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Tory cartoonists seem to think so too:

ConservativeHome's Mr Bean posters:

There are more where that came from .

My slightly different take on Thursday's elections, now that I have had a bit of time to separate my own defeat and local party's odd targeting strategy from cold hard results, is that the second biggest winners were....nobody. Of the councils up for election, 66 have returned councils with no overall control - where no party group is large enough to take control of the council; six more than previously.

So probably up to about a third of us live in an area that has minority or coalition government. This sort of result is usually one of the main arguments against Proportional Representation - that it leads to "weak" government. But, you know, I believe "weak" government is exactly what we want and need. Government is too big, too strong, too interfering as it is, and under the winner takes all voting system we have this leads to absolute power in the hands of a minority of voters.

Next year, Scotland will have "all up" council elections, using the Single Transferable Vote system to return multi-member wards (which local government is already used to anyway). So if Scotland can cope with it, why can't the rest of us?

Take Oxford for a minute again. Apart from one lady who disappeared without a word half way through her term of office, the Tories have now not had a single councillor for ten years. Yet with a "paper" candidate in my ward they still achieved 350 or so votes (17.5% of the vote and in the process kept Labour's candidate safe from my attack!). Across the city they have 12% of the vote, pretty well without trying at all (I reckon they only targeted, and not very enthusiastically at that, four wards out of twenty four). The Greens, through judicious targeting in their core areas, achieve 20% of the vote and get some 17% of the seats and Labour, the Lib Dems and the Independent Working Class Association are over-represented for their vote.

If Oxford wants to be a unitary authority (and on its present performance I agree with the Conservative leader of the county council that that would be a bad thing unless the city can prove it can run what services it has already efficiently) then it is only fair that all political opinion amongst its citizens be represented proportionately. Yes, there is a "democratic deficit" in the two tier situation at present where a political party completely unrepresented in the city (at borough or county council level) has complete control over some very big aspects of local government for Oxford's citizens - such as schools, roads and social services, but let's not replace that with another democratic deficit. If we want to have change, start with creating something closer to a democracy first. For the current system is anything but.

Technorati Tags: electoral reform, oxford, politics

...who makes it quite impossible for me to even think about joining or voting for the Tory party. Paul Walter today quotes from Ben Bradshaw on Davis:

Liberal Burblings: Davis: "Libertarianism" that is extremely narrow

Today, Ben Bradshaw points out Davis' far from libertarian approach to equal rights:

The notion that David Davis is a libertarian will provoke hollow laughter from Britain's gays and lesbians. Davis has opposed every freedom extended to gay and lesbian people, from the freedom to register one's partnership to the freedom to serve one's country. He has one of the worst voting records in the Commons on such matters. Like most Conservatives, Davis is very selective about whose liberties are worthy of support.

However well they might be doing, however their policies on other issues may be right, when they finally develop them, I would rather cut off my right arm or emigrate than countenance the election of reactionaries who, frankly, do not recognize me, as a gay man, as equal in rights and dignity as any other person.

Now, I know gay people in the Tory party who seem to be quite happy. I know stories, even of David Davis himself about how "some of their best friends are gay" and they are supportive of them. But there seem to be still an awful lot of them whose public policy agenda appears to want to diminish a bit of my humanity, and I can't hack that.

I think I understand the Libertarian Alliance position as explained a bit more by Sean Gabb over the weekend. But for me, there's no way I could vote for Davis or his party regardless of whether the entire election is somehow run solely on the basis of his stand on 42 days and the like. It may sound selfish but it's really not. I care less that his social conservatism focuses on gay people than I do about the fact in my mind that this means he chooses for himself what people are entitled to equality and who aren't - and nobody has that right as far as I am concerned.

Indeed, the Human Rights Act, whilst I personally don't like the way it works and would like to see most of it enshrined in a constitution and bill of rights instead, seems to me to be our sole bastion against such antediluvian attitudes amongst our "rulers".

If I still lived in the constituency of my birth I think I am being told by both Lib Dem and Libertarian leaderships that I should be grateful this man is standing up for some of my rights and they have no better candidate to offer.