Hold on, don’t chuck out your chip pan just yet. Every so often, it’s the only thing that will hit the spot Fried food has had a bad rap. To hear some, you’d think the frying pan was the source of all earthly evils – or at least dietary problems. And if you can get past that, there are those who fear they can’t rustle up a plate of chips without setting fire to the house. Today, I’m flying in the face of fears and fashion – and giving you my favourite deep-fried treats. I don’t advocate you eat them every day, but once in a while the lure of a crisp, golden coating is too strong to resist. You don’t need a deep-fat fryer, just a large, deep saucepan and a frying basket or a “spider” spatula (the type that has a wide, flattish basket at the end). A cooking thermometer would be handy, too, but if you don’t have one, there’s a simple temperature test – a cube of white bread browns in 60 seconds at 160C, 40 seconds at 180C and 20 seconds at 190C. And just in case, check the batteries in your smoke detector. When it comes to selecting oils, a high smoke point is what you want. No extra-virgin – it’s too delicate, and burns. Most of the time I use sunflower or groundnut, though rapeseed works well for croquetas. Before starting, make sure the oil doesn’t come more than a third of the way up the sides of the pan – adding moist food to hot oil makes it bubble fiercely, so give it room. And fry in small batches – throwing in too much at once makes the temperature drop dramatically so the food absorbs too much oil and becomes soggy. And we’re not interested in soggy. Crisp is what we’re after. Here, have a chip… Churros Dusting the churros with a little cinnamon as well as sugar isn’t strictly traditional, but it does taste good. Serve your churros with cups of hot chocolate thickened with a little cornflour. Serves four. 120g butter A pinch of salt 130g plain flour, sifted ½ tsp baking powder 3 eggs, lightly beaten Vegetable oil, for frying 4 tbsp caster sugar ¼ tsp ground cinnamon (optional) To make the dough, put 250ml water, the butter and salt into a
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Slowing down is the easiest way to cut your petrol bill, and coupled with some simple techniques you could save hundreds There’s a very simple way to save money on petrol: slow down. A car speeding at 80mph uses 10% more fuel than one cruising at 70mph, according to the Department for Transport. This week, Spain introduced a 110km per hour (68mph) limit on its motorways as part of a series of measures designed to cut petrol consumption in the country by more than 5%. Yet Britain seems to be heading in the opposite direction, with transport secretary Philip Hammond suggesting recently that our speed limit could be raised to 80mph to put the economy in the fast lane. But while Clarkson-ite petrolheads might cheer a rise in speed limits, in practice British drivers are already taking their foot off the pedal to save cash. Of 15,000 drivers who took part in a recent AA survey, 59% said they would think about slowing down if it saved them money. During the last petrol price spike in 2008, average speeds on British motorways fell to 69mph from 70mph the year before, while the number exceeding the limit by more than 10mph fell even more. But once petrol prices eased back again, average speeds rose. But you can drive at the same speed and still save on petrol by sticking to a few simple techniques, according to automotive engineer Anthony Sale of Powertrain. • Avoid over-revving Drivers typically let the revs run to 3,000 per minute on a petrol car and 2,500 on a diesel before moving up a gear, but Sale says we should be changing up when we hit 2,500 revs on a petrol and 2,000 on a diesel, and move into fifth (and sixth on new models) at the appropriate point. Your engine may not sound as if it is labouring, but in reality speeds above 75mph-80mph are when your engine starts glugging gas. “At very high speeds engines will rev higher, the engine will have to work much harder and it will start to drink far more petrol,” Sale says. In general, the economical band for petrol vehicles is between 1,500 and 2,500 rpm (for diesels it is between 1,300 rpm and 2,000 rpm), and these bands are the same for the vast majority of vehicles, Sale says. “The exception to the rules are vehicles which have either a very high or a very low power to weight ratio. If the engine has a lot of power but very little weight (for example, the 1.6l Mini diesel) then the revs can be kept closer to 1,600 or 1,700 rpm rather than going right to 2,000 rpm. Equally, if a low-powered engine is fitted to a heavy vehicle then it is likely that the engine will have to work much harder to move the mass of vehicle along, hence the need to rev the engine higher than the 2,500rpm top end of the band. “It is important to remember that at whatever point you change gear you don’t want the engine to labour as you tread back in.” • Acceleration and deceleration “Stamping on the brakes and then accelerating hard is efficient driving’s worst enemy. An efficient driver is a smooth driver,” Sale says. If you have cruise control, try to use it whenever appropriate.” There are times when you can cut your fuel usage to zero: by cruising in gear as you slow down to a junction or roundabout. Many drivers occasionally put the car into neutral and let it coast as it slows, which is a no-no. “Lifting off the throttle, rather than putting it in neutral, means you will use no fuel at all,” Sale says. It’s safer, too. • Speed bumps Braking hard, accelerating, then braking hard for the next speed bump means you drink petrol, Sale warns. Drive along speed-humped roads at a steady 15mph-20mph instead. • Tyres Over time, tyres will naturally leak a bit of air. The RAC says you can improve fuel consumption by up to 2% if you regularly check and maintain pressures. It’s safer, too: dozens of people a year die due to poorly-inflated tyres. • Roof racks A report by car manual maker Haynes says get rid of the rack – fully loaded it can add 30% to fuel consumption. But AutoExpress says that’s a myth. Its test found that those with aerodynamic designs added little to the fuel bill. But reducing weight – for instance by clearing unnecessary items from the boot – will definitely make a difference, albeit small, to fuel consumption. • Air con v open windows At low speeds, such as driving around town, air conditioning can add 5%-7% to fuel costs, Sale says, so just wind the window down. At higher speeds the effects are less noticeable. • Radio/CD player In a survey by BP, 10% of drivers thought that turning off the radio improved fuel consumption. It doesn’t. • Engine size Don’t assume smaller engines use less petrol. A big car with a 2l engine may use less than the same car with a 1.6l engine as it strains to pull a larger weight. On test, a people carrier with a small engine recorded worse fuel efficiency than one with a bigger engine. • Petrol v diesel In general diesels will use less fuel, but as they typically cost more to buy the savings aren’t always obvious. The Environmental Transport Association has a calculator on its website which gives you an indication of the costs of running on diesel, petrol, biodiesel, electric battery or fuel cells. Sale says: “I’ve driven diesels with dreadful fuel efficiency, and petrol cars that have excellent fuel efficiency.” • Learning to drive more smartly The AA Driving School offers a Drive Smart deal for already qualified drivers wanting to cut petrol consumption. It consists of a minimum of two hours of in-car lessons, and the AA says “pupils have typically been able to cut 10% from their fuel consumption (equating to savings of £160 a year based on today’s petrol price).” Motoring Petrol prices Saving money Family finances Consumer affairs Patrick Collinson guardian.co.uk
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From the domesticated drawings of the 18th century to Disney animation, the story of illustrated versions of the Arabian Nights is one of the slow triumph of the imagination A lady on a divan telling stories to a turbaned sultan; men with scimitars running down a dark and narrow street; a jinni issuing like a vast dark cloud from a flask; a prince in a pavilion guarded by lions; a veiled lady at the entrance to a shop; a young man on a flying carpet circling over a domed palace; a man clinging to driftwood in a stormy sea . . . These days, thanks to illustrated children’s books, comics, films and video games, people are much more likely to have a sense of what the world of The Arabian Nights should look like than to have actual knowledge of the stories themselves. It was not always so. The first edition of The Arabian Nights had no pictures, and even when, in the late 18th century, fully illustrated editions began to be published, their illustrations gave little sense of the exotic medieval Arab environment in which the stories were set. Only from the 19th century onwards did some illustrators try to get Arab buildings and costumes right. In 1701 the orientalist and antiquarian Antoine Galland published a translation from Arabic into French of “The Voyages of Sindbad”. The translation was well received and since Galland had been told that “The Voyages of Sindbad” were part of a much larger collection of stories known as Alf Layla wa Layla , or “The Thousand and One Nights”, he located a three or four-volume manuscript of this work and set about translating it. His translation, published in 12 volumes in the years 1704-17 was a raging success. His Les mille et une nuit was not received as a collection of children’s stories (nor should it be). On the contrary, it was read and enthused over by courtiers and intellectuals in Versailles and Paris, and Versailles and Paris set the fashions for the rest of Europe. So translations of Galland into English, Italian, Russian and other languages soon followed. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Addison, Johnson and Goethe were among the 18th-century writers whose work was heavily influenced by the Nights . The Nights had a crucial role in shaping the origins and evolution not just of fantasy literature, but also of the realistic novel. Copyright was not policed in the 18th century and books that were successful were almost invariably reissued in pirate editions. Between 1714 and 1730 a series of pirate editions of Galland’s translation were printed in the Hague. Each of the 12 volumes had a frontispiece by David Coster, a Dutch artist. Since Coster had no notion of the medieval Islamic world as something alien and strange, his engravings depicted the characters in the stories in European dress. King Shahriyar looks very comfortable in his western-style four-poster bed as he sits up listening to stories told by Sheherazade. The only concession to the exotic is that he has a loosely tied turban as an item of nightwear. The relatives of Gulanar the Mermaid are welcomed into what looks like a French palace and the genie summoned up by Aladdin is merely a very large man in a tattered robe. Artists who came after Coster in the 18th century shared his vagueness about the exotic. The preferred strategy was to dress the men in vaguely classical togas and plonk turbans on their heads, while the women were given dresses that would not have been out of place in Versailles. In Charles-Joseph de Mayer’s collection of fairy tales, the engraver Pierre-Clément Marillier portrayed King Shahriyar and his brother Shahzaman in bosky French countryside, while his version of the encounter of the third dervish with the 40 young women looks like nothing so much as a scene from Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress . Robert Smirke’s histrionic scenes from the Nights have the appearance of being based on pantomime performances. Things changed with the publication in 1839-41 of Edward William Lane’s The Thousand and One Nights in three volumes. Unlike earlier English translators, Lane, who had spent years in Egypt, translated not from Galland’s French, but directly from the Arabic. Lane intended his translation to have an improving, didactic purpose and he seems to have thought of it as a kind of supplement to his pioneering work of ethnography, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). He thought that the stories of the Nights could serve as an introduction to everyday life in the Middle East. (Never mind about the flying horse, the jinn, the Roc, the magic lamp and the Old Man of the Sea.) His copious endnotes furthered his didactic aim and so did the illustrations. William Harvey, a pupil of Thomas Bewick and one of Britain’s leading engravers, did the boxwood engravings, but Lane stood at his shoulder, checking the look of things and providing previously published engravings of Egyptian and Moorish architecture for him to copy. In general, the purpose of the pictures was not to stimulate the imagination or supplement the storyline, but to introduce the British reader to the authentic look of the Arab world. Just occasionally Harvey was licensed to use his imagination, as with his marvellous depiction of the giant jinni in “The Story of the City of Brass”, or the battle of magical transformations in “The Story of the Second Dervish”. Dalziel’s Illustrated Arabian Nights Entertainments , published in 1865, was
Continue reading …Sen. Lautenberg Decries the "Toxic Tea" Being "Brewed" by the Tea Party Republicans
March 11, 2011 No CommentSen. Frank Lautenberg stood up on the floor of the Senate in opposition to just how radical the so called astroturf “tea party” agenda is with the proposed budget cuts that have come out of the House and that have been embraced by their “tea party” members of the Senate as well. Lautenberg Decries Senate Republicans’ ‘Toxic Tea’ For Students, Women And Environment : Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) decried the “toxic tea” being “brewed” by the Tea Party Republicans in Congress on the floor of the Senate Thursday, highlighting proposed cuts to early education funding, college tuition assistance, women’s health care and environmental protections. “Here in Congress, Tea Party activists have seized control of the Republican side of the aisle — and it is far from a tea party for lots of jobless people and those qualified to study in college but unable to pay the freight,” Lautenberg said in prepared remarks. “Now that they are in power, we see they’re brewing Toxic Tea — a dangerous concoction that will create pain for our children and bring shame to our country,” he said. “We know that cutting critical programs now brings sky-high prices later — in more illnesses and a less-educated society,” Lautenberg said. “So we look at the future and we say we must invest in our children, our environment and medical research. But every time, they say: ‘No.’” “Ask any parent if they want their kids to drink from that teapot. We need to gather together for birthday parties, school graduation and lots of smiles instead of their toxic tea parties. Let’s reject the House Republican Tea Party approach to funding our government,” Lautenberg said.
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Once he was the face of the ladmag generation, now he’s coming over all perceptive and vulnerable. Decca Aitkenhead on an unlikely reinvention Frank Skinner gave a talk at an arts festival 18
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Father of soldier who died at barracks calls for public inquiry after new report seen by BBC Police investigating the unresolved deaths of four soldiers at Deepcut barracks failed to follow up potential suspects who could have been responsible for their murder, according to a new report into the deaths. The soldiers died in mysterious circumstances at the Surrey army base between 1995 and 2002 amid reports of systematic bullying from senior officers. Devon and Cornwall police reviewed Surrey police’s investigation and found that the force failed to follow up specific individuals who could have killed the soldiers, according to the report seen by the BBC. The 140-page document said it was impossible to say whether or not the individuals should have been considered suspects or eliminated from inquiries. But the review said that Surrey police failed to investigate a potential suspect known as the “unknown white male” who could have been connected to the death of Private Cheryl James, an 18-year-old who was found dead with a single bullet wound to the head at Deepcut in 1995. “The unknown male should have been subject to a Trace and Interview action,” said the report. “Operation Stanza [the review] believes insufficient investigative work took place to identify this unknown male who could have potentially been a suspect.” The BBC also quotes the Devon and Cornwall review as finding evidence of a “possible mindset” held by individuals leading the original inquiries who thought that the re-investigations were in some way “different”. James’s father, Des James, has now called for a public inquiry, criticising Surrey police for investigating a suicide rather than considering all alternatives. “[The report] simply confirms what we have always believed – that this was a hurried investigation, put together quickly, more to placate public opinion and media attention than to realistically and honestly find out what happened to these young people,” said James. Surrey police denied failures to follow up potential leads. In a statement, representatives told the BBC that the force had had “an open-minded approach” and “considered all hypotheses with equal weight”. Surrey police also pointed out that Devon and Cornwall produced no evidence to say that they missed anything by not following up the suggested leads. The other soldiers who died from gunshot wounds at Deepcut were Private Sean Benton, 20, from Hastings, East Sussex, Private Geoff Gray, 17, of Hackney, east London, and Private James Collinson, 17, of Perth, Scotland. A coroner recorded a verdict of suicide for Benton but the inquests into the other three returned open verdicts. A report by Nicholas Blake QC in 2006 found that bullying and “foul abuse” were a routine part of life at the army’s training barracks at Deepcut, although no evidence of deaths being anything other than self-inflicted was found. Deepcut Police Military Rowenna Davis guardian.co.uk
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HG Wells, author of more than 100 books, was also a prophet of the sexual revolution. David Lodge delves into his many affairs and, below, DJ Taylor considers his literary achievement In 2004, while waiting for my novel about Henry James, Author, Author , to come out, I occupied myself by writing the introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of HG Wells’s novel Kipps . In April I made this note in my very occasional diary: Researching Kipps I came across in Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography an interesting story of the ménage of Mr and Mrs Hubert Bland at Well Hall, Eltham. He was a Fabian, a philanderer who converted to Catholicism, she was
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Husband of US congresswoman, who was wounded in the Arizona shootings, is commander of the Endeavour mission due for lift off from Cape Canaveral on 19 April US representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was gravely wounded in a shooting rampage in Tucson in January, plans to attend the launch of her astronaut husband’s space shuttle mission next month, an aide said. “The plan is for her to attend,” said CJ Karamargin, spokesman for the Arizona Democrat, adding that changes in her medical condition and other factors would determine if she went to the Florida launch. “It is a goal that we are working toward, and we certainly hope that she’ll be there,” he said. Giffords’s husband, Mark Kelly, a three-time space shuttle veteran, is commander of the Endeavour mission due for lift off from Cape Canaveral on 19 April on what is scheduled to be Nasa’s final shuttle flight. Doctors are expected to give an update on Giffords’s condition at a news conference in Houston on Friday. She is undergoing rehabilitation at the Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Centre there. Giffords has not been seen in public since she was shot in the head on 8 January when a lone gunman opened fire on a crowd of people gathered for a Congress on Your Corner event outside a supermarket. Six people were killed and 13 others, including Giffords, were wounded in the shooting spree. The accused assailant, 22-year-old Jared Loughner, pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to a 49-count indictment stemming from the attack. Gabrielle Giffords Arizona shooting United States US politics The space shuttle guardian.co.uk
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Abobo, usually one of the most populated suburbs of Abidjan, has become a place of terror, bloodshed and desperation The men wear roughly improvised balaclavas, some plain black, others patterned with skulls and crossbones. One is clad in a heavy-duty jacket that bears the circular logo of CND. They have fashioned a checkpoint out of battered car doors lined up across the road. This is the gateway to the “autonomous republic of Abobo”, usually one of the most populated suburbs of Ivory Coast’s commercial capital, Abidjan. It has in effect declared independence from the disputed presidency of Laurent Gbagbo. Now a lawless place of terror, bloodshed and desperation, it typifies the slow-motion implosion of a country into a failed state. No one is safe in Abobo. Women were slaughtered in a hail of machine-gun fire at a demonstration. Men have been beaten and burned alive because they were judged to belong to the wrong tribe or nationality. UN peacekeepers have been shot at and western journalists have been roughed up and threatened with lynching. The Guardian’s vehicle was stopped at the makeshift roadblock and its occupants ordered out. The masked guards, going by the name “invisible commandos”, conducted a thorough search of the glove compartment and under the seats. A local observer said men with AK-47s were waiting out of sight in case the mood soured. Normally busy with traffic, Abobo is emptying as thousands of residents flee the anarchy. Burned out hulks of cars and pickup trucks litter the scorchmarked roads. Vast piles of rubbish are expanding and threatening public health. Along the single storey rows of shops, almost all the shutters are down, making a mockery of the glamorous faces grinning from advertising billboards “Life in Abobo is catastrophic,” said resident David Kouassi, an IT technician. “You have people who cannot get to work so they are being fired. The electricity company is threatening to cut people off for not paying their bills. It’s hard to find food or medicine. I will use one word to describe what will happen if people don’t take care of this situation: chaos. Abobo will become a place where no one can live.” Kouassi, 28, had a narrow escape when youths questioned him about his tribe: fortunately his was the “right” one. He said: “Sometimes if you don’t go back home in time, you find youths have set up blockades with machetes and knives. They search you and steal everything they find like medicines and mobile phones.” He is trying to move away with his pregnant wife and father but has nowhere to go. “If we stay here we could be killed,” he said. “Almost all the companies and shops have been ransacked and people have run out of money and are looking at ways to feed themselves. When they have exhausted the shops, they will go to homes and families could be killed.” The Abobo militias say they are defending the neighbourhood against Gbagbo’s security forces and hired mercenaries following weeks of night raids and street battles with heavy weapons. They demand that Gbagbo gives way to his rival, Alassane Ouattara, who beat the incumbent president in a UN-certified election last November. There are signs that other pro-Ouattara areas are trying to secede from government control, turning Abidjan into a chessboard of rival power bases. The most important politically is the sprawling Golf Hotel where, in sharp contrast to Abobo, there is sunshine and calm as Ouattara and his “cabinet” sit and watch and wait. One resident describes it as “the safest place in Ivory Coast today”. Beside a lagoon and surrounded by great coils of barbed wire, UN peacekeepers from Bangladesh, Jordan, Togo and elsewhere try to sleep in humid white tents on a lawn near the hotel swimming pool. Inside the worn four-star hotel, where all 250 rooms are occupied, people lounge on plastic chairs in the cavernous reception hall with 1970s decor of murals and lurid green and purple walls. In a makeshift plywood studio, young men wearing headphones sit at computers editing content for a pro-Ouattara station that they hope will counter Gbagbo’s state TV. Among those who have been holed up here for nearly four months is Patrick Achi, Ouattara’s economic infrastructure “minister” and government spokesman. He describes the hotel as a “prison” but said its guests were working day and night to weaken Gbagbo’s grip. “Power: it’s all he cares about,” Achi said. “Mr Gbagbo is the most charming person I’ve ever met in my life. I compare him with a snake that the kids put around their necks. He’s around your neck and feels so soft and he starts to squeeze and you don’t realise. By the time you realise, it’s too late and he kills you.” Achi believes a popular uprising against Gbagbo could be imminent – though it is unclear how the UN’s 12,000 peacekeepers would respond. “We think the time is ripe,” he said. “Shooting those women [at a demonstration in Abobo last week] was really a turning point. No one in the army wants their name attached to a criminal act. If it came to it, Mr Gbagbo would have a handful of loyalists but that’s all.” But Ouattara, now bound for Nigeria for talks with President Goodluck Jonathan, is playing a delicate waiting game. Achi continued: “People have been asking Mr Ouattara to make a call to go after Mr Gbagbo. One guy told him on the internet that we did not vote for you to go for the Nobel peace prize. They are saying people are already dead and we have to go after him. “But you have to be sure everybody is ready, because if it misses it makes things more difficult. If you don’t defeat him, it makes him stronger.” The UN says nearly 400 people have died since the political crisis began; Outtara’s camp puts the figure at 700 with a further 300 missing. This week’s atrocities allegedly included the murder of a 12-year-old boy and kidnapping of his younger twin sisters, apparently because their father dissented against Gbagbo. Around 80,000 refugees have poured into neighbouring Liberia and some 450,000 are internally displaced. The UN’s children’s agency, Unicef, has warned of a “humanitarian emergency”, with rates of acute malnutrition trebling in some areas and schools closed for around 800,000 children. Hospitals are running out of staff and supplies. Drugs are no longer available for new cases of HIV-positive pregnant women who want to prevent their babies from being infected. The UN says 1.5 million people are at risk of deadly diseases and there are already outbreaks of yellow fever, measles and cholera, which has infected 516 and killed 12. Banks are closed and essentials such as gas, petrol and money are about to run out, while staple food prices have soared by an estimated 80%. Hotels and restaurants in Abidjan, once “the Paris of Africa”, are shutting as the city is gradually strangled from within. An entire economy is creaking and listing. “There’s already a pretty gruesome humanitarian disaster going on,” said one western diplomat. “It will get worse when the electricity is cut off. The question is, when will the population radicalise? When will the army intervene?” The official, who has prepared an evacuation plan, added: “Civil war is a real possibility. It will be very destructive, not just in terms of lives and homes but Ivory Coast as a nation. It could be a bloodbath here. That’s a dreadful outcome.” Ivory Coast’s election was one of the most open and most observed in African history. It was intended to be a model for the continent’s widening democratic movement. Instead, with Gbagbo now seen by many as another benighted Mugabe or Gaddafi, the whole country is staring into the abyss of Abobo. Ivory Coast Protest David Smith guardian.co.uk
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Founder of SDP, which went on to form the Liberal Democrats with the Liberal party, launches No to AV, Yes to PR campaign in letter to the Guardian Hopes of replacing the first-past-the-post voting system with the alternative vote (AV) have received a blow as Lord Owen, one of the founders of the Social Democratic party that went on to form the Liberal Democrats with the Liberal party, helped found a group opposed to AV in favour of “real reform”. The “No to AV, Yes to PR” campaign was formally announced on Friday in the Guardian’s letters page, with the support of Owen, his fellow crossbench peer Lord Skidelsky, and other eminent figures including the Bishop of Blackburn, Nicholas Reade. It is designed to attract those disaffected by the decision of the longstanding supporters of proportional representation – such as the Liberal Democrats, Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust and the Electoral Reform Society – to back the Yes to AV campaign. In a separate intervention, a group of leading historians sent a letter to the Times (paywall) in which they argued that a switch to AV would undermine the principle that each person’s vote is equal. The criticisms of the AV referendum – a key demand made by the Lib Dems as part of the coalition deal – comes as Nick Clegg prepares to face party activists in Sheffield for their spring conference. Before the general election, Clegg had described AV as a “miserable little compromise” because it stops short of full proportional representation, which is based on the share of the vote gained by each party. Clegg is now making the case that AV will ensure more people’s voices will be heard, while David Cameron is pressing the Conservative line for a retention of the status quo. Under AV, voters rank candidates in order of preference, with losing politicians in each constituency eliminated and the preferences redistributed until one has more than 50%. Owen and others argue that many will share their belief that a “third choice”, of a proportional voting system, should have been included in the forthcoming referendum on voting reform on 5 May, and that clinging to AV as the first step towards a fairer system of proportional representation is misguided. “This is particularly so since proportional representation has been at the core of election campaigns over at least 30 years by the Liberal party, the SDP, the Green party and, up to late 2009, the Liberal Democrats,” they wrote. The authors said they would “reluctantly vote” against AV. “We recognise that some of those strongly committed to proportional representation genuinely believe that the alternative vote is an incremental step to the fairer system of proportional representation. But we do not accept that the electoral voting system can be subject to repeated reform. Once changed, a new voting system has to be tested over a substantial period of time – otherwise it will destabilise our political system and encourage cynical attempts to change the system for reasons of partisan advantage.” Clegg said in an Independent interview on Friday that he had joked to Cameron that he was talking “complete bilge” when he defended the first-past-the-post system at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday. But Cameron’s position is shared by senior academics and historians, who drew on the lessons of history to warn that AV would “for the first time since 1928″ present the possibility that “one person’s casting ballot will be given greater weight than another”. In their letter to the Times they wrote: “For the first time in centuries, we face the unfair idea that one citizen’s vote might be worth six times that of another. It will be a tragic consequence if those votes belong to supporters of extremist and non-serious parties.” They argued that the cause for reform could not have the “fundamentally fair and historic principle of majority voting cast aside”. “Twice in our past the nation has rejected any threat to the principle of one citizen, one vote. The last time, in 1931, Winston Churchill stood against the introduction of an alternative vote system. As he argued, AV would mean that elections would be determined by ‘the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates’. He understood that it was simply too great a risk to take.” AV Proportional representation Electoral reform Liberal Democrats David Cameron Conservatives Liberal-Conservative coalition Hélène Mulholland guardian.co.uk
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