The way I see it, either she did it in which case she deserves everything she gets, or she didn’t, in which case she might think back to how she has treated the presumption of innocence in the past. Anybody arrested in connection with a high-profile murder or child kidnapping seems to be all over the front pages with lots of dirt dished, before they are released without charge. In a way I kind of hope she is innocent so that she will get a taste of how all that feels.

Bit uncharitable of her old man to call it a witch hunt, but I suppose he knows her best.

Some people who have been crunching the numbers came up with some good statistics. My personal favourite, and a small consolation for not winning a seat I didn’t expect to win, is that the Labour to Tory swing in Maidenbower was over 19% and therefore the highest in the town and one of the highest in the country. I haven’t checked just in case the maths is wrong.

I did have a little look at the old Maidenbower results though. In 2010 (which had a high turnout obviously) Peter Smith got Labour got 1289 votes for Labour, so there are at least 1289 people there who would consider voting for us. If only we knew who they were and got them out to vote this year it would have been enough to win!

Another interesting statistic was the overall vote. In the past the Tory leader has always taken great pleasure in pointing out that the total Tory vote was higher then the total Labour vote. Meaningless in local elections really, and distorted during elections by thirds depending on which 2-seat wards didn’t have an election that year. This year the total Labour vote was nearly 900 higher than the total Tory vote. Still meaningless in my opinion, but at least it is meaningless in the right direction.

These results don’t help predict which county seats are most winnable next year because the county seats are not just combinations of borough seats: some are combinations of parts of borough seats. There are a couple of pleasing direct comparisons though.

Broadfield. In the last county elections the Tories won 1367 to 963. Add together this year’s Broadfield North & South results and you get Labour ahead by 1383 to 802 so that is looking good for next year.

Tilgate and Furnace Green. Assumed to be safe by the Tories. In the last county elections they won by 1600 to 871. Add together this year’s Tilgate result and last year’s Furnace Green result (there was no election there this year) and you get Labour on 1600 and the Tories on 1518 – and remember that a lot of that is based on last year’s Furnace Green result before the coalition really fell out of favour. It could well have been worse for them if they had an election there this year, so that seat could well be winnable too.

Since the last county elections Labour have won seats back in Ifield, Northgate and Gossops Green and shrunk the gap in Three Bridges so we could have our eye on the Gossops Green + Ifield West seat and the Northgate + Three Bridges seat. At the moment Labour only have two seats on the whole of the county council so having four potential targets in one town is very encouraging. The fact that some of those seats are occupied by this blog’s least favourite Tories is just a bonus.

Best of all, it is possible the Tories were faloling into our old trap of feeling over-confident or complacent. At the very least they may find themselves having to work hard to try and protect seats they may have taken for granted before. If that means they are not able to concentrate a lot of their resources on Southgate like they seem to have done this time, maybe we will finally crack that nut as well.

We now have a situation where there are 5 split wards which have both Tory and Labour councillors. Four of them were, I think, recently all-Tory wards and all of them have had Labour wins as their most recent result. We only need to gain three of them to regain control of the council.

But what about Southgate? That ward stubbornly refuses to change hands. It used to be all-Labour (as most of the town was at one point) then started to swing both ways and it has now been all-Tory for a few years. My one firm prediction about our local elections was that at least one ward would end up with a majority of less than 50. I was wrong and this year the narrowest margin was the 66 votes in Southgate. So why didn’t we win it this time?

Raj got a little bit closer than last time in terms of the absolute size of the margin but in percentage terms it is almost exactly the same as 2011, just on a greatly reduced turnout. Why is it that the swings we see elsewhere in the town, and the country as a whole, aren’t happening there too?

I don’t like to over-analyse election results. I think its pointless trying to second-guess the electorate by over-simplifying it all. In Southgate there were 2068 votes cast and probably more than 2000 different reasons for why those votes were cast the way they were. But I think there are probably four factors that contributed.

The biggest one is probably the presence of the Greens in Southgate, with a well-known candidate – the local vicar who is an ex-Labour councillor. While Labour and the Tories have been on 41% and 44% for the last two years, the Greens have polled 14%. If you assume that the Greens take more votes from Labour than the Tories that alone could explain the difficulty there.

Another big factor was probably the rehabilitation centre that was mootted for East Park. It became a well-publicised possibility in the run up to the election and while I don’t think any candidate was in favour of it, it was the Tory who took most advantage and was prominent in the campaign to stop it.

There are three other factors which may or may not have contributed. Both are a bit nebulous, if that is the right word, but you can see the effect when there are all-out elections or when a by election happens along with the normal one.

It sounds silly, but alphabetical order seems to have a small impact. When there two candidates from the same party there is a tendency for the one who comes first on the polling slip to get more votes. It doesn’t make sense to those of us who use both our votes for the same party but it seems to happen. It is probably a coincidence that the first few letters of the alphabet are over-represented in the surnames of councillors. I reckon the alphabet effect could account for a small handful of votes.

Another factor is the doesn’t-live-here factor. Some voters have a real reluctance to vote for candidates who do not live in the area they are looking to represent. In this case I know the Green does live in Southgate, the Labour candidate lives in Furnace Green and I’m not sure where the Tory lives. At the very least this could account for a few Green votes that might otherwise have gone Labour.

The last factor is a bit less amusing. It is the racial aspect. Again, where there are elections where two candidates from the same party appear, there is a distinct tendency for the one with the less ‘English’ name to poll fewer votes, all other things being equal. I’m not suggesting there is a consciously racist motivation at work, but there could be an inclination to be less likely to vote for a name that is unfamiliar or that you can’t pronounce. Mind you, the BNP have stood in Southgate before and got a handful of votes, would those erstwhile BNP voters have voted deliberately against Raj or just stayed at home along with the majority of voters? Nobody knows, but if the foreign-sounding name factor cost a dozen votes it could account for a chunk of the small margin.

When the gap is only 66 votes a few factors that can cost maybe 10 votes each can be significant. Or perhaps I am just talking out of my backside. It does happen.

The other noteworthy ward was Maidenbower, for personal reasons. I was standing there and didn’t win. I didn’t expect to of course, but considering we did no work there I think 425 votes was respectable. considering the shockingly low turnout. In percentage terms it is about 5 points up on last year. I feel a bit sorry for the voters of Maidenbower. They must feel a bit ignored really. We don’t put in a lot of work there because our limited resources are better used in places where we are likely to win – which worked out well for us this time. I guess the Tories also have limited manpower and will also concentrate on the marginals so safer seats like Maidenbower get ignored are engaged with less than voters in, say, Ifield or Gossops Green. No wonder the turnout was so low. If the parties can’t be bothered with the voters why should the voters be bothered with the parties?

I imagine the Tories do engage a bit more with Maidenbower, but then they have two councillors who are effectively being paid to so I hope that is the case. In the absence of more proportional voting methods I can’t see it changing, which is a shame. I’d like to think that if we spent a couple of years identifying our potential voters there we could make it a lot closer. If the Maidenbower branch expands a little and gets more active maybe that will start to happen.

I think a lot of my colleagues will, like me, wish next year was another borough election rather than the county – although we have to have a good chance now of at least doubling the Labour presence in Chichester.

For various personal reasons I won’t go into, I wasn’t hugely involved in the Labour campaign this time round, but from what I saw of it we have finally started doing it right. We started early and have got more into the mindset of permanent campaigning. We also selected earlier which really helps, and we selected good candidates in the main wards who all led their own campaigns from the front. As long as we continue to take it seriously like that it all bodes well for the future.

Also for a change, I regretted having a proof copy because it only has placeholders where the foreword, acknowledgements and author biography would be and as soon as I finished I wanted to find out a bit more about the author, specifically whether he has written any other books. (It turns out he hasn’t yet)

Anyway, here is what I wrote about it:

The subject matter is quite dark but written in a light way that lets the writer get away with killing women, children and pensioners without traumatising the reader. It is black comedy with just enough comedy to stop it just being depressing.

The comedy is laid on thickest at the start with some genuinely hilarious descriptions of young Geldof’s cringeworthy home circumstances, but done well enough to let later levity rely on references and memories of the pre-apocalypse situation when necessary.

Like all good apocalyptic stories it does make you wonder exactly how a government would respond to such events. Would they be better or ever worse? There are satirical undertones to this that do encourage such questions, but you don’t get to ponder them too much as the story keeps pulling you along.

I do have a small problem with the plausibility of some bits right at the end, but not enough to spoil my enjoyment of the book and to even mention the specifics would be a spoiler for anybody else so I won’t go into details. Having said that, the very last bit of political satire involved in the zombie interview is very tasty.

And do look out for the John Selwyn Gummer spoof. A fine example of very, very dark satire.

If you enjoyed the film Black Sheep (the New Zealand killer sheep comedy and not the German/Russian WWII film) then you would enjoy this. It is a similar topic but on a much larger scale.

It is very , very depressing reading.

The way I understand it, from the book I was reading, the first chimps were bred for other experiments and Harlow raised them in isolation to try and keep them free of cross-infection but found out that the isolation severaly damaged the chimps emotionally. I think most normal people would have regretted that, but he thought that the emotional damage was interesting in itself and then continued. The results of these experiments have really shed a lot of light on the workings of the human mind, but I don’t think that justifies the nature of them.

It was another book that I got through Amazon’s Vince programme, which I might otherwise have missed out on.

Amazon don’t like the reviews on their site to be overly long so I’ll paste what I wrote there and then expand on it a bit because I can waffle on as much as I like here I found this to be a completely fascinating book. As well as presenting a theory about moral psychology it also covers the author’s journey to reaching that theory.

This does mean that it takes a while to actually get to the point of explaining ‘why good people are divided by politics and religion’ because, for example, it outlines a theory and then mentions how that theory turned out to have a flaw and then describes how the author revised it and then lays out the new version, so you end up with several iterations of the theory. This is a 400-page book with the last 100 pages being references, acknowledgements, notes and bibliography, so really 300 pages of the proper book and it is not until the last few pages that the question of the title is really addressed, but that is not a problem because you really do need to build up to it.

There are two main metaphors used in the book. One is to picture the mind as a rider (representing the logical mind) on an elephant (representing the emotional mind). By coincidence I have now started reading abook about decision-making processes which covers a lot of the same ground regarding the relationship between logic and emotions, and draws on some of the same references. I’ll admit that I found the metaphor a bit cute at first but eventually came to terms with it.

The other metaphor is the description on the human mind as being 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee to explain how we sometimes act for our personal benefit and sometimes for the benefit of the community.

This was where it got especially interesting as it picked up on some of Darwin’s ideas about social evolution and developed them.

Along the way the book provides a way to classify moral matters into six categories, which the author calls moral foundations, and presents the results of large-scale studies to show how people of different political beliefs possess (or use, or are guided by) different foundations in different proportions.

This is, of course, just a theory and in a field where absolute proof isn’t likely, but it is all plausible enough to be useful, and for a leftie like me a little bit depressing because I am used to seeing my side as being the goodies and the other side as being the baddies. Instead I have the challenge to consider that the other side might have valid reasons for thinking what they do (while still being wrong of course).

The religious aspect is also disturbing reading for a confirmed atheist like me, because the book makes a good case for religion having a positive impact on the development of human society – regardless of whether gods exist or not.

At the very least this book has made me think more about the relationship between my points of view and those of my political opponents. It has the potential to be life-changing if you totally buy into the theory and use it to guide some decisions. For example, the centre-left could make a careful study of the moral foundations to find ways that their manifesto could address all six and not just concentrate on two to make itself more appealing to more people.

Even without deciding to let this change your outlook completely, there is plenty to dwell on and it is very clearly written and summaraised at every step.

So why was it so challenging and potentially life-changing?

Well, as a rule we tend to read things that support our own opinions rather than challenge them. Wooly liberals don’t read the Daily Mail and mad right-wing plutocrats don’t read Socialist Worker. It can set off some serius cognitive dissonance if you find yourself reading something from the oppsite end of the spectrum, especially if you find yourself agreeing with parts of it, because contemporary politics has become very polarised and tribal.

This, however, is not a book written from a right-wing perspective that challenges some aspect of policy. It is worse than that; it is a mostly scientific but sometimes personal explanation of some theories that undermine some fundamental beliefs.

Just so we know where we stand, I’m a pretty staunch republican, atheist and averagely tribal member of the Labour movement, and this book gives very good reasons to not just do away with religions, the monarchy, and the Tories. Even more depressing, it gives some very plausible scientific reasons why liberals (in the broader American sense) are doomed to have a narrower appeal than conservatives (again in the broader sense).

Having said that, with some of this Haidt was pushing at an open door to an extent as I have felt for a while that politics is far too combative and polarised and that while gods may not exist churches (other religious establishments are available) have and continue to perform some useful services alongside the less appealing aspects like institutional child molestation, ritual suppression of women and perpetuation of inequalities.

I’m not going to, and can’t fully explain all that here because I’m not good enough at it and I would have to quote so much of the book it would qualify as piracy. As a rough approximation, there is some investigation of the way the mind works and the relationship between the emotional and rational parts of the brain. As a sort of side-challenge this undermines a lot of what Plato and Mill thought and I’ve always rated them. Anyway, it turns out that a lot of our opinions and beliefs are due to the emotional side of the brain and the rational part does not so much lead us to our answers but is used post hoc to rationalise what our emotions have come up with.

One practical reason why this is bad for us on the left is that we do tend to try and make our case by reason. How many times have you heard somebody at a Labour gathering complain that if only the voters read our well-argued wordy leaflets instead of being swayed by the tabloid heart-string tugging of the Tory leaflets they would realise who is right? We are getting a bit better but generally we try to win arguments (and elections) with logic while the Tories go straight for emotional dog whistles (and the Lib Dems, of course, have their dodgy bar charts). I don’t think we will ever get over this because it is Labour’s instict to think we are above that sort of thing, but unfortunately that sort of thing works because that is how human minds work.

The book closes with a decent argument for why both liberal and conservative attitudes are necessary. Without the liberal influence we would never make advances, especially social advances like equalities. We would still have women not allowed in pubs, homosexuality illegal, children up chimneys and so on. Without the conservative influence though, we would advance too quickly without letting society adapt and adjust to the changes. That clashes with the instictive attitude we are supposed to have that the world would be better if we won every election and won every seat. It may just be that it is better for the balance of power to change every now and then and for whoever is in power to have the other lot existing as a strong and viable opposition.

This is a lot harder to stomach these days. In the past the small-l liberals and small-c conservatives were spread around the parties more. There were socially conservative socialists and socially liberal Tories in far greater numbers. There were more shades of grey, but now we have become entrenched in ever more polarised positions.

I would still happily see an end to all religions, a fully elected second chamber and head of state and all the rest, but I can see how you can’t do that without identifying the useful functions they perform in terms of social evolution and make sure something else is in place to cover them first, and that isn’t an overnight task but one that could take generations – especially as even the concept of social or cultural evolution is still hotly disputed.

Maybe on its own the book hasn’t made me change what I think or do, but it has at least made me realise that perhaps I should. Really I can’t recommend this highly enough.

1. 100% mandatory
2. In Glasgow

And I decided to do it as a day trip. My four colleagues went up Tuesday afternoon, but I figured that since I live right next to the airport it was feasible to do it all in one day. It was, but it made for one long day.The shame of it is that I had never been to Scotland. Newcastle was the closest I ever got to the border. It always bugged me a bit that I had done a fair bit of globe-trotting in the past, visiting or passing through some pretty far-flung places but never set foot in Scotland. I can’t say that any more, but on the other hand I can’t exactly say I have seen much of it.

To make matters worse, I went by EasyJet both ways. They really have sucked all the joy out of flying haven’t they? I know that draconian (and possibly futile and pointless) security measures contribute to the misery, but EasyJet have certainly done their bit.

Arriving at Glasgow I took a taxi and was treated to a potted history of Paisley and had pointed out to me where Alex Ferguson was raised, where Billy Connolly used to work and where Robert the Bruce’s daughter fell off her horse. Really. I was also told about every ex-landmark we passed which had been earmarked at sometime as a site for Tesco. At least I got to see a little bit of the locality I suppose – though I suspect the meter was wired up to charge not only by the mile but also by the word. It would explain the size of the fare.

I had allowed a little bit of leeway in the schedule in case of small delays, but we actually took off a little early and made good time so I didn’t have to rush and arrived onsite just a few minutes after my colleagues. I may have been tired from the early start and the uncomfortable flight but at least I wasn’t hungover. They had all enjoyed a night on the town and the dubious delights of a haggis pakora at a local curry house.

The course details had 5pm as a finish time so I had decided not to risk booking the 6:30pm flight back just in case and went for the next one – 7:55pm. It turned out that the course finished early and we could have made that one after all as we told each other at regular intervals during our long loiter at the airport. To make it worse the flight back was a little late and I ended up back home at about 10pm.

So it was do-able, but I’m not sure I would want to do it again. It may be an internal flight, but I have to remember that Glasgow is further away from here than Brussels, Amsterdam or Dusseldorf. It is twice as far from home as Paris – a bit ironic because I could never do Paris as a day trip. Partly because of the time difference but also because you can’t fly there from Gatwick so and up going by train.