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There’s a movement among remainers to get Ode To Joy to number one in the charts for Brexit day. We know, even if successful, it won’t change anything. Johnson isn’t going to cancel Brexit because of this. (He totally should, nonetheless.)

So why is there a similar movement among Brexiters to get their own song “Seventeen Million F–k Offs” to number one instead?

They’ve won. Despite only getting about half the votes in 2016, Maximum Brexit is going ahead. But once the party’s over, they still won’t be happy and deep down, they know. Victory feels so much like defeat.

And among all this false revelry, there’s a bunch of smug Remoaners trying to spoil the party. “They were supposed to have been defeated by now. Our victory must be total!”

And so they get a song that’s literally telling remainers to f–k off to number one. Maybe that small victory on top of all their other victories will finally make them happy?

Sorry Brexiters. You lost. We all lost.

Get over it.

When standing for election a politician will usually run as the member of a political party. The quid-pro-quo of this arrangement is that the party will collectively campaign for all their candidates. In return, the party will expect the successfully elected MPs to support their leader’s policies and support that leader in any votes-of-confidence.

Occasionally, an MP will decide to leave their party. This is often called “Crossing The Floor” for rather archaic reasons. Sometimes that MP becomes independent, sometimes they join other parties. Most famously, wartime leader Winston Churchill left the Conservative Party in 1904 to join the Liberal Party, only to return in 1924.

When an MP does this, it will often be met with calls for that MP to put themselves up for re-election by their voters in a by-election. Normally, this only happens when an MP dies, resigns, or maybe appointed to the House of Lords.

“The voters elected a Conservative to be their MP, not a Liberal! You should let the voters have their say if they want to keep you as their MP.”

I disagree.

We Elect People, not Parties…

“These are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution.” – Edmund Burke, 1774.

In the Westminster system, we vote for people. We don’t vote for parties.

It might not seem that way, given how much of campaigns at election time are for the various political parties rather than for the individual candidates. Nonetheless, at the completion of an election, the end result is that a person will have been elected to serve as MP. That MP is an individual who has been empowered by the voters to be their representative in Parliament for the term they were elected for.

If it were the case that we do actually elect political parties, we shouldn’t need a by-election when an MP needs to be replaced. The party could simply select a replacement internally without needing to involve the electorate. This shouldn’t be a problem, after all, the voters elected that party for a five year term, not the MP.

In fact, why not just give parties the power to dismiss and replace their MPs at will? If a party leader doesn’t like how an MP is acting, they can tell that MP “You’re Fired” and appoint a replacement. If that idea seems like an undemocratic stitch-up, I quite agree. (This is also a reason why I prefer AV over PR, but that’s another article.)

Currently, the only thing that can force a by-election for an MP who doesn’t want one is if that MP is convicted of a crime and enough constituents demand a “recall”. Is leaving a political party really up there with being a convicted criminal?

… and that’s a good thing.

“It has long (perhaps throughout the entire duration of British freedom) been a common form of speech, that if a good despot could be insured, despotic monarchy would be the best form of government. I look upon this as a radical and most pernicious misconception of what good government is, which, until it can be got rid of, will fatally vitiate all our speculations on government.” – John Stuart Mill, 1861.

It’s a good thing that we elect people instead of the parties. MPs are elected and empowered to make the difficult decisions and be held responsible for them. That is the essence of Parliamentary Democracy. By so empowering MPs, they become one of the checks-and-balances. A party leader can’t overrule the objections of other MPs, precisely because dissenting MPs are so empowered. Those MPs know they will be held accountable to their voters, not to anyone else. 

Recently (as I write this in 2019), an unelected Prime Minister wished to bulldoze his Brexit policy through Parliament. MPs did the job they were elected to do and said “No”. That Prime Minister saw first-hand what happens when you try to throw your weight around like King Charles. He found himself restrained by the very checks and balances that exist in functioning democracies.

(I stand by “unelected”. As I write this, Boris Johnson has neither been elected by the voters at large nor by their representatives in Parliament. His predecessor, Theresa May, became Prime Minister while her party held a comfortable majority in Parliament and later won a vote of confidence of MPs. I would have liked to have seen a formal vote of MPs to elect a new Prime Minister when the position becomes vacant, but I accept in her case that would have been a formality.)

If we move the focus of that empowerment to the parties, those MPs will find themselves accountable to their party, not to the voters. We’ll have reduced the role of an MP to mere party functionary. If an MP’s first loyalty is to their party rather than their voters, we’ll have just populated Parliament with a bunch of toadying yes-men. We wouldn’t even need 600-odd MPs if all you need are party robots, you could get by with around 50.

What would we gain if MPs did have to contest a by-election for leaving their party. There’s a general election every five years when they will have to be re-elected anyway. When that re-election comes around they will find themselves facing someone selected by their old party. Party leaders are already rather powerful, they could do with feeling not quite so powerful once in a while.

Further Reading/Sources:

Edmund Burke, Speech to the electors of Bristol.

John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government

How MPs are elected

How to become an MP

Wikipedia, Recall of MPs Act, 2015

The Guardian, Boris Johnson to seek election after rebel Tories deliver Commons defeat

i, From ‘do or die’ to ‘dying in a ditch,’

BBC, May’s government survives no-confidence vote

Credits:

Thanks to Stuart Edmond for inspiring me to write this.

Thanks to Ollie Killingback and Andrew Phillips-Godfrey for their feedback and ideas.

Leaving Home picture by Hans Splinter.

Get Out picture by Ramy Raoof.

I wrote this page before I found out that Milton Keynes City Council has held a flag design contest for children and already selected their new flag. This page is for the historic record.

Congratulations Milton Keynes on your new City status. All self respecting cities need a flag. London, Coventry, St Albans all have really good ones. You should have one too.

Having worked in Milton Keynes for over a decade, I was surprised to learn that Milton Keynes don’t have a flag. I was attending an event organised by a local group and they were using the “swan” flag of Buckinghamshire. This prompted me to set to work on a design.

I propose that Milton Keynes formally adopt this flag and wave it with pride. I will cheerfully gift all rights to the design to the City of Milton Keynes if they wish to adopt it as their official city flag.

Symbolism

The Cross of St George

The boldest element of the flag is the Cross of St. George, the flag of England. Milton Keynes is a part of England and found right around the middle.

The centre of the cross gives way to a circle, representing the grid system and roundabouts that Milton Keynes is famous for.

The Cubic Curve

The curve represents mathematics – the contribution of the Milton Keynes area to the war effort. The operation at Bletchley Park is credited with stopping the second world war by many years and became the foundation of the computer revolution, where Milton Keynes continues to play an integral part.

The curve itself is a formula that represents the year 1967, marking the year Milton Keynes was founded.
y = 1x³ + 9x² + 6x + 7

The Concrete Cow

The canton of the flag has a cow spot, representing the famous concrete cows. The spot itself comes from one of the cows themselves. I visited the site to look for a good spot that would fit and selected this one, inverting black and white to better fit the design.

Is this a joke?

No. I am quite serious. If you think symbolism that includes the roundabouts and concrete cows are mocking the City of Milton Keynes, remember that this is what made your city great. The grid system was built so that the sun would rise along the streets on the summer solstice as if the whole city is a Neolithic monument. That is so incredibly cool!

The cows are cool! Your local roller-derby team is named after the cows. Does London have concrete cows? No, they do not! (I think.) Be proud of your quirkiness.

“Milton Keynes has its own flag? What, a concrete cow and a roundabout?”
“Yes.”
“Cool.”

About Me

I’m Bill (P. Godfrey) and I’m a bit of an amateur vexillologist. (That’s the study of flags.)

I’ve been working for a Milton Keynes based technology company for a little over fifteen years. As I spend so much time there I joined and participate in a few local groups and societies.

There’s more about me and some of my writing on my website.

You may have read about the news that many voters have been turned away from voting over here in the UK. I’d like to share a little analogy abut what happened, why it is so controversial and how it goes beyond voter suppression.

Imagine you’re in California, and there’s a political party whose only policy is to deport anyone born on the other side of the Mississippi. (That and being paid donations through PayPal that are all conveniently under the £500 limit allowed for anonymous donations. Totally not a big donation from one person that would normally need to be declared.)

A group of people living in California but born in the east are rightfully worried that this party might gain power. They are entitled to vote as citizens so they make sure they are correctly registered.

Voting day arrives and the process goes smoothly for Californians. Voters from out-of-state, however, find they can’t vote.

Some are told they should have filled out a special form but were never told that was needed. Some did fill in the form but it got lost. Some did everything right but the people running the vote didn’t know this group was entitled to vote and just struck them off the register.

Election day passed and a significant number of people didn’t get to vote. Those people probably wouldn’t have voted for the deportation party so the situation may might end up unfairly inflating their share.

(Sounds ridiculous? This is basically what’s going on here. Only difference is our Mississippi River is a bit wider and we call ours The English Channel and The North Sea.)

Just to round out the story, on the day the news of voter suppression breaks, a senior politician chooses this day (quite coincidentally) to announce their resignation. News reports quickly start paying attention to this new distraction and soon forget about the dodgy funding and voter suppression.

Further Reading:
Channel 4
Guardian
BBC

Picture credit: Vote dans Crémazie
by Jean-Pierre Lavoie.

I had an idea for a nerdy tattoo a few years ago. It would represent myself as a software engineer and I thought it was quite clever. I seriously considered having it done but decided against it in the end, despite its cleverness.

Ink’d

This is my idea, the “end comment” symbol in many programming languages:

In C, and other languages that can trace their lineage to C, comments start with a /* and end with a */. Anything inside is ignored by the language, allowing the programmer to describe what’s going on. This is tremendously useful when reading other people’s code or even your own code from the past.

    /* This is a comment. */
    Code();

    /* This is another comment. */
    MoreCode();

Another way of looking at it is that these /* and */ symbols mark the change of state between comments and code. /* says “After this is comment” while */ says “After this is code.”

Or to put it another way, */ means “Enough talk, time for action.”

(This is where you exclaim to yourself how clever I am to have thought of that.)

I didn’t have the tattoo done in the end. Describing what it meant would have taken too much explanation. Even if a fellow programmer recognized the symbol, they would probably first think it looked like I’ve been “commented out”, as they wonder if I had the /* on the other side.

Also, rotated a little, it looks a bit like a squinting cyclops.

1993. Computers were desktop PCs running MS-DOS and the Internet was unheard of. My school had a number of PCs with Borland Pascal installed which my friends and I happily learnt. Along the way, we wrote a clever variation of the Minesweeper game. Life was good.

That would all change when I started my Computer Science degree course at university that year. Instead of many single-user machines running MS-DOS, we’d all be sharing a multi-user machine running UNIX.

Terminal Illness

To use this multi-user machine, we’d need to log-in from a terminal. If you were fortunate enough to find a vacant PC, you could use the terminal emulator program to connect. This had the very useful feature of being able to switch between screens so you could operate many sessions at once. I would usually have one with the email program running so I could switch to it occasionally to see if any new messages arrived, while a second session would run EMACS for whatever I was writing. A last one would compile and run stuff.

If I wasn’t quite so fortunate to find a vacant PC, I’d have to use one of the Falco T310 terminals. These were serious old-school terminals that connected to that machine over a serial port. Actual RS232 connecting to a multiplexing box in the corner. The university had maybe a hundred of them. Because they did only have a serial connection, you could only have one session per terminal. No fast switching between sessions for you – if you wanted to check your mail you had to shut down whatever you were doing and start up the mail reader.

These terminals weren’t all bad. It understood the standard ANSI codes to move the cursor about, so there wasn’t too much friction moving between the two. We coped and got on with the job.

Loss of control (characters)

One day, I intended to review a source code file, so I typed a “cat” command to show the listing, except I had accidentally run cat for the compiled binary executable instead. Oops! The screen filled with noise punctuated with beeping noises. Efforts to stop the onslaught were in vain as the buffers filled up with unintelligible bytes.

Then something unexpected happened. The screen changed mode and lines were drawn mixed in with the text. Not the box drawing characters I was used to but proper lines, drawn at funky angles spanning across most of the screen. These terminals supported some sort of control codes for vector line drawing, and my executable code just happened to randomly contain those codes. I must find them!

Living the student life, I wasn’t getting much of a chance to exercise my artistic muscles. Back at school, I knew how to program graphics in Borland Pascal and I’d come up with simple games and create animated art. Even dull homework projects would have a bit of a flourish thanks to creative use of the 640x480x16 mode. On UNIX in contrast, I was back in the 80s with an 80×24 character display, yet here was an elusive graphical mode I hadn’t seen in months.

grep -v “\a”

Actually finding what those magic control codes were was easier said than done. Once I had accidentally entered this graphical mode, I found I couldn’t type commands anymore. The only way I knew to get back to normal was to power cycle the terminal and login again. My attempts to split the file in half and display one of the halves would be accompanied with incessant loud beeping from all the BEL/7 bytes, which greatly disturbed the other people in the room. That amount of beeping could only mean I was up to no good!

After spending a day trying to extract the codes I needed, I had to give up. I was unfamiliar with working with Unix beyond dealing with plain text files. I knew how to open files in binary mode back on Borland Pascal, but not on any language I had access to in Unix. There was no StackOverflow to ask so I was stuck impotently banging rocks against this monolith. This was software development in those dark ages.

Next: Checking in at The Motel. BBS Systems, Fidonet and reinventing the remote-desktop.

Picture Credit: VT100 in the flesh, by Dana Sibera. (CC licensed.)
(I couldn’t find a picture of the Falco T310, so I used this picture of a VT100 instead. Sorry about that.)