Arbitrary and Capricious, Eighteenth-Century Style

I'm doing some reading for my British History class about the criminal "justice" system in England in the 1700s. Apparently, during that century Parliament passed an awful lot of new laws authorizing capital punishment for various offenses against property. However, the number of actual executions for crimes against property didn't increase much at all, even as the number of convictions for capital crimes against property did. Why? Because an awful lot of death sentences got commuted by royal prerogative into exile to, say, Australia. This happened on the recommendation of judges, and apparently the very same MPs passing the death penalty statutes were often the ones intervening to secure clemency. This seems like a bit of a puzzle, at first, but given the discussion of capital punishment in the contemporary era, and particularly my grandfather's book on the subject, there's a pretty obvious answer that occurs to me. When you have a lot of people getting convicted of capital crimes, most of whom don't actually get executed, it gives the people deciding to whom the pardons will be doled out a tremendous amount of arbitrary and capricious power. It's sort of analogous to what happens if you create a legal code in which just about everyone will be guilty of some minor offense, jaywalking, say, or something perhaps slightly less minor but equally routine, but where as a rule no one is prosecuted. That gives the authorities the ability to selectively enforce those laws against people they don't like, for one reason or another: political enemies, say, or more serious criminals they can't get on the main charges of murder, theft, whatever. And if you just look at the convictions, or in the 18th-century Britain case if you just look at the executions, you won't see anything wrong with the procedure: the people in question were guilty under law of committing crimes, and were punished accordingly. You only notice a problem when you see all of the people equally guilty not being punished, and start to wonder why some got away with their crimes while some had the book thrown at them.

Well, I Suppose That's One Way to Look At It

Here's a passage from the article I'm currently reading on political thought during the Restoration Monarchy in Britain from the 1660s to the 1680s:

"The clinching argument [for the Tories] that sovereign authority must be God-given was that rulers had the right of capital punishment. Since the Commandment enjoins, 'Thou shalt not kill', the right to take life could not have been transferred by the consent of the people, for it was not a right that the people had to give."

That's... an interesting argument, seventeenth-century Tories. Observing that your religion says killing is wrong, and that your kings possess the power of capital punishment, your conclusion is not that this royal power conflicts with the relevant Commandment and is therefore wrong, but that this is evidence that the kings have a kind of quasi-divine status that exempts them from the Commandment. Interesting.

Government Jobs

This is kind of random, but I just read a little write-up about a poll YouGov did in Britain about a variety of issues relating to poverty. One subject they asked about was unemployment benefits, and here's the line I found interesting:

80% agree with the idea that people who have been out of work for 12 months should be required to do community work in return for their benefits.

So, these people should be given the opportunity to do a form of work in the public interest determined by the government, and in return receive money from the government? To me, see, that sounds a whole lot like the government giving these people jobs. Maybe jobs with a fairly explicit agreement that the workers in question are hoping to get other jobs soon, but you have the basic wages-for-labor exchange going on here. I'm curious if 80% of Britons would agree that the government should offer jobs to people who've been out of work for a year, if you put it that way. Come to think of it, I wonder how these questions would play in this country.

He's Not The Messiah

Last year, sometime during the spring, I remember seeing a headline on Huffington Post: "The British Obama?" Underneath it was a picture of someone I had never seen before, but I soon became rather well-informed about him. It was Nick Clegg, the charasmatic Liberal Democrat leader who, it was supposed, would take advantage of the weakness of Gordon Brown's Labour Party to turn the Lib-Dems into a viable force for the first time in quite a few generations. After decades playing a centrist role in British politics, the liberals to Labour's actual socialists, the Lib-Dems had finally done what the rise of "New Labour" suggested for them all along, and simply become the left-wing party. Clegg seemed to do well in the debates, certainly looking like the more viable left-wing candidate than Brown. Heading into the elections, some polls showed the Lib-Dems competitive to beat Labour for second or even challenge the Conservatives for the national lead.

Then the election happened. While the Liberals did gain about 1% in the popular vote over 2005, they also lost five seats. Labour had a similarly disappointing night, while David Cameron's Tories notched 97 gains and came oh-so-close to an absolute majority.

A majority which Nick Clegg, he who ran his party distinctly left of Labour, handed him.

The Liberal Democrats are currently polling around 10% for a prospective U.K. general election. That's abysmal. That's less than half what they got in the election. It's worse than they've ever done in the handful of decades they've been around. According to UK Polling Report's swingometer, a performance that bad would have them getting a whopping, uhhh, 18 seats. That's about a third what they've got now. The Lib-Dem-sponsored AV referendum is polling right about 50/50, but with a bad trend. The only reason they went into coalition with the Conservatives was to get that referendum. Can you imagine if it fails? How much damage Nick Clegg, who was really supposed to be the savior of the Liberal Democrats, would end up having done to his party? With Ed Miliband leading Labour back to the left, I can envision a future in which the Lib-Dems kind of stop existing. It was always a sort of weird arrangement: the left-wing majority in Britain decided, for no good reason, to have two parties rather than one, despite the winner-take-all nature of their electoral system. It makes no sense; there's a reason you tend to see two-party systems in countries that use first-past-the-post.

This coalition has killed the Liberal Democrats. I don't see how they recover. All their liberal supporters have decided that, well, voting for the Lib-Dems gives them Tories. What's left? Trying to be that centrist party again? Centrist parties have a problem, which is that they are bloody boring. I can't imagine that the conservative voters will become a base for the LibDems. Nick Clegg has destroyed the party.

Most Votes, Most Seats

That's the meme that the Conservatives are pushing over in Britain right now: we won the most votes and the most seats, and therefore how dare the Liberal Democrats form an agreement with Labour! But do they have the most votes? Or the most seats? Well, that depends very much on how you draw the party lines.