Everyone else is linking to these, but I will too: two brilliant scenes made for the DVD of the most recent series of Doctor Who, the first of which could actually be a fairly good introduction to Doctor Who for people who know nothing about it:
And the second will go some way to reconciling fans of Old Who with the latest version:
Brilliant stuff.
i) births and deaths
7 November 1950: birth of Lindsay Duncan, who played Adelaide Brooke in The Waters of Mars (2009).
ii) broadcast anniversary
7 November 1964: broadcast of “Dangerous Journey”, second episode of the story we now call Planet of Giants. Ian and Barbara are trapped inside the laboratory; the Doctor and Susan scale a drainpipe to rescue them but are themselves threatened by the water.
ii) date specified in canon
7 November 1987: Peter Tyler is killed crossing the road to a friend’s wedding – oh no he isn’t – oh yes he is – as seen in Father’s Day (2005).
I’ve seen a couple of people doing this: go thorugh the list of UNESCO world heritage sites and note the ones you have been to. I count 83, so only 828 more to go… rather shamefully, there are two in Brussels (this and these) and one in Antwerp that I have not seen. It’s just as well that so many old capital cities are on the list or my tally would be considerably lower…
Austria
Azerbaijan
Belgium
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Estonia
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Holy See
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Jerusalem
Kosovo
Luxembourg
Macedonia
Malta
Montenegro
Netherlands
Portugal
Russian Federation
San Marino
Spain
Switzerland
Turkey
Ukraine
United Kingdom
United States of America
I wrote a while back that I was likely to vote for Tim Farron in the election of the next President of the Lib Dems. Having perused the candidates’ election leaflets, I see no reason to change my mind. Indeed, the two elections are so similar – straight out of the ALDC school of QuarkXPress – that it’s rather easy to compare and contrast and to see that Tim basically has the harder edge. For example, take the “3 reasons to vote for me” given by each candidate:
| Susan Kramer | Tim Farron |
| 1) Susan will work to keep our party strong, unified, distinctive and try to its core beliefs. | 1) Tim is a campaigner with a track record of winning against the odds. He took a safe Tory seat and converted it into the highest Lib Dem vote share on the UK mainland. |
| 2) Susan will listen to you, take your views and ideas to the party leadership and get answers. | 2) Tim listens to the voice of grassroots members. He is best placed to make sure that the leadership and ministers listen to you. |
| 3) Susan will travel up and down the country supporting your local Lib Dem campaigns. | 3) Tim is an outstanding communicator with the media and public. He will get across the positive messages about the distinctiveness of the Liberal Democrats. |
It is notable that all three of Susan Kramer’s statements are in the future tense, while Tim Farron starts with the past, moves to the present and switches to the future only halfway through the third point. It’s also notable that the future tense statements are all pretty woolly, and you would have to wonder why any candidate thought any of them was actually worth making as part of staking out your own ground. Note also that while the second of the three points is very similar for both candidates, Tim edges it by a) putting it in the present tense and b) pointing out that as an MP he has easier day-to-day access to the leadership.
That’s all a matter of style, I suppose. On substance, Susan Kramer has more (though not a lot more) to say about using the position of President to service the party membership, and Tim Farron is crystal clear that he sees the role as another potential public platform for a senior Lib Dem to use. If I were more active in the party, perhaps I would have a sense of things going wrong that Susan Kramer could fix, but I’m not so I don’t; and my ballot goes off with an X in the Farron box.
Two grand traditions of British sf meet in this book, where the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond try to save the universe while dealing with the piratical Captain Cornelius and also with the Terraphiles, re-enactors of Old Earth culture who have rather garbled views of the activities of Edwardian England (it should be noted that both Doctor Who and a Dalek appear in the original Jerry Cornelius series). It’s some way from being a standard Who novel, and rather closer to a normal Moorcock production if there is such a thing; having said which, the plot is relatively straightforward if not always elegantly expounded. There are some good rollicking descriptive passages, and Moorcock has fun with the misinterpretation of the rules of cricket perpetrated by the Terraphiles. It’s more of a curiosity than a classic, but I enjoyed it.
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Like a lot of people who were around in British student politics in the mid-80s, I am unhealthily gleeful about the voiding of Phil Woolas’ election in Oldham East and Saddleborough by an election court. (Edited to add: After starting to write this entry yesterday, I went out for dinner last night with someone who had dealt with Woolas in a different capacity many years later, and was equally delighted by the result.) I urge anyone who feels the slightest twinge of sympathy for him to read the full election judgement (BBC excerpt, official PDF). It’s all very well to have robust political debate, but to win an election by telling lies about your opponent’s entirely fictional links with Islamic extremism is surely a different matter. I won’t blame the Labour Party as an institution for this, and applaud the suspension of Woolas’ membership, though note with interest blog entries from Chris Davies, written just before the judgement, and Jonathan Fryer, immediately after, illuminating the local political style.
The full content of the offensive literature is in the judgement linked to above, but I thought some might be amused by the text that caused the last unseating of an MP on these grounds, as a result of the North Louth election petition of 1911,
To quote David:
The North Louth case started with a letter, published in the Freeman on 2 December 1910, written by George McSweeny. Part of it ran:
"Now, let me come to Mr. Healy, pure, great, and impeccable. Even the great Tim was absolutely pap fed with British gold. For years he nourished his hatred of a member of the Irish party by suggesting that he had procured some relative to be appointed a postmaster. Yet all the time Mr. Healy, senior, was secure in the possession of the snug postmastership of Lismore, and rumour has it indeed that the great Tim began his career in the Queen’s uniform, delivering letters, with the familiar rat-tat."
"Then there is the case of Mr. Anthony Carroll, Crown Solicitor of Cork. He was the hero of the Tallow Conspiracy Case and got his job immediately afterwards, yet he incurred no denunciation from Mr. Healy. People will say that had he been the cousin say of Mr. Devlin instead of being the cousin of Mr. Healy he might have fared worse."
"Then there was the case of Mr. Heskin, one of the defendants in the same Tallow Case. Mr. Heskin stood against the brother of Mr. Healy for the clerkship of the Lismore Union. Mr. Healy’s brother was beaten by the test of popular election. But he was not doomed to be long disappointed, for shortly afterwards he was appointed a Local Government Inspector at £500 a year. The recent family history does not even stop here. For it was only the other day that Mr. Joseph Sullivan, another member of the family, received an appointment of £800 a year in the Irish Land Commission. And all this under the corrupt Liberals. So far have matters gone up to the present. But from the number of Mr. Healy’s relations who are already or about to become barristers, doctors, engineers, attorneys, and politicians, I have no doubt that the list will soon be extended. Meanwhile when Mr. Healy next talks of ‘place-hunters’ let him chew these facts."
The letter was reprinted in the Dundalk Democrat on 3 December by suggestion of the agent of Richard Hazleton, the successful candidate in North Louth. Meanwhile on 2 December an order was placed for 20,000 leaflets in the following terms:
"Place-Hunting at Home. Tim Healy’s Family List. Mr. Carthage Healy, Brother, appointed Local Government Inspector, 1907, by the Corrupt Liberals!! 500l. a year. Mr. Joseph Sullivan, Cousin, Examiner of Titles, Irish Land Commission, 800l. a year. Anthony Carroll, Cousin, Crown Solicitor of Cork, 500l. a year! Arthur O’Connor, Ex-M.P., for years Healy’s fellow-wrecker in the Irish Party. An English Judge! 1,700l. a year. M. Healy, Senior, Father, Postmaster, Lismore, Co. Waterford. A. N. Sheridan, Election Agent of Mr. Healy, Dundalk, Clerk of the Crown and Peace, Louth, 600l. a year. The Corrupt Liberals again!! Jeremiah Howard, Henchman of William O’Brien, Director U.I.L., and Wrecker, 1907. Land Commission, 800l. a year. The Corrupt Liberals again!! Joseph Mooney, another Henchman and fellow-wrecker of Healy’s. Director Irish Independent, Labourers’ Cottage Arbitrator, Local Government Board, paid by the job. The Corrupt Liberals Again!!!! William M. Murphy, Railway Director, Contractor, Director Irish Independent, etc.., etc., recommended by Lord Aberdeen to build Government Railways in Africa; estimate, 100,000l. Maurice Healy, M.P., Brother, Postman at Lismore."
Unlike in Oldham East and Saddleborough, however, Hazleton’s campaign was also found to have been guilty of bribery, intimidation, and treating; also unlike Phil Woolas, the winning candidate was not found to be personally guilty, and so wasn’t barred from standing for office for three years (and in any case had also been elected for Galway so stayed in the House of Commons). It is slightly amusing that the accusation that Healy was on the British government’s payroll, probably not in itself a defamatory statement but obviously relevant in an election between two candidates trying to out-Green each other, was found by the judges to be sufficiently offensive to merit the rerunning of the election.
Woolas will probably appeal, but I do not wish him well. Judging by the statements he made yesterday he has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He said that:
“It is vital to our democracy that those who make statements about the political character and conduct of election candidates are not deterred from speaking freely for fear that they may be found in breach of election laws.”
It is also vital that you don’t win elections by smearing the other guy as a fellow-traveller of terrorists.
broadcast anniversaries
6 November 1964: broadcast of “Horse of Destruction”, fourth episode of the story we now call The Myth MakersThe Deadly Assassin. The Doctor is put on trial, realises that the Master is behind the assassination, and enters the dream world of the Matrix.
6 November 2009: broadcast of second episode of The Eternity Trap (SJA). Sarah destroys Erasmus and his machine with the sonic lipstick and rescues Professor Rivers. (But what about Lord Marchmont?)
6 November 2010: broadcast of The Last Precinct (K9).
5 November 1983: birth of Andrew Hayden-Smith who played Jake in Rise of the Cybermen, The Age of Steel, and Doomsday (all 2006).
5 November 1966: broadcast of first episode of The Power of the Daleks. Ben and Polly are getting used to the mysterious new bloke in the Tardis; they land on the planet Vulcan where Stevenson has been experimenting with Daleks from a crashed ship.
5 November 1977: broadcast of second episode of Image of the Fendahl. The mysterious skull is taking over Thea, terrifying Mrs Tyler, and forces the Doctor to touch it in agonising pain.
5 November 2006: broadcast of Cyberwoman (Torchwood), the one with the, er, Cyberwoman.
5 November 2007: broadcast of second episode of Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (SJA). Maria’s father saves her and Sarah Jane from the Trickster; poor Andrea remains drowned.
5 November 2009: broadcast of first episode of The Eternity Trap (SJA). Clyde, Rani and Sarah investigate the mysterious manor of Lord Marchwood and Erasmus Darkening (Luke gets a week off).
4 November 1971: birth of Robyn Moore who plays Jorjie’s mother June Turner in K9 (2009-2010).
4 November 1998: birth of Bear McCausland, who played Jack’s ill-fated grandson Steven in Torchwood: Children of Earth (2009). I doubt if I will note any more recent birth than his.
4 November 1967: broadcast of sixth episode of The Abominable Snowmen. The Doctor and friends destroy the Yeti controls, and Padmasambhava dies cutting the Intelligence’s link to earth. Travers spots a real Yeti.
4 November 1978: broadcast of second episode of The Stones of Blood. The stones attack Boscombe Hall, and Vivien Fay attacks Romana, who disappears into thin air.
Some of the greatest lines of the former Russian prime minster who died today (alas, no translation can really capture the tortured syntax of the original; many more on Russian Wikiquote here):
Что говорить о Черномырдине и обо мне?
What can I say about Chernomyrdin and me?
Хуже водки лучше нет!
Better than vodka there is nothing worse!
В Югославии катастрофа. Катастрофа – это всегда плохо!
In Yugoslavia it is a disaster. And disasters are always bad!
Пиво без водки — деньги на ветер
Beer without vodka is money down the drain.
Были у нас и бюджеты реальные, но мы все равно их с треском проваливали.
And we had a real budget, but we still failed miserably.
Учителя и врачи хотят есть практически каждый день!
Teachers and doctors want to eat practically every day!
Вино нам нужно для здоровья. А здоровье нам нужно, чтобы пить водку.
We need wine to be healthy. And we need to be healthy so that we can drink vodka.
Хотели как лучше, а получилось как всегда.
We wanted the best, but things turned out as usual.
The keen-eyed reader may spot a recurrent theme.
Lord Strathclyde (Leader of the House of Lords, House of Lords; Conservative): It is immensely interesting to hear of my noble friend’s dining partners and the conversations that he had. I hope that he will update us regularly.
i) births and deaths
3 November 1910: birth of Richard Hurndall, who played the First Doctor in The Five Doctors (1983).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
3 November 1979: broadcast of second episode of The Creature from the Pit. Adrasta interrogates Romana and K9; the Doctor, now in the Pit, meets Organon and then the Creature.
3 November 2009: broadcast of first episode of Mark of the Berserker (SJA). Clyde’s father turns up and takes possession of a peculiar pendant found by Rani and Luke.
Back in the mid-1980s, as a regular train passenger between Belfast and Dublin, I used to cringe at the sound of American tourists pronouncing “Drogheda”. This was entirely the fault of the mini-series based on The Thorn Birds, starring Richard Chamberlain as the dashing Father Ralph, and set on an Australian sheep station named after (but pronounced differently from) the Irish town.
The book isn’t really all that great. It is quite well written, but loses focus by letting characters drift in and out of view. The core narrative is the doomed love between Meggie and Ralph, but then there are an extra 200 pages tacked on of what happens to Meggie’s children, not really resolving the fates of the characters from earlier in the book (apart from those who are killed off). The ending, where Meggie’s daughter Justine dithers between several different destinies, felt rushed and disengaged. It’s all epic human interest stuff but the first two thirds could have been trimmed down to make a better book, and the last third expanded slightly to make another. I know it sold like hot cakes back on the 1970s so it obviously scratched some collective itch among the bookbuying public.
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None that grabbed me.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
2 November 1968: broadcast of first episode of The Invasion. The Tardis lands invisibly, and the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe seek help successively from Isobel Watkins, and Tobias Vaughn of International Electromatics.
2 November 1981: BBC broadcast repeat of “An Unearthly Child”, the very first episode of Doctor Who, kicking off the “Five Faces of Doctor Who” repeat season.
2 November 1987: broadcast of first episode of Delta and the Bannermen. Ken Dodd sends the Doctor and Mel to 1950s Wales where a holiday camp is being infiltrated by aliens.
2 November 1988: broadcast of first episode of The Happiness Patrol. Helen A rules Terra Alpha ruthlessly by killing anyone who is unhappy, supported by the sinister yet ridiculous Kandyman.
2 November 2010: broadcast of second episode of The Empty Planet (SJA).
2 November 1657: death and burial of Richard Maynarde, as described in Silver Nemesis (1988).
2 November 1941: The Eighth Doctor and Izzy Sinclair visit Coyoacan, Mexico, as seen in comic strip The Way of All Flesh (published in DWM #306 and #308-310, 2001).
I don’t know about you guys, but I have been friended by seven Russian LJ accounts in the last week or so, none of which appear to have any mutual friends or interests in common with me.
I cannot escape the suspicion that this is related to my recent professional interest in Moldova, where in four weeks’ time elections will take place, in whose outcome various Russian forces have a keen interest.
I shall not be posting anything remotely sensitive about my work with Moldova here, even in locked entries, but will be interested to know if anyone else has been experiencing anything similar.
(Also noteworthy that I had a spate of friend requests on Facebook from people with Slavic or Turkish names, none of whom had mutual friends with me, over the last couple of weeks.)
I must have first read this when I was seven; of course as an older reader one realises the depths of the narrative a bit more, understanding a bit better the warped family dynamic between Huck and his father on the one hand and his various prospective adoptive households on the other. Indeed families are a major theme of the book in a way I hadn’t realised before – Jim’s search for his own lost wife and children, the feud between the Grangerfords and the Sheperdsons, the fake dynastic history of the duke and the king, the affair of Peter Wilkes’ estate and will, and finally of course the Phelpses who adopt Huck as Tom Sawyer and then Tom as his own brother Sid.
Even at seven I was disturbed by Tom Sawyer’s failure to grapple with the reality of Jim’s situation in the final chapters of the book. He sets up an elaborate plan to abuse the hospitality of his aunt and uncle, setting Huck’s and Jim’s lives at risk as well as his own, gets wounded in the process, and all for the sake of a rescue which he alone knows to be completely unnecessary. As a child I felt he got away with it rather too lightly and indeed is unfairly rewarded with Huck’s continued admiration and a minimum of chastisement from his family, and my views haven’t changed in 36 years.
Of course I’m even more disturbed as a mature reader by Twain’s own failure to really rise above the racial stereotyping of his day. Jim is an instrument of Huck’s own growing up rather than a three-dimensional character himself, and Mark Twain resorts to racist humour rather too often for comfort.
But it still remains a very enjoyable read, much better than Tom Sawyer (I think; though it is decades since I read the earlier book).
broadcast anniversaries
1 November 1980: broadcast of second episode of Full Circle. The Marshmen take the Tardis, with Romana inside it, and she gets to meet the spiders at close quarters.
1 November 1986: broadcast of first episode of Terror of the Vervoids (ToaTL #9), and first appearance of Bonnie Langford as Mel. She and the Doctor investigate mysterous goings on aboard the spaceliner Hyperon III.
1 November 1989: broadcast of second episode of The Curse of Fenric. Mysterious goings-on with Millington and the Haemovores.
1 November 2010: broadcast of first episode of The Empty Planet (SJA).
Four months down, eight to go!
Ireland in the Age of the Tudors 1447-1603, by Stephen G. Ellis
Pies and Prejudice, by Stuart Maconie
The Great Tradition, by F.R. Leavis
Sudan: Darfur and the Failure of an African State, by Richard Cockett
Up the Poll: Great Irish Election Stories, by Shane Coleman
A Short History of Myth, by Karen Armstrong
Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I, by Stephen Alford
Fiction (non-sf) 4 (YTD 43)
Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers
Advise and Consent, by Allen Drury
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen
SF (non-Who) 2 (YTD 62)
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
Earth Logic, by Laurie Marks
Doctor Who 5 (YTD 56)
Blue Box, by Kate Orman
Deceit, by Peter Darvill-Evans
The Crystal Bucephalus, by Craig Hinton
The Many Hands, by Dale Smith
Seeing I, by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman
Comics 1 (YTD 15)
Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness, by Bryan Lee O’Malley
5/19 (YTD 51/238) by women (Armstrong, Rand, Marks, Orman x 2)
2/19 (YTD 18/238) by PoC (Myers, O’Malley)
12 owned for more than a year (A Short History of Myth, Earth Logic, The Great Tradition, Deceit, Seeing I, Burghley, The Sound and the Fury, Pies and Prejudice, A Doll’s House, Fallen Angels, The Many Hands, Ireland in the Age of the Tudors)
No rereads (YTD 21/238) though Ireland in the Age of the Tudors is a much updated second edition of Tudor Ireland which I read in 2008.
~6,500 pages (YTD ~75,900)
A very interesting biography of Elizabeth ‘s chief minister, who basically ran England from her accession in 1558 to his death in 1598 (and had held the same office of Secretary of State, though with less power, during the earlier reign of her younger brother). I found it generally more interesting, though in places more frustrating, than David Loades’ The Cecils which I read two years ago.
Alford is excellent at the big picture. The book is beautifully organised – in general chonologically, with occasional excursions into family life or household economics (facilitated by Burghley/Cecil’s obsessional record keeping) – and he usually has interesting things to say about what it meant to Burghley to be in a position of such political power, while running a growing household. He’s also very good at cautioning against Whiggism: Burghley did not know that Elizabeth would live to 1603, that she would never marry, that the Spanish Armada would fail, that Mary Queen of Scots would lose their decades-long battle of wits. I found it fascinating that Burghley/Cecil was so heavily involved with the intellectual leadership of the time, as was his second wife Mildred; even more fascinating that, while keeping meticulous records of his own correspondence and affairs, he was apparently instructing printers to generate largely fictional and utterly propagandistic pamphlets describing the issues of the day, which of course in the days before newspapers, and in a society where information was heavily censored, meant that he largely controlled public political discourse.
Burghley/Cecil was also a keen genealogist, but Alford has him as a man of Lincolnshire (rather than Wales as Loades has it), and the evidence is in his favour. Indeed, there is very little about Wales in this book, but lots about Scotland, which Cecil had first visited in the train of the English army during the Rough Wooing. Alford has Cecil obsessed with securing stability and Protestantism in Scotland, in order to secure England’s rear from the Catholic enemies on the Continent; Mary Queen of Scots became a direct threat to that policy, and had to be neutralised. Alford’s analysis of Burghley/Cecil’s Scottish policy is particularly lucid and convincing. Slightly frustratingly, given my own interest, Ireland appears only as a background issue – my ancestor Sir Nicholas White comes up as a correspondent to whom Cecil/Burghley would confide his concerns, though of course with an eye to the possible interception of the correspondence.
I’m sorry to say that I found some serious flaws in the book. Alford’s prose is sometimes clunky and often repetitious. His efforts to get inside Burghley’s head do not always succeed. An early and unsuccessful chapter deals with how Burghley (then plain William Cecil) dealt with the nine day reign in 1553 of Lady Jane Grey/Dudley, in a situation where he was still Secretary of State (as he had been for Edward VI) but faced with the crumbling of the new queen’s rule from the moment her accession was proclaimed. Alford concentrates on the tension between Cecil’s loyalty to the wishes of the dying teenage king and his obligations under the law passed by Henry VIII. To me the much more interesting story is that Cecil obviously spotted that Jane was dead in the water from the word go, and made sure he had not signed a single document which could demonstrate that he was seriously complicit in her attempt to take power – which is pretty impressive given that he was the chief minister of the government. He obviously could not know whether Mary would take months, weeks or days to take power (in the end it was only days) but equally obvously saw what was going to happen from pretty early on and made his plans accordingly.
So, a bit annoying in places but generally enlightening and stimulating, if you are interested in the period.
One of those classics which one really ought to see on stage, but can try to get to grips with by reading the script. A rather good psychological study of a woman who is stuck in a bad marriage, infantilised by society, but doesn’t actually realise what is going on until she is confronted with her husband’s readiness to dump her to avoid scandal – at which point she suddenly (and perhaps a little unrealistically) catches herself on. Today (I hope) the situation itself would seem rather unrealistic, but I can see how it might have shocked the audience of 1879.
I thought this was a rather good Eighth Doctor novel, with the Doctor and Sam finally reuniting after three years in which Sam becomes an environmental activist and basically grows up, while the Doctor is held in a very creepy and nasty prison. I was one of many Old Who fans who took a while to get used to the romance element between the companions and the Doctor in New Who, but here is an example of it being worked rather well into the narrative. The last few books in the series I have read have been pretty decent, and I hope this trend continues.
broadcast anniversaries
31 October 1964: broadcast of “Planet of Giants”, first episode of the story we also now call Planet of Giants, starting Season 2 of Classic Who. The Doctor, Ian, Susan and Barbara arrive in contemporary England, but miniaturised; they witness a murder and face peril from a cat.
31 October 2009: broadcast of Regeneration, the first episode of the K9 spinoff series. In a totalitarian London in 2050, K9 Mark 1 appears, regenerates, and teams up with teenagers Starkey and Jorjie. (This is the only episode I have seen but I enjoyed it.)
A couple of weeks back the Newsletter published my analysis of the 2010 election in Northern Ireland, which gave rise to a typically long discussion on Slugger O’Toole, in the course of which several discussants gently critiqued me for one particular sentence: “The decline from 51.8 per cent of votes for unionist parties in 2005 to 50.5 per cent in 2010 is more than accounted for by the gains made by Alliance and smaller centre parties.” Commentators responded:
…I suggest that the fall in nationalist turnout to levels approximating to Unionist turnout is a more important factor…
…It seems to me that nationalist/republican exuberence with the GFA, and a latter realisation that they don’t need ‘every vote’ to win most western constituencies caused an exceptional voter-turnout in early post GFA elections. Whyte shows that nationalist vote is constant despite latter lower voter turnout down in nat-majority areas…
…do you agree that in the Westminster election there was a narrowing of the differential in the community background turnout with the Nationlaist turnout falling and the unionist turnout either stabilsing or growing?…
I posted a comment that turnout differential between the communities may not tell us all that much, but agreeing that we might learn more from some more analysis. This post is that analysis.
Nationalist votes in 2010 were down from 300,156 to 282,912 (but up from 41.8% to 42.0%); Unionist votes down from 369,704 to 340,602 (decrease from 51.8% to 50.5%). That’s a 5.7% drop in absolute voting numbers (17,244) for Nationalists and a 7.9% drop (29,084) for Unionists. If the Unionist vote had dropped by the same 5.7% as the Nationalist vote in 2010, it would have been 348,464 rather than 340,602, a difference of 7,844 between the counterfactual situation and the reality. The Alliance Party got 14,471 extra votes in reality. So my initial broad-brush statement that “The decline from 51.8 per cent of votes for unionist parties in 2005 to 50.5 per cent in 2010 is more than accounted for by the gains made by Alliance and smaller centre parties” is at least accurate though possibly could be more precise.
(Health warning: all figures for individual seats below are calculated from notional 2005 results rather than actual results. For some of the seats of course this makes no difference but it means that for those that have changed the precision of my figures should be taken with a pinch of salt.)
Anyway, my conclusion from staring at the figures in a jet-lagged state for some time is that one can’t really draw much more from them than that turnout was down overall and particularly in the West and in boring contests. I will, however, refine my previous statement that the Unionist decline is more than accounted for by Alliance growth. In fact, the 7,844 gap between votes for Unionist parties as cast in reality, and as they would have been had their party support declined at the same rate as Nationalist support, is not only less than the 14,471 votes gained by Alliance, it is less than the 9,019 extra votes gained for her party by Naomi Long in East Belfast. The bigger picture is messier. There was no other seat where Alliance gains exceeded Unionist losses. So the picture is clearly much more complicated. (I should clarify that Alliance support is of course much more broadly based than picking up disaffected Unionists; the context of my original remark was an article looking at what had happened to Unionist votes since 1921.)
The four seats with a more than 10% drop in turnout are all safely held by Sinn Fein – West Tyrone (-11.7%), Mid Ulster (-10.3%), West Belfast (-10.3%), and Newry and Armagh (-10.2%). We could add also Foyle, safely won by the SDLP with a turnout change of -8.8%, to this category. However, it is not only Nationalist parties whose vote was falling there. Nationalist vote share actually increased in West Tyrone, Mid Ulster and West Belfast, and dropped by only 1.1% in Newry and Armagh and 0.9% in Foyle; in West Tyrone there were special circumstance because of Kieran Deeny’s candidacy in 2005, but in Mid-Ulster the Unionist vote fell by 2100 and in West Belfast by 1500, proportionately rather more than the Nationalist decrease (respectively 2500 and 3300). So I think this disproves the theory that post-Agreement Nationalists are now sitting back from the polling station, comfortable in the glow of victory, unless we add to that picture post-Agreement Unionists morosely abstaining in the gloom of defeat (ie we would have to believe in people being both less likely to vote if their side wins, and also less likely to vote if their side loses, which rather removes the usefulness of the analysis).
One thing does seem clear to me though. Turnout dropped least where there was an interesting contest (with one exception which I’ll get to later). In the two seats won by moderate women challenging the Unionist establishment, North Down and East Belfast, turnout actually increased (though not by much – 0.8% and 0.9% respectively). In North Belfast, where there was a possibility of a sufficiently split Unionist vote for SF to gain a seat, and Strangford, where the UUP had put up one of its more credible candidates and the DUP were defending the dubious legacy of Iris Robinson, turnout dropped by only 1.5%. In South Belfast, where the SDLP had what would have been a tough defence in a different year, and South Antrim, where the UUP leader was doing his ineffective best to unseat the DUP, turnout dropped by 3.2% and 3.5% respectively. Everywhere else was within the 4-7% window, apart from the five safe Nationalist seats mentioned in the previous paragraph. (The TUV challenge doesn’t seem to have made much difference to turnout.)
One anomaly really jumps out. If people are more likely to keep voting where there is an interesting contest, why did turnout in Fermanagh and South Tyrone drop by 4.5%, 1500 fewer votes cast in an election where the electorate had increased by 1200, and where the result was determined by a margin of only 4? One could of course argue that we’re simply seeing the same geographically based turnout drop of around 10% in other western seats, masked by a bonus of 6% or so extra because of the closeness of the race. In comparison with 2005, the total Nationalist vote decreased by 990, the total Unionist vote by 1625 (and we can be exact because the boundaries were the same). This is the one seat where a local differential in the change in community turnout surely did determine the outcome. Had the two sides lost proportionately the same number of votes – had indeed the Unionist and Nationalist vote totals decreased by the NI-wide average of 7.9% and 5.7%, rather than the actual figures of 7.0% and 4.0% – the Unionist candidate would have defeated Sinn Féin by 175 votes. But my own gut feeling is that the numbers bear out the reports of serious internal problems in the Unionist campaign which were discussed on various blog posts after the election (and, frankly, indicated between the lines of the court judgement affirming the election result).
So, my conclusions are that i) the relatively greater drop in Unionist turnout is very marginal and more than accounted for by the East Belfast result alone; ii) we’re now seeing a lower turnout from both Catholic and Protestant voters in the rural areas where a high turnout was once accepted as inevitable; and iii) voters, like commentators, will pay more attention if the race appears to be a close one.
Having been disappointed by Armstrong’s The Age of Transformation, I’m glad to report that I enjoyed reading this very short reflection on the development of mythology through the ages – I’m still not convinced by Armstrong’s Axial Age hypothesis, but I found a lot of resonance for me in her thoughts about the importance of myth and how societies have changed their approach to it in the wake of technological and social change since the invention of agriculture to the present day. She urges a wider appreciation of the importance of myth in the present day to which I’m totally sympathetic.
I’ve been on the road for the last ten days, so updates have been limited to linking and Whoniversaries, and actually reading LJ and email has barely happened at all. If anything interesting happened while I was away please tell me!
Meantime I managed to read several more books, of which the first was this set of anecdotes, borrowed from
But Coleman concentrates almost entirely on Dáil elections, so missing the drama of European and Presidential elections, not to mention the extraordinary case of the 1925 Senate election (and for all I know local council elections may have also produced moments of excitement I’m not aware of). So while the prose is generally catchy, and it would be a good stocking-filler for anyone with an interest in Irish politics, I wished for a little more breadth as well as depth.
30 October 1978: death of Brian Hayles, writer of The Celestial Toymaker (1966), The Smugglers 1966), The Ice Warriors (1968), The Seeds of Death (1969), The Curse of Peladon (1971) and The Monster of Peladon (1974).
30 October 1997: death of Sydney Newman, without whom etc etc.
30 October 1965: broadcast of “Death of a Spy”, the third episode of the story we now call The Myth Makers. Steven and Vicki are imprisoned by the Trojans; the Doctor designs the wooden horse and it is brought into the city.
30 October 1976: broadcast of first episode of The Deadly Assassin. The Doctor returns to Gallifrey to try and prevent the assassination of the President – but fails.
30 October 2009: broadcast of second episode of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith. The Doctor, Luke, Clyde and Rani are trapped in a time slip; Sarah persuades Peter to restore normality at the cost of his own life.
30 October 1938: the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard land in Manhattan and encounter Orson Welles, as told in the Big Finish audio Invaders from Mars (2002).