News roundup, 3 June 2025

- Leaders of several First Nations in northern Manitoba who are experiencing large-scale evacuations are calling on the province to exercise emergency powers to free up hotel space. Meanwhile, several buildings in Lynn Lake have been destroyed, and 125 firefighters have been brought in from the US to help with the situation. On a more positive note, the fire threatening the city of Flin Flon seems to have been contained.

- Lisa Robinson, a notorious city councillor in Pickering, Ontario, has failed in her bid for compensation from the city after being disciplined and having her pay docked on numerous occasions, mostly for promoting hate, since she took office. Not only is she not getting the pay docking reversed, she was hit with an additional $30,000 in court costs. Robinson's story is rather interesting; she was a candidate for the federal Conservatives in the Toronto riding of Beaches-East York in 2021, until the party dropped her for social media posts that were far too extreme even for them (for her part, she claims that the posts were somehow faked). She also spoke at "Freedom Convoy" events, and was a candidate for the fringe Ontario Party in 2022. When she ran for city council later that year, she apparently managed to dial back the crazy for the duration of the campaign and focus on fiscal conservatism, but has been bringing hordes of brownshirts to council meetings and allegedly having them threaten and dox her political opponents. More info in this Reddit thread as well as this one.

- South Korea is electing a new president today. The election was necessitated after the incumbent president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was removed from office following his impeachment for his attempt to impose martial law. The front-runner is Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the opposition Democratic party, which already controls the country's parliament.

- Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders has withdrawn from the governing coalition, a move likely to force early elections. Whether this will shift votes in his favour, as he presumably hopes, remains to be seen.

- Israel opened fire on Palestinians lining up for food aid at a distribution site in Gaza. Not sure how this is supposed to help protect Israelis or fight antisemitism. Speaking of which, the suspect in the fire attack on a pro-Israel event in Boulder is entirely unapologetic about the attack, saying he'd do it again if he could. 

- Nick Clegg, who I'd lost track of after voters punished him for propping up David Cameron's government through some, er, interesting times, has resurfaced to declare that requiring AI researchers to obtain permission from artists before using their work to train an AI would "kill" the AI industry. Turns out Clegg spent much of the intervening time working at Meta.

Credit where credit is due

I'm not particularly keen on the Cameron-Clegg coalition in the UK, but they're doing the right thing here:

In a bold if lonely environmental stand, Britain’s coalition government has set out to curb the growth of what has been called “binge flying” by refusing to build new runways around London to accommodate more planes.

Citing the high levels of greenhouse gas emissions from aviation, Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, abruptly canceled longstanding plans to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport in May, just days after his election; he said he would also refuse to approve new runways at Gatwick and Stansted, London’s second-string airports.

The government decided that enabling more flying was incompatible with Britain’s oft-stated goal of curbing emissions. Britons have become accustomed to easy, frequent flying — jetting off to weekend homes in Spain and bachelor parties in Prague — as England has become a hub for low-cost airlines. The country’s 2008 Climate Change Act requires it to reduce emissions by at least 34 percent by 2020 from levels reached in 1990.

From the New York Times. Conservatives around the world should take note -- even they can't continue to ignore environmental issues. How this will play out remains to be seen, but it could conceivably make it OK for conservatives to be environmentalists. And that can't be anything but a Good Thing, regardless of one's views on conservatism as a whole.

In fact, if you think about it, conservatives ought to be environmentalists. Few things are more destructive of traditional ways of living than famines and shortages.

Even Brown's resignation couldn't save Labour

It's now official; David Cameron is the UK's new prime minister. What went wrong is unclear; as George Eaton points out, in settling for Cameron and the "alternative vote" the Liberal Democrats have retreated considerably from their previous position on electoral reform. But maybe it was seen as political suicide to side with Labour; alternatively, perhaps Labour figures that they're better off not being in power right now (some have suggested that the new PM is going to be extremely unpopular very soon, owing to the austerity measures that will be necessary). Also, Clegg and company might believe that AV is a foot in the door that could eventually lead to the adoption of multi-member STV at a later date (it would at least get the public accustomed to preferential balloting).

Incidentally, for some suggestions as to how the past election would have gone under AV and under multi-member STV, check this out (this is of necessity rather speculative, as in the real world many voters would have given their first preferences to a different party if they had confidence that their vote would count).

Interesting developments in European politics

Firstly, Gordon Brown has decided to take one for the team:

The British political landscape was transformed last night as an unbridled bidding war for power led to Gordon Brown proffering his resignation as prime minister in a dramatic attempt to secure Labour a power-sharing government with the Liberal Democrats.

Brown's surprise announcement on the steps of No 10 prompted an extraordinary Tory counter-offer to the Lib Dems: a referendum on the alternative vote electoral system, and a coalition government with seats for Nick Clegg's party in the cabinet. The proposed Tory coalition deal would last at least two parliamentary sessions.

The hurried Tory offer, previously seen as completely beyond the ideological pale for the party, was swallowed by shell-shocked Tory MPs.

Cameron said he would whip a vote in parliament to ensure there was a referendum on the alternative vote, but the Tories would then be free to campaign to keep first past the post in the referendum itself.

From the Guardian. If Clegg is as smart as I think he is, he won't bite on the "alternative vote" system, which is another term for instant-runoff voting. While it can be viewed as a special case of the single transferable vote system preferred by the Lib Dems, it is one in which proportionality is sacrificed for more local representation. To my mind this system is at best only marginally better than FPTP and under some circumstances can be worse (if introduced in Canada, for instance, it would likely lead to a never-ending string of Liberal majorities). I suspect that Clegg would probably rather work with Labour than the Conservatives anyhow, and with Brown out of the way he'll have more credibility making such a deal.

This isn't the only big thing to happen across the pond either. Angela Merkel just suffered a significant setback in Germany:

Results from Sunday's poll show Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won 34.6 percent of the vote, down a full 10 percentage points from the last election in 2005 and their worst showing ever in the state. The center-left Social Democrats (SPD) were only marginally behind, winning 34.5 percent of the vote.

The business-friendly Free Democrats, the CDU's current coalition partner in North Rhine-Westphalia and at the national level, gained half a percentage point, winning 6.7 percent of the vote. The environmentalist Greens did the best, almost doubling their showing from the last state election, securing 12.1 percent. The Left Party won 5.6 percent, and is now poised to enter the NRW state parliament for the first time.

The election outcome means that the opposition Social Democrats and the Green party could narrowly form a governing coalition in Germany's most populous state with a slim one-vote majority, but would likely require support from the Left Party.

From Deutsche Welle. What's critical to this is that state governments appoint members of the Bundesrat, the upper house of the German parliament, and as a result of this Merkel is expected to lose control of that house. And a big reason for this is Germany's reluctant approval of the bailout of Greece, which pleased the markets but had a rather different effect on the electorate. We'll have to see how this goes; Merkel is not up for reelection until 2013, unless her coalition somehow collapses, so she could find herself stymied for quite some time by an uncooperative Bundesrat.

The UK election

Well, as we know the British election resulted in what the Brits call a "hung parliament". Myself, I prefer the more value-neutral term "minority parliament", but that's just me. (Interestingly, the British expression is not known to have been used before 1974, according to this article). Now Nick Clegg has said that he'll give the Conservatives the first opportunity to make a deal with him, given that they won the most votes as well as seats. However, one of Clegg's demands is electoral reform, something that the Conservatives are very leery of, so Brown may yet get the chance to hold onto power. Gwynne Dyer has a pretty good summary, but there is something in his article that I take issue with:

Clegg is talking to Conservative leader David Cameron first, since his party got the largest number of seats and votes, but Cameron’s best offer is "an all-party committee of inquiry on political and electoral reform". He cannot offer more, because his own party won’t let him.

This does not make a lot of sense politically, since Labour, not the Conservatives, is the greatest beneficiary of the current voting system. But there I go again, expecting rational self-interest to determine political choices. The real reason that the rank and file of the Conservative Party hate the idea of change—any kind of change—is because they are conservative.

While I agree with Dyer that Cameron won't be able to offer more, I don't agree that Labour is the biggest beneficiary of first past the post. In terms of seat count alone, Labour does indeed benefit more than the Tories do, but in order to successfully govern under PR a party has to have potential coalition partners. Both might have a shot at the support of the Lib Dems, but under PR there'd be other parties represented in the House as well. And I suspect that Labour's base would be a lot less uncomfortable with them forming a coalition with, say, the Greens than rank and file Tories would be about a coalition with the BNP or UKIP.

New kid on the block in UK politics

Well, he's not really new, having been leader of the Liberal Democrats for over two years, but for most of that time he wasn't really seen as a going concern. That may be changing:

A week ago this morning, it was still possible to refer to Nick Clegg as a fringe candidate, the nerdy leader of a third-place British party who could walk down city streets without being recognized.

What has happened to him in the past seven days has no precedent in British politics, and few in elections anywhere. You probably have to reach to the world of reality television, where fellow Briton Susan Boyle rose, in similar one-night fashion, from spinsterdom to celebrity.

As of Thursday, Mr. Clegg, leader of the centrist Liberal Democrats, is the most popular politician in Britain, with his party either leading or tied with the Tories throughout the week. An Ipsos MORI poll Wednesday showed his party tied with the Conservatives at 32 per cent, with Labour at 28 per cent – a doubling of the Liberal Democrat standing last week. Other polls had his party ahead.

“We have never seen anything like this sort of an instant rise before in the history of British elections, and it means that the entire system has changed, quite literally overnight,” said Bobby Duffy of the London office of polling firm Ipsos MORI. “What had been a fairly staid election to choose between Gordon Brown and David Cameron has suddenly sparked into life, and nobody knows where things will go now.”

From the Globe. If Clegg manages to take power, or even win the balance of power in a minority parliament, he could leave a permanent mark on British politics. After all, the Liberal Democrats have advocated electoral reform for many years; a switch to PR would have a dramatic effect on all future elections.