Bean are much better apart than together. The one weak link seemed to me Kit Harington as Jon Snow; hopefully he’ll grow into it. (And I can’t lay my hands on my copy of the book now to see if Eddard promises to tell him about his mother in the original as well; please enlighten me in comments.)

Anyway, look forward to the next episodes, with more confidence than I felt last week.

i) births and deaths

25 April 1923: birth of Paul Whitsun-Jones, who played the Squire in The Smugglers (1966) and the Marshal in The Mutants (1972).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

25 April 1964: broadcast of "The Screaming Jungle", third episode of the story we now call The Keys of Marinus. The second Key is hidden in a jungle full of mobile carnivorous plants.

25 April 1970: broadcast of sixth episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor finds that the aliens are keeping the original astronauts hostage, but is kidnapped by Carrington on his return.

A Song for Arbonne is set in a vaguely parallel world, a story of conflict between the free loving Provençal-ish people of Arbonne and the nassty Norman-type bigots of Gorhaut, with pseudo-Celts, pseudo-Italians, pseudo-Spaniards and pseudo-Germans as well. The exiled northern aristocrat who appreciates southern music is the central character, and you know from quite early on how it’s likely to end (and it duly does end that way), yet I found it totally gripping (with only one significant flaw – the central character’s father is an eeevil high priest who is really a bit too eeevil). Excellent stuff.

I’ve been trying to work out why epic fantasy doesn’t usually work for me, with the exception of a few writers, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, and Guy Gavriel Kay. (For example, I recently bounced off Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight and Steven Brust’s Taltos books.) Haven’t yet come to any conclusions, though.

This is one of the classic chapters of Decline and Fall, and also one of the classic accounts of the life of Mahomet (sic) and the early years of Islam. It is very readable – for once, Gibbon is not assuming much prior knowledge from the reader, and so he shows off his own reading in the best possible way. Although it’s obviously a geographical jump away from the main narrative, I think I would heartily recommend it to anyone wondering if Gibbon is for them – as long as they are prepared to go through 81 pages, including 187 footnotes.

I’ve consistently enjoyed Simon Messingham’s other Doctor Who books, and this one was no exception: essentially a rewriting of Colony in Space to make it much much better, with the Master out of it entirely and a single bloc of colonists and management faced with indigenous aliens who have acquired strange powers. Messingham succeeds in drawing convincing characters inhabiting his newly constructed colonial settlement, with the Doctor and Sam appearing among them just as the situation starts to get bad. Rather a good sf novel on its own merits.

I bought this I think on a recommendation from Ken MacLeod, and I am very glad he suggested it to me. It’s a low-key, subtle, short novel about a man and woman who wake up in a motel together one day in 1957 with no memory of each other, or of anything that has happened since 1946; and they have to explain 1950s America to themselves, and themselves to each other, before discovering what has actually happened to them. The alert reader will work out what the answer probably is by about halfway through the book, but the atmospherics are fantastic. I see that Sohl was more successful as a TV scriptwriter for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone and even Star Trek, so will look out for his stuff in future.

…from Fred Astaire!

i) births and deaths

24 April 2008: death of Tristram Cary, who wrote incidental music for six First Doctor stories and two later ones.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

24 April 1965: broadcast of “The Space Museum”, first episode of the story we now call The Space Museum. The Tardis jumps a time-track and the crew find themselves in a museum where they cannot interact with the locals and they themselves appear on display.

24 April 1971: broadcast of third episode of Colony in Space. The Doctor and the colonists take control of the IMC ship, but Jo is in the hands of the primitives.

24 April 2010: broadcast of The Time Of Angels. The Doctor, Amy, and River Song find themselves trapped on the Byzantium with armed Clerics and the Weeping Angels.

iii) date specified in canon

24 April 2010: marriage of Bernice Summerfield and Jason Kane, as described in Paul Cornell’s 1996 novel Happy Endings. (I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to reveal that things didn’t really work out between them.)

• Jason O Mahony » Blog Archive » For my British Readers: Before you vote on AV, ask someone who has used it.
  …those bizarre arguments tend to be made by professional politicians who really don’t like the increased choice that AV gives to voters. Every argument they make against AV seems to have at its heart the point that “You the voter should not be allowed think or do that”. Voters, on the other hand, voting under an AV system, think “I really like her, he’s okay, and I can’t stand that other guy with the beard”.  The professional politicians on the No side just hate that voters should be given permission by AV to even think like that.
  (tags: avreferendum)

In case you hadn’t heard:

Best Novel: Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House – congratulations, sir!

Best Short Fiction: “The Shipmaker”, by Aliette de Bodard.

Best Art: Joey Hi-Fi’s cover for Zoo City.

Best Non-Fiction: Paul Kincaid’s Blogging the Hugos – at least I gave this my first preference.

Not a bad set of results at all.

A couple of interesting things about this annual. For the first time it features behind-the-scenes articles on how the TV show is made, including interviews with Simon MacDonald of Visual Effects, Janet Budden and Odile Dicks-Mireaux about design for Castrovalva, and inevitably JNT himself who gets as much space as the others combined. The filler fluff seems to have otherwise been cut back and the stories are decent enough – the first one in particular is rather long by DW Annual standards. All stories feature Nyssa and Tegan, and the comic strip (only one this year) has Adric as well; and the last story features the Master kidnapping planes taking off from Heathrow, so completely different from any recently shown TV story then. The art is decent with the companions and Doctor looking more or less like themselves (though the Master looks more Delgado than Ainley).

To be honest I was a little underwhelmed by this book, set in the present day, featuring an Algerian refugee living in Chicago who turns out to have been genetically programmed for permanent happiness and ends up fleeing her own sudden celebrity. I thought it was charming enough but not terribly profound, and the author’s appearances in parentheses wondering about what he will write next seemed to me rather precious. At least it’s not very long.

That means I’ve now read all six shortlisted novels for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award (which will be announced on Wednesday). They fall pretty easily into three categories:

Underwhelming – Generosity, by Richard Powers, and Lightborn, by Tricia Sullivan

Good, but seem odd inclusions on the shortlist – Monsters of Men, by Patrick Ness and Declare, by Tim Powers

Excellent, and I hope one of them wins: Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes and The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald. Local pride would incline me towards The Dervish House. Good luck to ’em all.

What if the Silurians had killed the Third Doctor in the 1970s and taken over the earth, leaving the Brigadier and Liz Shaw as leaders of a hunted and dwindling human resistance? Jim Mortimore brings the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Benny to a parallel universe to find out. It was particularly interesting to read it soon after listening to a slightly different alternate timeline for Liz (The Sentinels of The New Dawn) and also the Ace-in-devastated-England stories, Project: Destiny and A Death in the Family, which Big Finish did last year. Mortimore writes engagingly and I kept turning the pages, but I was not totally convinced by some of the details – the use of the Tardis to sort things out at the end, or the Jo Grant time line, or the plausibility of two decades of human resistance (including a functioning nuclear submarine). Still, a pleasing read, with the ending setting up (I suppose) a story arc for the next few novels.

i) births and deaths

23 April 1975: death of William Hartnell, who played the First Doctor from 1963 to 1966 and again in 1972.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

23 April 1966: broadcast of “The Final Test”, fourth episode of the story we now call The Celestial Toymaker. Dodo and Steven defeat Cyril the schoolboy at Tardis Hopscotch, and the Doctor solves the Trilogic Game; they escape.

23 April 2005: broadcast of World War Three. The Doctor, Rose and Mickey defeat the Slitheen by hacking into UNIT’s computers.

23 April 2011: broadcast of The Impossible Astronaut.

• Stephen Lillie, Manila: Marshall Islands at risk from climate change
  A British diplomat visits Majuro.
  (tags: climatechange)
• CHERNOBYL: 25 YEARS LATER
  Pavol Demeš visits Chernobyl, 25 years on.
  (tags: ukraine nuclear)
• Hugo Humiliation : Uncertain Principles
  Chad Orzel reacts to my Hugos post with a confession of his own.
  (tags: sf)
• Reading the Hugo Winners | Sphaerula
  Conrad Halling reacts to my Hugo post (and has some complaints about Livejournal).
  (tags: sf)
• life and opinions of andrew rilstone: What if they gave an election an no-one came (3)
  "The No-To-AV campaign leaflet is quite the most hateful document I have ever read, and I speak as one who has made a special study of the works of Dave Sim, and once read the Daily Express every day for a month."
  (tags: avreferendum ukpolitics)

This post locked for obvious reasons.

Ire

Some bloke called Marios Evriviadis, an assistant lecturer in international politics at a college in Athens which I have not heard of, has written a long screed about evil foreign pseudo-NGOs meddling with the Cyprus situation (can’t find the original but here is one of the places). As sometimes happens, my name is mentioned, which is what triggered my google-fu; I was surprised on running it through the online translator to discover that I apparently was forced out of my last job due to pressure from the Turkish government. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and I wonder if Mr Evridiadis has actually been misinformed by someone claiming to know the facts, or (more likely) if he has simply invented it in the expectation that nobody cold challenge his good story. I posted a brief statement in response, on those sites where it was actually possible to do so, and emailed Mr Evriviadis directly demanding a retraction, though I don’t expect to hear back.

Glee

I was also a little alarmed to receive from Chambré Public Affairs their election guide to the Northern Ireland Assembly election on 5 May. In general I like their work and approach, and I go back a long way with Will Chambré, the boss, who I played with when we were about seven. But this seemed to me to be treading a bit on my own territory, presenting a guide to each of the 18 electoral districts and speculating on the results. I was worried either that they might have copied my own material or, worse, that they might have done their own work and done it better.

But I was reassured on looking through their guide over lunch. Not only is it not ripped off from my own site, it is definitely not as good, with confusing statistics provided and some significant inaccuracies in the non-mathematical information. I note that it’s not downloadable from their own website (I was sent it by email), and wonder if Will has retrospectively pulled the plug on it. (It’s very bad of me to feel glee at someone else’s project not working out well, but sometimes I am a bad person.)

i) births and deaths

22 April 1942: birth of Denis Lill, who played Dr. Fendleman in Image of the Fendahl (1977) and Sir George Hutchinson in The Awakening (1984).

22 April 1984: birth of Michelle Ryan, who played Christina de Souza in Planet of the Dead (2009).

22 April 1989: death of Kenny McBain, who directed The Horns of Nimon (1979-80).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

22 April 1967: broadcast of third episode of The Faceless Ones. The Doctor convinces the Commandant to let him investigate the mysterious disappearances.

22 April 1972: broadcast of third episode of The Mutants. Jo, the doctor, Cotton and Stubbs are trapped in the caves by the Marshall, with gas closing in.

22 April 2006: broadcast of Tooth and Claw. The Doctor and Rose save Queen Victoria from werewolves; she founds the Torchwood Institute.

(Odd coincidence that Pauline Collins features in two episodes shown exactly 39 years apart.)

• YouTube – Elisabeth Sladen tribute from David Tennant
  David Tennant's tribute to Elisabeth Sladen
  (tags: doctorwho elisabethsladen)
• The Y Article – By John Norris | Foreign Policy
  The report places considerable emphasis on the importance of achieving a more sustainable approach to security, energy, agriculture, and the environment. Again, it is important to stress that this narrative was penned by senior military thinkers, not the Sierra Club. The simple fact is that any clear-eyed analysis pretty quickly comes to the same conclusion: The United States has established an incentive system that just doesn't make any sense. It continues to pour tens of billions of dollars into agricultural and oil subsidies every single year even as these subsidies make the gravity of the environmental, health, and land-use problems the country faces in the future ever graver.
  (tags: usa)

i) births and deaths

21 April 1927: birth of Gerald Flood, who played Kamelion in 1983 and 1984, and also King John in The King’s Demons (1983).

21 April 1935: birth of Anthony Read, script editor of Doctor Who from Underworld (1978) to The Armageddon Factor (1979), co-writer of The Invasion of Time (1978) and writer of The Horns of Nimon (1979-80).

21 April 2002: death of Terry Walsh, stuntman and actor in many Old Who stories.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

21 April 1973: broadcast of third episode of Planet of the Daleks. The Doctor and the Thals escape from the Dalek base.

21 April 2007: broadcast of Daleks in Manhattan. The Doctor and Martha land in New York in 1930 where the Daleks are attempting to merge with humans.

• soniclipstick: Sarah Jane Field Report – 20th April 2011 – the Tribute Edition, part 1
  Big list of tributes – the ones that caught my eye listed separately.
  (tags: elisabethsladen)
• YouTube – Elisabeth Sladen has died. Russell T Davies speaks (BBC News, 19.4.11)
  BBC / Russell T Davies tribute
  (tags: elisabethsladen)
• iainjcoleman: Elisabeth Sladen
  Iain Coleman's tribute
  (tags: elisabethsladen)
• rarelylynne: Thank you, Elisabeth Sladen
  Lynne Thomas' tribute.
  (tags: elisabethsladen)
• The Doctor Who News Page: Doctors Pay Tribute to Elisabeth Sladen
  The Doctors' tributes.
  (tags: elisabethsladen)
• Tom Baker Newsletter | Latest news | Lis Sladen | Sarah Jane
  Tom Baker's tribute.
  (tags: elisabethsladen)
• The Very Fluffy Diary of Millennium Dome, Elephant: Day 3761: A Tear, Sarah Jane?
  Millennium Elephant's tribute.
  (tags: elisabethsladen)

I write from London, where I will be taking young F to the Doctor Who Experience this morning, after last night’s unexpected and very sad news that Elisabeth Sladen is no more. There are some lovely tributes to her already: see here, here, Ian here, here and Jennie here.

For myself, she is the first Classic Who companion who I remember clearly. Numerous female fans have written of her importance as a role model for girls, but this was not absent from the way we boys related to her either – being the Doctor’s friend, the one who gets to travel with him for fun and danger, was a cause of envy and emulation. Her relationship with the Doctor taught me important lessons about mentoring which I try to implement in my life to this day. As I’ve commented before, her character really blossomed in the Sarah Jane Adventures when she acquired a group to mentor in her own turn, rather than being saddled with the chinless wonders she was given as comic relief in the first K9 spinoff and the 1990s Pertwee audios.

I’ve been trying to identify my own favourite Elisabeth Sladen moments. Her two farewells, of course, in The Hand of Fear and School ReunionPyramids of MarsDeath to the DaleksThe Monster of PeladonEnemy of the BaneSarah Jane Smith audio plays. But if you want to listen to a lesser-known jewel of Elisabeth Sladen, in I think her only appearance in the Whoniverse where she does not play Sarah or her double, I strongly recommend you get hold of Walking to Babylon (will cost you a fiver), one of the very first Big Finish audios, adapted by Jacqeline Rayner from a Kate Orman novel about Bernice Summerfield, where she plays the ancient priestess Ninan-ashtammu and does it superbly. There’s always more of her material out there if you know where to look.

The BBC faces a tough choice now about the Sarah Jane Adventures, in that apparently half of the next series had already been filmed. In my own view there are only two real options: leave it at the end of Series Four (as Big Finish left her at the end of their sequence of audios), or engineer some teachable moment about Sarah Jane’s own demise. The latter is much trickier, yet I somehow hope they do it, and do it well; Sarah Jane Smith and Elisabeth Sladen deserve no less.

i) births and deaths

I’ll comment more later, but like everyone else I was very sad to see that Elisabeth Sladen’s name is now in the minus column as well.

20 April 1951: birth of Louise Jameson, who played the Fourth Doctor companion Leela from 1977 to 1978.

ii) broadcast and publication anniversaries

20 April 1968: broadcast of sixth episode of Fury from the DeepThe Making of Doctor Who by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks, the first book about the show.

20 April 1974: broadcast of fifth episode of The Monster of Peladon. Eckersley’s treachery is revealed.

• Inequality: The 1% solution
  I don't expect my colleague to share all my beliefs about how to weigh the political equality of citizens against the freedom of billionaires to spend their money on politics. But I do think that if we don't agree that rich people have more political power than poor people and that they use that power to pursue their economic interests, then we've really got a communications problem.
  (tags: us economics)

(Written for Stratagem, 19 April 2011)

Boundary changes are both a curse and a blessing for the psephologist. The process of sitting down with copies of the maps of changed districts, and allocate votes for the various parties in past elections to small fragments of constituencies, and then adding them up and trying to believe the answer, is one of mind-numbing complexity. On the other hand, one tends to find that very few other people have tried it, and that fortunately those who do tend to reach much the same conclusions.

The boundaries for this year’s Assembly elections are being used for the second time, following last year’s Westminster election, and probably for the last time, assuming that the House of Commons is reduced to 600 MPs as scheduled and that there is no premature dissolution. They replaced the 18-seat boundaries which had been used for every election from 1996 to 2007. In some cases – the five south-western constituencies, and North Down – there was in fact no change. Some of the other seats, however, were quite drastically altered.

The biggest net change is to Strangford, where seven Castlereagh wards were moved to the Belfast constituencies in return for three South Down wards being added at the other end. I make the net shift of 2007 voters about 3,000 unionist votes (2,400 DUP and 600 UUP) out, about 200 nationalist votes (mostly SF, though they are still a long way behind) coming in, and Alliance down by a net 800 or 900. Given that the seat had the closest result in the entire 2007 election, the DUP’s Michelle McIlveen defeating the SDLP’s Joe Boyle by a mere 31.05 votes, one has to count it as rather likely that the SDLP will make the breakthrough here which they have been close to in the last few elections.

The second biggest change is East Belfast, where five of those Castlereagh wards are added from Strangford at the cost of two going to South Belfast. Here I make the net change of voters 3,600 extra unionists, based on their 2007 performance (2,600 DUP, 800 UUP and 200 others); 300 fewer nationalists (200 SF, 100 SDLP); and 200 more Alliance. These shifts are, however, eclipsed by the massive change in voter behaviour which saw Naomi Long elected Alliance’s first Member of Parliament in 2010, defeating DUP leader Peter Robinson; the 2007 results are of limited use as a guide to voting in 2011.

North Belfast is one seat where, though the changes on the ground are drastic, with six Newtownabbey wards being added, the electoral consequences are fairly minimal. I reckon that SF and the DUP in North Belfast both gain 1500 voters who supported them elsewhere in 2007; but the SDLP gain 1000, the UUP 900 and Alliance 700. It barely changes the percentage vote share for the parties.

South Antrim is a slightly different matter. It loses five wards to North Belfast and gains one from Lagan Valley; I make the net shifts 800 fewer unionist voters from 2007 (fairly equally split between DUP and UUP), 500 fewer Alliance voters and 1,500 fewer nationalist voters (perhaps 850 SF to 650 SDLP). In 2007, the SDLP’s Thomas Burns beat the DUP’s Mel Lucas for the last seat by less than 1,200 votes, so all one can say is that his defence of his seat has been made tougher.

South Belfast gains two wards from East Belfast and two from Castlereagh. By my count they have 2,200 unionist voters (1,600 DUP and 600 UUP) in 2007, 1,100 nationalist voters (700 SF and 400 SDLP) and also 700 Alliance voters. In 2007, Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey was only 700 votes ahead of the second DUP candidate, Christopher Stalford, so again his defence has been made tougher.

Lagan Valley, as noted above, loses a ward to South Antrim and, more significantly, one-and-a-half wards to West Belfast. I reckon that removes 1,200 unionist voters (900 DUP and 300 UUP), little difference to Alliance (for whom the areas in question are not hotbeds of support) and 3,800 nationalist voters (2,400 SF, and 1,400 SDLP) – this is almost half of the 7,900 Nationalist voters of 2007, and exactly half of the SDLP’s support. It’s very difficult to see a nationalist seat being retained in Lagan Valley in that context.

East Antrim, however, goes the other way, losing one ward to North Belfast and gaining three from North Antrim, with a net loss of 900 unionist votes (600 DUP and 300 UUP) and 200 Alliance votes, and a net gain of 1,600 nationalist votes (900 SF, 700 SDLP). The SDLP missed their seat here by less than 900 votes in 2007; if they can remain the larger nationalist party (which they were not in 2010) they should be able to make a gain.

West Belfast gains those one-and-a-half wards from Lagan Valley and thus also gains 400 unionist votes (300 DUP and 100 UUP) and 2,800 nationalist votes (1,800 SF and 1,000 SDLP). I don’t see that changing the results very much.

South Down loses three wards to Strangford. I reckon that the 2007 levels of support in the area in question was 2,700 unionists (1,700 DUP and 1,000 UUP) and 1,000 nationalists (evenly divided). This may be enough to gain nationalists a seat, but it may not – the UUP’s John McCallister beat the SDLP’s Michael Carr for the last seat by over 3,000 votes in 2007, which looks on the face of it like a sufficient cushion.

East Londonderry and Foyle have a straight transfer of two wards to the former from the latter. I make the 2007 results in the area concerned about 700 unionists (600 DUP and 100 UUP), and 2000 nationalists, equally split between the two main parties. (Again, not a strong area for Alliance.) This doesn’t make much difference in Foyle; it nudges nationalists closer to a third seat in East Londonderry, but probably not close enough.

Finally, North Antrim is very much affected by the loss of three Moyle wards to East Antrim: a heavily nationalist area, I make the shift 900 SF voters, 700 SDLP voters and a handful of unionists. The SDLP’s Declan O’Loan had a comfortable margin of more than 2,000 votes over the DUP’s Deirdre Nelson, but that becomes much less comfortable under the new boundaries.

In summary, one can see the boundary changes having the following likely effects:

Unionist gain from nationalists: almost certain in Lagan Valley, possible in South Antrim, South Belfast, and North Antrim.

Nationalist gain from unionists: almost certain in Strangford and East Antrim (though Alliance seats in both are also potentially at risk), possible in South Down.

But of course, this analysis is based on voters supporting the same parties in 2011 as they did in 2007, whatever the boundaries may be; and we can be pretty certain that that will not happen.

broadcast anniversaries

19 April 1969: broadcast of first episode of The War Games. The Tardis lands in what appears to be a first world war battlefield, and the Doctor is sentenced to death by firing squad.

19 April 1975: broadcast of first episode of Revenge of the Cybermen. The Doctor, Harry and Sarah arrive at Space Beacon Nerva to find many dead crew members, a mysterious golden asteroid and Cybermats.

19 April 2002: webcast of “Death Comes to Time, Part 1”, which is, confusingly, the eleventh episode of Death Comes to Time.

19 April 2008: broadcast of Planet of the Ood. The Doctor and Donna visit the Ood Sphere and liberate the Ood from their human masters.