Senedd 2021 Election Leaflets Review & Ranking

With less than a week to go to the Senedd Election, here is a review of the political literature we have recieved so far. I introduced the scoring template in a preview post, but to recap, parties earn points for SMART goals, the number of leaflets, being bilingual, contact details, candidate photos, and endorsements. Parties are docked points for vague objectives, throwing shade - 1 point per target, photos of politicians from other parties, photos of the area that don't include the candidate, stock photos, and typos. I'm also going to list "pandemic points" as a possible tiebreaker.

As of this post we have received 20 pieces of post so I am going to list them by most leaflets then alphabetical order, which means we start with Labour.

Party: Labour

Number of items: 4. 2 of them are general for the list votes and 2 were from Vaughan Gething, the constuency candidate. Only 2 were bilingual, so 6 points

Quite like this design

SMART goals: 3 points - not many, as the leaflets tended to focus on what "Welsh Labour has delivered" rather than making promises. I like the idea of a new national forest - and that's a measurable goal. We will either have one or we won't.

Contact details: a total of 10 ways to get in touch with either generic Labour or Vaughan himself.

Relevant photos: 10, including lots of Vaughan in the consituency. All 4 regional list candidates had pics. Including the one called Mr Death. (He's never going to be health minister, is he!)

Endorsements: 6 different ones. Vaughan got an endorsement off Lynda Thorne who is one of my local councillors who has been very helpful in the past.

Vague objectives: -7. Including to make Wales "a greener country".

Shade: -2. Main targets are the Tories who get unfavourable comparisons across a lot of policy areas. Plaid Cymru apparently "want to put up barriers to our neighbours just over the border".

Irrelevant photos: 0

Typos: -1

TOTAL = (35-10) = 25. I think this is the most points Labour have ever scored in one of these rundowns. True, they racked up the easy points with the contact details, but overall their literature is a lot more positive than it has been in previous campaigns. If there was more detail to their goals they would have scored even higher.

Pandemic Points: 10! Vaughan Gething mentioned it a lot in his 2 leaflets. But then he is the health minister so I think that's reasonable. 

Party: Liberal Democrats

Number of items: 4. These all came like letters in proper envelopes. We had 2 from the local candidate, Alex Wilson, and 2 from the regional list candidate, Rodney Berman. All 4 mailings were a letter and leaflet, so 8 pieces of literature in total, all bilingual = a whopping 16 points.

Comms note: one of the leaflets is a CV of the candidate, which is quite a nice piece of literature. Given the lack of space I'm not sure why they needed to include his hobby of running a theatre group, though.

#TopTip: Only include necessary information on a CV

SMART goals: 3 - not much really that could be measureable. A lot of space on the regional list leaflets is used up explaining how to vote tactically and "lend your vote" to the Liberal Democrats. 

"Pssst! Lend us a vote, mister..."

Contact details: 3

Relevant photos: 9

Endorsements: 2

Vague objectives: -7. Things like "better schools and hospitals" are laudable, but not specific.

Shade: There's a personal swipe at "our current MS", ie.e. Vaughan Gething, but they don't mention his name. In it's own way that's extra-insulting. Plus "The Conservatives simply don't have the answers for Wales' future" while Labour "is a wasted vote" and "Plaid are focusing on consitutional issues ahead of the COVID recovery." While asking Labour voters to lend a vote to them, they say that could have kept UKIP out of the Senedd last time. I'm going to count that as shade too, so the total shade points are -5.

Irrelevant photos: -1 for a stock photo.

Typos: 0

TOTAL = (33-13) = 20, a respectable score

Pandemic Points: 3

Party: Plaid Cymru

Number of items: 4. 2 general ones and 2 for the local candidate, Nasir Adam. All bilingual, so 8 points.

Is it just me, or is this Labour's colour scheme...?

SMART goals: 11. Lots of these including specific numbers. 1000 more doctors for the NHS. 5000 more nurses and other healthcare professionals. 50,000 new homes. And a promise of an Independence Referendum before 2026.

As a note, just because a goal is SMART doesn't actually make it smart. I have grave doubts an extra 1,000 doctors could be recruited in just 5 years.

Contact details: 4

Relevant photos: 10 - lots of photos on Nasir in action including on a community litter-pick wearing a t-shirt that riffs on the cover of Straight Outta Compton by NWA. An interesting photo choice. Judging by these leaflets, Plaid have one approved photo of party leader Adam Price, which must appear on all their literature. Just that one photo. No others.

Endorsements: 0

Vague objectives: -10. Lots of aspirational stuff like "a fair deal for families". What does that even mean?

Shade: The thing about encouraging tactical voting is that you end up throwing shade on parties by just saying they can't win. That's said about the Greens and the Lib Dems. Generally though they don't really go after anyone. -2 points.

Irrelevant photos: 3 stock photos! -3 points. 

Typos: It's not a typo but on the leaflets from Nasir, he lists 4 pledges on one leaflet and 3 pledges on another leaflet and the pledges are different. So I'm going to ding a point for inconsistency. -1

TOTAL = (33-16) = 17

Pandemic Points: 1

Party: Conservative Party

Number of items: 2 bilingual leaflets = 4 points.

SMART goals: 5. Promises of 1,200 more doctors but only 3,000 extra nurses. 5,000 more teachers and lots of big new roads, all heading out of Wales, incidentally. Also a very cunningly phrased promise about council tax - constituency candidate Leighton Rowlands will "vote to fund a council tax freeze".

Contact details: 2

Relevant photos: 3

Endorsements: 0

Vague objectives: -5, including "more police on our streets". How many more?

Shade: Just the one reference to Labour failing Wales before the pandemic. -1 point.

Irrelevant photos: -5. Stock photos of policemen, a hospital, a motorway.

Typos: 0

TOTAL = 14-11 = 3 points

Pandemic Points: 1

Party: Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party

Number of items: 1 (saes yn unig)

SMART goals: 0, unless you count the name of the party

Contact details: 0

Relevant photos: 0

Endorsements: 0

Vague objectives: Do we count hashtags? #SaveWales #SavetheUnion. They reckon a vote for them will bring about one education system, one health service and one government. No real detail on what that would look like. I'm going to give them -2 for the hashtags.

Shade: This leaflet doesn't say anything beyond slogans.

Irrelevant photos: 2 stock photos, one of the Senedd with a red cross through it and a landscape. -2 points

Typos: 0

TOTAL = (1-4) = -3

Pandemic Points: 0

Party: Freedom Alliance 

(This appears to be some kind of anti-Lockdown party. There are also are a few conspiracist-tinged phrases in their literature, like "the current political structure and its controllers".)

Number of items: 1 (saes yn unig, although it does say "For the love of Cymru vote for freedom")

SMART goals: I guess "no lockdowns, no curfews" could be measureable. A generous 2.

Contact details: 3, including a QR code.

Relevant photos: 1 photo of the constituency candidate, Alan Golding.

Endorsements: 0

Vague objectives: This whole screed is a vague objective, starting with "a new way of doing politics is needed". Alan promises to return Wales to a position "where people matter more than our politicians". This will be through "honest conversations" and asking "difficult questions that need to be asked". To be honest by the time I got to the appeal to "common sense solutions", I had checked out. However, a quick run through brought me to a tally of 19 vague objectives. A new record. 

Shade: All other policial parties and "career politicians". And their controllers too I guess. I'm going to just give -1 point as he is the only candidate to throw shade on the controllers. 

Irrelevant photos: 0

Typos: 0

TOTAL = (7-20) = -13

Pandemic Points: doesn't actually mention the pandemic, despite claiming "Lockdowns have plunged the Uk into unimaginable debt, caused a national mental health crisis, devastated our children's education, and have been directly responsible for many avoidable deaths from cancer, heart disease and suicide." Still, 0 pandemic points. 

Party: Independent (David Rolfe)

Number of items: 1 (saes yn unig) - the smallest leaflet received so far.

SMART goals: There was no room for any on the leaflet.

Contact details: 4

Relevant photos: 1, of the man himself, David Rolfe.

Endorsements: 0

Vague objectives: David listed 3 bullet points, but with no details, they all count as vague objectives so -3 points.

Shade: David claims to be "An independent voice among the political chaos of mainstream parties" but he doesn't actually throw shade on anyone. 0 points.

Irrelevant photos: 0

Typos: there's a word missing in the legally required text on the leaflet. -1

TOTAL = (6-4) = 2

Party: Propel

Number of items: 1 bilingual leaflet = 2 points

SMART goals: "We will end Welsh lockdowns". OK. Well I guess that's measurable. It also mentions that Propel candidates have signed a "Contract with Wales" to introduce 10 Acts in the Welsh Parliament. The leaflet invites me to look them up online, but I'm not really that invested. So there may be details there that would turn them into SMART goals. I'm only giving 1 point though.

Contact details: 3 social media channels

Relevant photos: 1, of leader Neil McEvoy. And his signature. Which potentially gives graphologists a deeper insight into Neil's personality.

Don't need to ask for his autograph

Endorsements: 0

Vague objectives: the summary of the Contract with Wales lists 4 vague objectives. There is another vague objective listed as part of their proposed Coronavirus Recovery Act. So a total of -5.

Shade: Nothing. 

Irrelevant photos: 1 landscape stock photo, so -1

Typos: 0

TOTAL = (7-6) = 1

Pandemic Points: 0

Party: Reform UK 

(This used to be the Brexit Party)

Number of items: 1 (saes yn unig)

SMART goals: The one measureable goal is to halve the number of councils in Wales from 22 to 11. They are also promising no more full scale lockdowns. 2 points.

Contact details: 3 social media channels

Relevant photos: 2. There's a photo of the local consituency candidate Alan Pick, and one of party leader Nathan Gill (who was previously elected to the Senedd as a UKIP candidate and then quit that party).

Endorsements: 0

Vague objectives: They want to reform a lot of things but don't say how. I counted 5 vague objectives.

Shade: They accuse Welsh Labour of keeping children out of schools without good reasons. Otherwise, they use a good chunk of the leaflet to claim that 50% of people don't vote in Welsh elections so seem to be trying to cultivate people who don't vote rather than steal voters off other parties. So that's just the 1 shade point for the Welsh Labour reference.

Appealing to people who normally can't be arsed

Irrelevant photos: 0

Typos: 0

TOTAL = (8-6) = 2

Pandemic Points: 0

Party: UKIP

Number of items: 1 (saes yn unig)

SMART goals: They want a referendum to scrap the Senedd. They also want to cut alcohol duty and scrap business rates for small companies. I'm going to give them 3 points.

Contact details: 0

Relevant photos: 6 of their list candidates and Neil Hamilton who is the party leader (and is beginning to look like the Emperor Palpatine), so 7 points in total.

Endorsements: 0

Vague objectives: Lots of comments like "UKIP Stands against the knee-taking cultural vandals who want to erase Wales' history by removing statues to its fallen heroes." Talk about fighting imaginary enemies. 

Culture warriors screaming at clouds

There's other stuff too like ending illegal immigration and funding the NHS instead of sending foreign aid, which has echoes of the lies told during the Leave campaign about all that money that could be spent on the NHS and which then disappeared. I counted 9 vague objectives.

Shade: Lots of it. The Tories and Reform UK "are desperate to keep their snouts in the trough", the Abolish the Assembly Party weren't nasty enough to displaced people in a migrant camp, Mark Drakeford "cosies up to Plaid Cymru who want to destroy the UK and drag Wales back into the EU." They mention the EU a few times. It's clearly a bogeyman for them. The only people they don't mention are the Liberal Democrats, which must be quite demoralising for them in a way. -5 points.

Irrelevant photos: 0

Typos: 0

TOTAL = (11-14) = -3

Pandemic Points: 0

Party: Worker's Party

Number of items: 1 bilingual leaflet, so 2 points

SMART goals: 1 (free bus travel for kids)

Contact details: 3

Relevant photos: 4. (3 photos of the people I think are the named candidates and 1 of George Galloway, party leader, who is also on the regional list.)

Endorsements: 0

Vague objectives: 8, at least. But a lot of statements that aren't anything, like, for example: "There should be no homelessness in Wales... Affordable housing projects are not affordable for normal people." There's no actual commitment to do anything.

Shade: there's a swipe at "big business" but no mention of any other parties. 0.

Irrelevant photos: 0

Typos: 0

TOTAL = (10-8) = 2

Pandemic Points: 1

And that, dear readers is it, for now. Well done if you have made it this far. Hopefully you will get your strength back in time to vote on Thursday.

Bookblogging – introducing smupidity

In his very small book Machines Will Make Better Choices Than Humans, Douglas Coupland coins the word “smupidity”.  It’s a combination of smart and stupid.

He describes it thus:

“...people are generally far more aware than they ever were of all the information they don’t know. The weight of this fact overshadows huge advances made in knowledge accumulation and pattern-recognition skills honed by online searching.”

I have found that helpful when considering how people seem to leap into misinformation and obviously bogus conspiracy theories so readily. What the hard right misinformation channels and conspiracists offer is often a bizarrely simplistic world view underneath the complicated layers of untruth. 

At their heart conspiracy theories divide the world into goodies and baddies and claim the random unpredictable chaos of life is not random unpredictable chaos; it’s all planned. It’s similar to the comfort that people find in religion, which may be why religion has proved such fertile ground for conspiracy theories recently. There's congruence.

When people try and assign conspiratorial meaning into something unknown and frightening, like a worldwide pandemic, it’s their way of trying to assert control over a situation. 'Alternative facts' give the illusion of power. It’s smupidity, but it helps alleviate the weight of the unknown.

James Bond Spectre review, or, How to write a sexual predator character who becomes an icon

Spectre is one of the most successful British films ever, and probably the most successful Bond film. It has received rave reviews. It also has the honour of being the first James Bond movie with a theme song that became a number 1 hit single. For a while the news feeds were dominated with news about it. As a film, it is touted as one of those 'must-see movies'. So I went to see it.

Back in 2012 I wrote a review of Skyfall, where I said I was uneasy with the predatory activity of MI6's most well known double-O agent. Specifically, a barely consensual shower sex scene when Bond forces himself onto a frequently-trafficked woman, who is later shot dead in front of him.

The same tropes crop up in Spectre, which for all it's glitz and hype suffers from three key failings: a reliance on magic, conspiracy theory 'explanations' and sexual predation. That last charge is the worst one, but I will deal with the other two first.

What do I mean by magic? Well, we have a massive secret base in the manner of the best Bond films of old. But it suffers from what I call the 'Death Star flaw', by which I mean it can be totally destroyed by one well-placed shot. Seriously. Bond shoots one little gas pipe and the whole place goes up in multiple explosions. At some point that goes beyond good marksmanship and becomes magic.

The conspiracy theory explanation was tiresome as well. I'm pretty sure the Skyfall villain spent some time explaining how he was behind all the terrible things that happened to Bond. Now the main villain in Spectre does the same thing. Apparently the events of all four films starring Daniel Craig were all orchestrated by this one guy as some sort of revenge for the villain's Dad liking James more when his family fostered him. It seems like a lot of effort to go to.

The 'it's all a massive conspiracy' idea is quite popular in movies. I think this is because movie-makers are trying to tell a story and actually the real world isn't set up for stories. Most events don't have a beginning, middle or end, nor are there neat causative processes that can be easily narrated. People want to believe in conspiracies, and large shadowy criminal organisations pulling the strings behind the scenes, because the idea that things happen at random and chaotically is terrifying. There is no way to control much of the random stuff that happens in reality. But you can do it in the movies. Take out the mastermind and the terror stops.

And then we have the third problem. The predation. Bond wastes no time at all bedding a widow the evening she returns from her husband's funeral. He then promises her protection, but not from him, from someone else he knows. I wouldn't put too much faith in that, but it might be better than any protection Bond would offer. In Skyfall Bond spectacularly failed to protect a woman he had just promised to protect. In Quantum of Solace a casual lay from the diplomatic service is found tortured to death in his hotel room shortly after they did the deed there.

But widows aren't enough. Bond soon latches on to a recently orphaned young woman and by the end of the film, has seduced her. Widows and orphans? There seems to be no emotionally vulnerable group that Bond won't exploit.

So, what's good about this film? Well, there are stunts. There is a lovely tracking shot of a train in the North African desert. There are stunts... Yeah, that's about it. The thing is the stunts and cinematography can't mask the sucking hole at the centre of the film, the aggressive sociopathic sexual predator called James Bond, who we, the audience, are meant to root for as the hero.

There is even an attempt at exoneration. Ralph Fiennes, taking over as M now that Judi Dench has moved on, gives an impassioned defence of the Double O programme at one point. To the career civil servant he says that having a licence to kill is a terrible burden because you have to look into a man's eyes and decide whether to kill a fellow human being or not.

I can see that being a difficult thing to do. I don't see any evidence that Bond sees this as a difficult thing to do.

As this film makes clear, human beings are expendable to James Bond, whether its his sexual conquests, or the careers of colleagues who he asks to deliberately disobey orders and operate outside their jurisdiction.(And that's another contradiction in the Bond films - any agent hat goes rogue is presumed to be bad and kill-worthy for 007, but he effectively goes rogue here and takes several important colleagues with him. Talk about subjective morality - it's OK for me to ignore orders that I decide are unjust, but anyone else who doesn't follow orders goes on the death list. Wait, why?)

So, this is where we are. A career sexual predator with a callous disregard for human beings who cross his path is apparently an icon.Quite what this shows about our culture is hard to fathom. The most worrying thing is that very few people seem to question this. We just munch our popcorn, go 'ooh' at the explosions and let James carry on with what he does.

It's all a conspiracy...except it's not

Eight years on from 9/11 and how time has flown. What’s interesting for me though is how many conspiracy theories have sprung up in quite a short time.

Just to set out where I’m coming from – I don’t believe any of the conspiracy theories for two reasons. 1) As I see it, a jet plane crashing into a skyscraper is likely to destroy it without the need for thermite charges or the CIA. 2) I don’t believe large groups of people can keep secrets very well.

A lot of people would have to be involved in a conspiracy to bring down the World Trade Center. And human beings are unreliable blabbermouths. Someone would have let slip that there was more to 9/11 than the official view, if there was more to it.

Plus there’s the reasoning (if you can call it that) of the conspiracy theorists. Basically their argument runs like this: If the Government conspired to destroy the WTC, then they would deny it. So the fact that they deny conspiring to destroy the WTC ‘proves’ they did actually conspire to destroy the WTC.

Just about every conspiracy theory I have ever seen has that circular reasoning at the heart of it.

Ultimately conspiracy theories are just people looking for a ‘supernatural’ explanation for something quite mundane. We don’t want to believe that a handful of people with only rudimentary flight experience could cause such carnage, so we invent a conspiracy to make us feel safer – this must have been a huge operation with government complicity and decades of planning and so on. That’s far better than the thought that this was a random act of terror caused by a few people, which could be easily replicated.

As a race we have often created ‘supernatural’ explanations for random, frightening events that we have no control over. Whether it’s sacrificing virgins to appease the volcano gods, or throwing gold coins into rivers to ask the river spirits for safe crossing, it comes down to the same thing. We want to ‘explain’ the randomness as somehow caused by something, because that makes it less scary. We can perhaps do something to propitiate the gods (or the government) so that the danger goes away.

But the thing is, just wishing the world was a safer place doesn’t make it so.

Back to NYC

Pre-clearance at Hamilton airport (no band playing as you leave more's the pity) meant we hardly had to queue when we landed in the USA. That felt right somehow.

I'm not sure I'd ever up sticks and move, but I could imagine myself living in America. For one thing the Americans I've met over here seem much nicer than some of the ones I've met in the UK. I think it's a ploy - they export the obnoxious ones to put us off wanting to go!