The Shoogly Peg

Most days are pretty unexceptional. Go to work, come home, have your tea. Maybe watch some telly, surf the internet or read a book, go to bed. Repeat. Today can be different. Today you can stand up for a mother and her daughter who are about to be separated, in your name, by your government.

Ten-year-old Precious and her mother Florence Mhango have been in the UK for seven years, having come from Malawi. Under Malawian law, children are the property of the husband: but Florence fled from her husband because he was violent. If they are sent home, Florence and Precious will be separated and Precious is at risk of being subject to female genital mutilation.

Today, at 5.30 outside Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow, there will be a vigil to show support for Precious and Florence. Please make today special by being there.

Like many people in Scotland, I’ve been moved by the story of Precious and Florence Mhango. Anne McLaughlin MSP sums it up when she says,

“Could you stand to hold your child knowing that it may be the last time and that soon you may be left with only memories and the living nightmare of not knowing where they are or what is happening to them? This is what Florence Mhango is facing.”

Those words were still in my mind when I read the letter from Lord Tebbit in the current edition of Total Politics magazine. Here is his letter in full.

“I was disappointed, but not surprised that in his “Letter of the Month”, Mr Ellis, the director of policy and development at the Refugee Council, got away once again with recycling the myth that anyone, adult or child, is held against their will (or that of their guardian) in immigration detention centres”.

“As former Home Office Minister, Admiral Lord West, confirmed to me in the House of Lords, all those currently receiving free board and lodging in those centres are free to leave at will. They are not, however, free to enter the United Kingdom until their claims to be entitled to do so have been investigated and found to be valid. It is their choice, not a decision by the United Kingdom authorities, that they continue to stay in these centres”.

Oh, well done, Lord Tebbit. Trebles all round, as Private Eye would say. Not only have you managed to insinuate that detention centres are just cosy B&Bs for Johnny Foreigner, you’ve also managed to make very clear your petty resentment at the paltry sums being spent on their “free board and lodging”, without actually spelling it out.

Well, I’m sure all those being held in such detention centres – sorry, voluntary places of residence – will be delighted to know that they can just stroll out of the front door any time they choose.

Except they can’t, can they Lord Tebbit? Because they are not free to enter the UK, and, oops, turns out the UK is the country that’s outside the front door of the detention centre! What Lord Tebbit means is that they are free to go home, any time they choose, and if they insist on being so awkward as to not want to go back to a place where they may be raped, murdered, tortured or abused, and to exercise their legal right to seek asylum, well, that’s their own silly fault, isn’t it?

There is a vigil being held for Florence and Precious Mhango on Monday 19th July, at 5.30 at the top of Buchanan Street in Glasgow. I wasn’t going to go. I was feeling cynical and hopeless, and couldn’t see that it would make any difference.

Now that I’ve read that repulsive letter, I’ve changed my mind. It has shown me what happens if you indulge your cynicism: you turn into a bitter, pitiful, horrible old man who gets his kicks from twisting words to make helpless, frightened people out as lucky old loafers, and resents spending any money at all on trying to stop terrible and utterly predictable things from happening to fathers, mothers, sons and daughters from places that are not really all that far away.

I’ll be at the vigil on Monday. I don’t know if it will make any difference to Florence and Precious Mhango: I hope it will. But even if it doesn’t, even if we fail, each and every person there can at least show that they are not like Lord Tebbit, who looks at lonely, fearful people and only sees pounds, pennies and a chance to sneer.

AV makes me think of pirates. I can’t help it. My brain reads the first two letters and automatically adds “-AST!” So I end up pondering not alterations to the electoral system, but eye patches and wooden legs and Johnny Depp. Ooh, Johnny Depp. Yummy…

Sorry. Politics. Right. So Nick Clegg has made The Announcement about limits on the number of MPs and fixed-term parliaments and a referendum on the Alternative Vote. Leaving aside, for the moment, the eyewatering cheek of holding a referendum on the day of the Scottish Parliament elections, despite the cockup of the last Holyrood poll being put down to two elections on the one day and the feverish protestations of the coalition government that they have a Respect Agenda with the Scottish Parliament (a Respect Agenda sounds like the sort of thing that a desperate supply teacher would attempt to introduce, but I am digressing from my digression) is this actually the reform that our political system needs?

Well, no. Will I vote for it? Yes. Am I an idiot? Possibly, but let me elaborate.

AV is not a proportional system. A proportional system allocates seats according to the proportion of the vote you get. So if a party gets a third of the votes, it should get a third of the seats. Unlike our current voting system, which is so unfair you’d think it had been cooked up by Dick Dastardly, and means that most people’s votes are wasted.

AV will improve this situation a bit. Instead of putting a cross in a box, we will rank candidates in order of preference. If nobody gets over 50% of the vote first time round, then the second-preference votes of the candidate who came last in the first round of voting are redistributed, and so on until somebody gets over 50% of the vote.

It’s an improvement, in that it just means that lots of people’s votes won’t count, rather than most people’s. That’s why I’ll vote for it, even though it’s not the system I want. Now, some people not a million miles from me think this is a bad thing. They are using the fact that people who want a Yes vote in the referendum don’t generally think that AV is the best system as an argument to vote No.

This argument makes no sense whatsoever. Campaigning against AV because it’s not PR would be the equivalent of a person in a bath full of snot being asked if they would prefer to stay where they are or move to a bath full of water, only to reply that since their preferred option of a bath full of chocolate is not on offer, they denounce water-filled baths as hypocritical wishy-washy compromise and would much prefer to continue wallowing in bogies.

Politics is all about compromise. Most of the time, you can’t get what you really really want, so you strive to get as close to it as you possibly can. Why is this so hard for some people to grasp?