Individual Electoral Registration Desk Research Drama

You may have read the Guardian's article on individual registration (IR) earlier this month

"As many as 10 million voters, predominantly poor, young or black, and more liable to vote Labour, could fall off the electoral register under government plans, the Electoral Commission, electoral administrators and psephologists warned"

You may have even read my response, thrown away in passing on a 38 Degrees discusssion

" [...] the issue is not IR ... but how it's been proposed to be done here."

"What are the proposals to mitigate and reverse the drop off if we switch to IR?"

"A botched and/or politically motivated switch to IR could be worse than the current system. It would need to be done well and in a non-partisan way, if it were done at all."

The Electoral Commission have also just put out the following statement:

'We support the introduction of IER [individual electoral registration] as an important improvement in how people register to vote. It was initially proposed by the previous government and we are pleased that the current government has produced a White Paper on its introduction. We welcome the current debate on the issue and the opportunity for pre-legislative scrutiny to ensure IER is introduced in the best way possible.

'We believe IER can be introduced in a way to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the electoral register is improved. We have however highlighted to Government and Parliament our concern that if the opt-out from registration currently proposed is introduced registration could drop towards election turn-out levels.'

Earlier this week, I went looking for some reasoned perspectives on IR and found the Electoral Reform Society, the Open Rights Group and Unlock Democracy. I'll have a look at these and the White Paper and then report back with Tim's take on IR, take two.

Solar panels at stag do venue

Props also to Dale's stag do venue - the Park Farmhouse Hotel near Donington Racecourse in Leicestershire - for having this mightily impressive solar array on site. Apparently it provides most of the energy for the function barns and banqueting halls (where we toasted Sir Dale of the North Hamptons).

Lance Bubo is The Plague Visitor

This is my friend Giles at my other friend Dale's medieval stag do (how awesome an act of geekery is that?) in costume as a plague visitor during the time of the Black Death.

Giles is an archaeologist, but has a secret life going into schools in costume to explain British history in a hands-on way. So I don't in any way need to reach for metaphor to describe him as a legend.

Having no such fantastic costume to draw on, I took one of Dale's mauve shirts, accessorized with a belt, and used it as a belt. When challenged, I simply claimed to be the Purple Sage, tasked with bringing about the Lilac Time. :-)

Disco philosophy and Hercules & Love Affair

Have you ever thought about the progressive character of disco and it's less polyester-prone daughter, house music? What would it be like to live in a society governed by the values of house? Freedom, racial and sexual equality, and piano breakdowns for everyone, that's what.

And at the level of the individual? Disco and house preach self-respect, persistence in the face of emotional hardship, the right to love, and freedom through dance.

Taken as a whole, surely this should be the music of right-thinkers everywhere.

Although there's nothing worse, of course, than a disco fan gone bad.

So why's this music on my mind? In recent weeks, I've built myself an emotional cocoon out of headphones and this year's Hercules And Love Affair album, Blue Songs. It's unashamedly house-driven - divas, hi-hats, hand-claps and yes, that piano boogie - and equally unabashed in its pursuit of house philosophy: love, self-reliance, reaching for the positive, and dancing, dancing, dancing.

Blue Songs even offers a cover of that groove politics classic 'It's Alright' as one of three slower numbers that push it well into crossover territory. It's a mark of how good the album is that they enhance its pacing rather than feeling tokenistic.

So, why not let a little house music into your life? Not even I can listen to ambient drone metal all the time.

I'll leave you with the video to My House, which seems to be doing its best to recapture the spirit of some obscure American cable TV equivalent of the Hitman And Her circa 1989.

Remember to stick around for the commercial break.

Iain M Banks @ Birmingham Library 7 June

IMB: serious raconteur. I mean, any question from the audience leads to shaggy-dog answers stretching anything up to five minutes, circular, recursive, frequently very funny indeed. Yet his stories neatly divert his interrogators from his secrets.

As Awesome Girlfriend quipped 'He delivers much, but promises little.'

So, for example, questions about Culture prequels and ideas for future novels are ducked, swamped by sheer rat-a-tat verbiage.

Some highlights:

• IMB's first exposure to SF as a small child was - apparently - an unremembered work by Enid Blyton (Enid M Blyton?)
• He knew his chosen career aged 11, and spent his teens writing out pun-laden thrillers up to 400,00 words in length.
• The M stands for Menzies - his never-used original SF alias was going to be John B McAllen after his then two favourite whiskies.
• He describes mainstream fiction as a delicate piano compared with SF's gothic church organ, where you can pull out all the surreal, exaggerated stops for a spectacle of Demillean proportion

The most resonant point he made, for me, was his reluctance to explain the origins of the Culture, to fill in the blanks of its history. SF/fantasy authors are often compulsive world-builders - or if they aren't then there's usually a subsequent, poorer writer to come along afterwards to do the job for them through unnecessary sequels, guides or role-playing source-books.

The strength of the Culture, on the other hand, is that its vague set-up as a post-scarcity benevolent oligarchy allows IMB to bring in any and every weird flourish he wants without ever having to pretend that he has fully defined it.

I Want My Mumblecore Thor And I Want Him Now

Thor (Hurrgh! What is he good for??) didn't blow me away, but it benefited from being the first film I saw after the Your Highness debacle. Anything was going to be generously received after that.

So, Thor (Hurrgh!) was alright, but I don't want to waste ink describing its okayness in minute detail. No. I want to suggest that somewhere, buried under the Flash Gordon CGI (Asgard = Mongo) is the ghost of a film I would watch the heck out of struggling to get out.

We'd keep most of the start of the film, partly because the Attack on the Planet of the Ice Giants is pretty cool, but crucially Thor (Hurrgh!) needs to get exiled and lose his powers for this to work.

Hammer-deprived Dave Thunder falls to Earth and hangs out with The Radiant Natalie Portman and her astronomical Scoobies in a few charming scenes. Chris Hemsworth and TRNP (given that she's a scientist, does that make her TRNP-PHD?) have chemistry, there are cute misunderstandings of 'primitive Earth culture', it's a rather sweet underplayed romance.

Thanks to discussions of inter-dimensional Marvel astrophysics, it even just about passes the Bechdel Test.

This is comfortably the best bit in the film. Really.

Unfortunately, this is where reality and my ghost film part accompany.

The real Thor (Hurrgh!) sees our hero regain his weapon and godlike powers and frees Asgard from the confused and incoherent tyranny of his adoptive brother Loki. From that point the film is passable, but nothing special.

Yet what if this didn't happen? Hammerless, lost on Earth, like the Third Doctor on steroids, what does he do?

Perhaps Thor (Hurrgh!) would move in with TRNP. Maybe he would use his Asgardian super-science to assist her research, maybe employ his hammer-fu to make his living from hand-crafted furniture, like some kind of Viking Viscount Linley.

There would be the inevitable comic resolution of the everyday misunderstandings arising from a modern woman dating a Dark Ages deity. Heck, there can even be an tolerable amount of learning if you want it.

All done in a arthouse (ArtNorse?) style, of course.

Okay, so I'm being a little flippant here, and it may feel like I'm turning Thor (Hurrgh!) into Mork and Mindy but my point is this: for about ten minutes Thor looked like a gentler, better film, and was the poorer for not persisting in that vein.

Curiosity and spirituality

It's perhaps not commonly known, but I occasionally take services at a Unitarian meeting house in South East London.

For more information on Unitarians (like Quakers with hymns) see http://www.unitarian.org.uk. Our Meeting House is on Faceborg here:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Lewisham-Unitarian-Meeting-House/204686696210228

The theme of yesterday's address/sermon was 'curiosity and spirituality' and I include revised extracts below.

Last month I finally watched Citizen Kane for the first time. For those who haven't seen it, the story revolves around a reporter's quest to uncover the riddle of Charles Foster Kane's dying words. Consumed with the need for an answer, he plunges deeper and deeper into Kane's life. Yet for all his zeal and labour, he never finds the answer he is looking for.

But if our own questions don't have one right answer, or even an answer at all, does that matter?

Can we enjoy asking questions without needing an answer?

A question of questions

There are differing views on the value of questions. At one end of the spectrum, analytical philosophers like A J Ayer argued that most questions of ethics or metaphysics are not really true questions at all, as they cannot be answered through observation or mathematical logic.

At the other, literal-minded interpretations of religion tend towards being 'all answer and no question', to quote John Updike. In other words, all questions of belief or practice can be addressed through a monolithic reading of a single holy text.

I have too many questions myself to rest easy with either view. I do think the big questions are worth asking, worth discussing with others. But I've also learnt to live with the fact that often all we get isa provisional answer, an answer for the moment alone.

Sometimes all we can do is hold the question without getting an answer at all. Yet I believe that paying the question attention is I believe in itself useful and consciousness-expanding.

This is why the most interesting teachers answer questions with riddles, parables and stories that enrich debate and enhance possibilities, rather than closing them down.

This is why it's vital to engage with ideas, and with others with ideas, who make you think in new and exciting ways.

This is also why critical thinking is so important

Critical thinking and curious cats

The liberal Anglican Don Cupitt (in The Sea of Faith) defined critical thinking as follows:

A critical thinker seeks to emancipate his own thinking from the tyranny of theory. He learns regularly to perform little thought experiments in which he sets aside the theory which he himself uses to look at himself and the world and tries looking at them in light of another theory.

The only thing I think is missing from this definition is a sense of playfulness. For example, I share my house with three cats which the landlady has left in our care. I have no idea what they are thinking when they poke their noses into everything around them, but they are undeniably curious about the world in a playful, open-ended way.

I recently came across a summary of liberation theology and straight away knew I wanted to read more. I don't know what I'll take from these ideas, but I do hope that this open-minded, curious, cat-like enquiry will help enhance my own thinking and spiritual practice, as Christianity, Buddhism, psychoanalysis and conversation with other Unitarians have all done before now.

Curiosity helps us grow as individuals - if Thomas Edison had not sought the new he would have just built a better candle!

Unicorns in the balloon factory

What applies to the individual also applies to to the community.

There's a great story from Seth Godin in Tribes - a parable almost - about a unicorn in a balloon factory. It means no harm, but it causes all kinds of havoc just by having a point to make.

Curiosity, asking questions, is part of liberation. Wherever a status quo is unhelpful, perhaps even harmful, calling it into question can be a powerful and sometimes a brave act, and perhaps the start of a positive change in your life or the life of the community.