A media firestorm broke out over a proposal last week by the European Commission to ban restaurants from serving olive oil in open containers. Olive oil would have had to be provided in sealed containers, so that diners could be sure what they were getting. The measure was supported by the olive oil producing countries of southern Europe – not surprisingly, since with separate containers for each table there would be a lot of waste, so more olive oil would have to be bought – but opposed by Germany and other northern countries on the basis that it would add to costs for consumers.

The reaction, also not surprisingly, was especially intense among the Europhobic tabloid media in Britain. Prime minister David Cameron spoke out against the move, although Britain had apparently abstained on the initial vote in the Commission.

On Thursday the EU backed down. Agriculture commissioner Dacian Cioloş said that he had “seen and heard strong views expressed by consumers.” As a result he had “decided to withdraw this proposal and not submit it for adoption.”

In other words, the system worked. Despite its very real overbureaucratisation and democratic deficit, the EU is actually capable of responding to public opinion. But as is usual with such things, the initial outlandish proposal will stick much more firmly in the public mind (helped by the media) than the more sensible outcome.

The outcry also risks obscuring the fact that there is a real problem that the Commission, ineptly, was trying to address. Olive oil varies widely in quality and therefore price; it’s a relatively simple matter for a restaurant to promise the good stuff (and keep a couple of bottles of it around to show people) but actually fill the serving jugs with something much inferior. The fact that the proposed regulation was a really stupid way to deal with this doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist.

Many libertarians seem to have convinced themselves that fraud isn’t something government should concern itself with, and that it’s something the market can just sort out on its own – in this case, customers will simply avoid restaurants that are deceiving them about the quality of the olive oil.

It’s unlikely that they would say this if the problem was restaurateurs bailing up customers at gunpoint and stealing their wallets, although in both cases it’s true after a fashion.

In my view the problem is that, as with a great deal of consumer law, countries have turned over to the regulatory apparatus problems that would be better dealt with by the ordinary criminal law. Instead of occasionally fining merchants for breaking intricate regulations, why don’t we put some serious police resources into detecting actual wrongdoing and send the perpetrators to jail. It’s called deterrence. (I’ve suggested this a number of times before.)

That wouldn’t give so much of a boost to the olive oil producers, but it might result in a better deal for consumers.

Grattan exemplifies the “horse-race” school of political journalism, where everything is focused on the political standing of the players rather than on what they’re actually doing. Its staples are leadership challenges, opinion polls, scandals, “gaffes”, inside sources and so on – things that obviously fascinate those in the press gallery but have a more limited appeal for the general public.

The worst of this sort of journalism can be seen in America, where the time that media organisations devote to so-called news programming has far outrun the resources they are willing to put into actual reporting. But Australia seems to be catching up.

I wrote about the local government referendum at Crikey earlier this week (I think it’s still behind the paywall, so if you haven’t already subscribed then you should). I quoted a Nielsen poll that supposedly showed 65% support for “recognising local government in the Constitution,” and commented as follows:

That would have been an accurate description of the Hawke government’s proposal, back in 1988 (which was heavily defeated). It proposed to recognise local government, but not to give the Commonwealth additional powers. The current question is completely different: there’s no explicit recognition, but there is a new power, for Canberra to fund local government directly, on such conditions as it thinks fit.

So the support that Nielsen found shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The usual pattern in referendum campaigns is that support plummets once debate gets properly underway and people realise (or, depending on your point of view, are fooled into believing) that there’s more to the question than the government is letting on.

Grattan, however, takes the Nielsen result at face value and even remarks that “Recognition of local government has been put twice before in referendums – in 1974 and 1988,” apparently not knowing or not caring that they asked completely different things.

Grattan is obviously in favor of the referendum while I’m against, but that’s not the source of the problem. Her whole approach is centred on the politics of the referendum: what it means for the government and opposition, not what it might mean for public policy. Looking at the merits of the question, for her, would be like judging the worth of a football team on the basis of what they were going to do with the premiership after they won it.

Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with writing about “politics” in a narrow sense rather than writing about policy. That doesn’t make you a bad journalist or a bad person. But there are two very important reservations to make.

Firstly, that sort of journalism shouldn’t be the driver of political coverage. When you put the opinion poll on the front page and bury important policy developments on page ten, you’ve got things the wrong way around – not least because it makes it hard to understand what’s moving the opinion polls if you don’t know anything about policy.

Secondly, if you’re going to write about the horse race you still need to get the facts right and not fall for the spin. Yet Grattan, remarkably, quotes the version of the local government proposal from Anthony Albanese’s press release, complete with its rogue full stop, just three days after Anne Twomey – in the very same publication – had exposed its deceptive nature.

If we’re going to talk about the referendum, let’s understand what we’re talking about. This is not about some abstract “recognition”; it’s a proposal to allow the federal government to fund local government via the same process of tied grants that it now has for the states. You may or may not think that that’s a good thing (I don’t), but can we at least have journalism that engages with the facts.

One of the things that made the Commons debate much messier than it would otherwise have been is the fact that Britain already has something a lot like same-sex marriage, in the form of civil partnerships. It’s a not entirely welcome sign of my longevity as a pundit that I wrote about these when they were introduced in 2005:

[C]ontroversy has largely been avoided by a simple, and very British, compromise – gays can get married, but it isn’t called marriage; it’s called “civil partnership.” …

Unlike the “civil unions” proposed or implemented in some American states, they really are marriages in all but name; partners will be entitled to the same benefits, and dissolution of partnerships can only happen via a “divorce” process. A give-away is that the new status is only available to gays, not heterosexual couples – because the equivalent for them is just traditional marriage.

The distinction between civil partnerships and civil unions is an important one, although the terminology is not always consistent. Britain’s system should be contrasted with that in, for example, France, which in 1999 introduced the pacte civil de solidarité (civil solidarity pact), or PACS. PACS was a substitute for same-sex marriage, but it was available to opposite-sex couples as well and became increasingly popular with them as an alternative to marriage: by 2010 some 95% of PACS being entered into were heterosexual, and the total number was rapidly gaining on the number of marriages.

The rights and responsibilities under PACS are significantly less than those of marriage in such things as inheritance, adoption and taxation (although they have been progressively upgraded). Crucially, there is no requirement for a “divorce” process; a PACS can be ended on the spot by mutual agreement or can be repudiated by either party.

Australia has a similar set of rights given to de facto couples, which can be either heterosexual or homosexual. Most states provide for them to be formally registered (see for example the Victorian Relationships Act 2008), but even without registration they provide an alternative to marriage that is seen to have a lesser status but greater flexibility.

So the British position was quite different: for all practical purposes civil partnership was equivalent to marriage, except it lacked the title and therefore the perception of full equality. It’s an interesting comment on the way political controversy works that debate on the current bill seems no less heated – and indeed may be more heated – for the fact that its effects are fundamentally symbolic rather than substantive.

One of the tactics seized on by opponents of same-sex marriage was to argue that if marriage was being opened up to gay couples, civil partnership should at the same time be opened up to straights. The government successfully fended off an amendment to this effect (with Labour’s help), but has promised a speedy review of the position.

Clearly there is no logic to retaining two options – marriage and civil partnership – for same-sex couples while opposite-sex couples have only one. For consistency, there are three possibilities:

(a) call all recognised civil relationships “marriage”, and phase out civil partnership;

(b) call all recognised civil relationships “civil partnership”, and phase out marriage; or

(c) offer all couples the option to call their relationship either “marriage” or “civil partnership”, as they choose.

Personally I would have to say I favor (b), but in a country like Britain (and Australia, for that matter) it is politically impossible. The most laissez-faire option might seem to be (c), but the government is afraid of the consequences of a large number of heterosexual couples demanding recognition. (In effect, the change would make heterosexual marriage more attractive by offering couples the option of not calling it “marriage”.)

Cameron would obviously like to move towards (a), but it faces the obstacle that some of those who have entered into civil partnerships are probably quite happy with that status and don’t want to be in something called “marriage”. It might be possible, however, to stop offering new civil partnerships and instead introduce a type of civil union that would be available to both same-sex and opposite-sex couples.

There is also the very deep problem of the role of the Anglican Church, which (unlike any church in Australia or most of the democratic world) remains an integral part of the state. One of Cameron’s concessions to the anti-gay brigade was a provision that the Anglican Church would be banned from offering same-sex wedding ceremonies – a very odd restriction if you think of the church as an arm of government, but probably no more confused than many other things about this archaic relationship.

In a rational world, the churches could call whatever they wanted “marriage” and the state would simply ignore them, confining itself to recognising (and regulating where necessary) whatever civil contractual relationships people chose to enter into. We’re still a long way from that, but at least Britain has taken another serious step towards equality.

And Assad’s actions in intensifying the fighting seem to match his words. In yesterday’s Crikey Damien Kingsbury gave a pessimistic assessment:

With the anti-Assad forces now clearly divided between the Free Syrian Army and the al-Qaeda affiliates and Western support wavering, Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers are feeling increasingly confident of turning the tide in the war. It may be, however, that this is but another twist in an increasingly complicated, bitter and prolonged war.

Another twist indeed. This morning there’s again a small note of optimism as Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN mediator for Syria, tells the world that plans for the peace conference are going ahead: “The Syrian people are building great hopes on the conference, as the opposition prepares itself to take part and likewise the Syrian regime prepares to take part in this conference. … The United Nations is working to organise the conference in the best way possible.”

What to think? The Syrian opposition are saying (not unreasonably) that they are not up for any negotiated outcome that leaves the Assad regime in power, but they seem open to talks that involve the regime. Moaz al-Khtaib, who recently resigned as president of the Syrian National Coalition, said that “all opposition forces have no objection to finding a political solution.”

Conversely, the Russians have been insistent that Assad’s removal not form any sort of precondition for talks, but they have not endorsed Assad’s position that the “terrorists” need to disarm first.

It still looks possible that the two sides might be brought to the same table, but whether that offers any prospect of an actual agreement will probably depend most of all on the Russian attitude. Its military aid to Assad seems to be increasing rather than diminishing; in the short term that has obviously strengthened his position, but it also means that a threat to withdraw support could be a very powerful incentive to bring him to some sort of deal if Russia decides that is in its best interests.

Kingsbury suggests that “One reading of Russia’s position is that it will support peace talks in June, but only if it can strengthen the hand of the Assad regime ahead of such negotiations.” I think that may be right, with the additional point that if Russia is the one doing the strengthening (rather than, say, less respectable allies such as Iran and Hezbollah), it gives it maximum leverage with both sides at the peace conference – if it ever happens.

The downside risk is that further militarisation of the conflict could have incalculable consequences. For one thing, Russia’s attitude is clearly a factor putting pressure on the US to help arm the Syrian opposition. And while increased bloodshed sometimes drives participants to make compromises for peace, sometimes it does the opposite, pushing them to revenge what they have already suffered.

And of course there’s the Israeli factor, with another flare-up yesterday on the Golan Heights.

The best one can say is that hope for Syria has not been completely extinguished. But the road to peace is going to be far from easy.

Partly it’s just a problem of timing. Two issues have come to the boil at once: relations with the EU, brought to a head by the strong performance of the anti-Europe UK Independence Party in this month’s local elections, and now same-sex marriage. Either on its own could be dealt with, but the combination is looking deadly.

It’s not so much a matter of fighting on two fronts as having given the same enemy two different lots of ammunition. The fundamental problem in both cases is the philosophical divergence between Cameron and his immediate allies on one hand, and a large slab of backbench and grassroots Tory opinion on the other.

Cameron clearly holds a dim view of his opponents. He’s previously described as full of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”; now one of his senior people has referred to the Tory backwoodspeople as “swivel-eyed loons”. But in the past Cameron has shown full awareness of the need to throw such people a bone every now and then. As I put it nearly four years ago (the issue was where the Tories sit in the European parliament):

Major parties always represent a broad coalition of views, and to play relentlessly to just one side is to court disaster. Cameron has chosen an issue on which he evidently feels he can do something to keep his right wing happy without risking anything important in the main game of domestic politics.

Over time, however, being different things to different people becomes more and more difficult. For a party whose origins are based on religion as much as class, same-sex marriage was never going to be easy, and strong words have been used in recent days. A group of Conservative activists called the bill “flawed, un-Conservative, divisive, and costing us dearly in votes and membership,” and accused Cameron of “utter contempt for ordinary people.”

And yet. No-one should ever have been under the illusion that Cameron’s views were not out of step with a lot of Conservative opinion. He was chosen as a liberal, as an acknowledgement that the party had drifted too far to the right and needed to change course to be able to win government. The membership that elected him made the bargain with their eyes open; one commentator described the party at the time as “trusting, excited, a little terrified of the risk they have just taken, but with a sense that absolutely anything could happen next.”

Go back and read the piece by Andrew Rawnsley that I quoted back in February – it makes Cameron’s dilemma clear:

Because he was not clear, the enemies of modernisation within his party were never fully confronted and defeated. He campaigned for the leadership on the slogan “change to win”. But it only half-changed and then it only half-won.

In fact, the Tories are not uniformly enemies of modernity (they would never have elected Cameron if they were, no matter how desperate they were), and the current revolt, although widespread, is still probably not fatal for Cameron. Although the media didn’t seem to think so, the vote on the EU referendum could have been a lot worse: the large majority of the party still backed the government’s position.

Nor, on the specific question of same-sex marriage, is it at all clear that Cameron could have done any better. Given the traction the issue has got in the rest of the world there was no chance it could be kept off the agenda entirely. The alternatives were either to embrace it explicitly, or to keep quiet as a government and hope that, with suitable encouragement, a sympathetic backbencher could get it through with cross-party support.

The second option might have worked better, but there’s a pretty good chance it wouldn’t have – that, without endorsement from the top, same-sex marriage would have been overwhelmingly opposed by Tory MPs and as a result would have either (a) been defeated on the floor of the Commons or (b) been carried almost entirely on Labour and Liberal Democrat votes. Either outcome would have cast the Tories as villains in the eyes of the majority of the electorate.

For the Conservatives to purge Cameron as too liberal would be to commit electoral suicide, and most of them know it. They might not like him, but for the foreseeable future they’re stuck with him.

The topic is refugees, and Bianca Hall has the report in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

More than 90 per cent of asylum seekers who arrived by boat were found to be genuine refugees in the March quarter, figures to be released on Monday show. But those who arrived by plane – despite being eligible for release into the community and not having to face years of detention on Nauru or Manus Island – were almost twice as likely to be rejected as refugees.

So far there’s no sign of the figures on the immigration department’s website, but no doubt they’ll appear in due course. In any case they’re totally consistent with past experience; as Hall says, 91% of boat arrivals in 2011-12 were found to be refugees and 93.5% the previous year. But “Of those who arrived in Australia by plane before lodging an application for protection, 33.2 per cent were given initial approval, rising to 54.7 per cent after appeals.”

Given those numbers, you’d think that a government that was primarily concerned about the welfare of people crossing the Indian Ocean on leaky boats would try to get them onto aeroplanes instead. Conversely, if its priority was to stop people who aren’t genuine refugees from coming here, it would focus on the plane arrivals, either sending them to Nauru or adopting some other draconian measure of deterrence.

Since the government shows not the slightest inclination to do either of these things, it’s reasonable to conclude that its real concerns are something other than what it claims.

If you depended only on the political debate (or on the tabloid media) for your facts, you’d probably assume that Australia was being deluged with asylum seekers with dubious claims – so-called “economic refugees” who are just looking to improve their lives rather than fleeing persecution. The latest figures demonstrate, yet again, that this is simply not true. (The UNHCR provides a wealth of statistical material if you want to explore further.)

Immigration minister Brendan O’Connor has a different approach to the figures. Without saying so in quite so many words, he clearly intends to suggest that too many people are having their refugee status approved, and that more should be knocked back. Last week he promised “a comprehensive review of the refugee status determination process to ensure that we continue to meet our international obligations, but also that our final acceptance rates for comparable cohorts are consistent with other countries.”

Hall quotes him saying that “We accept that we need to abide by the refugee convention,” but that “We don’t believe we should be doing more than that.”

But notice how the government’s rhetoric contradicts itself. If crossing the ocean to come here really is an exceptionally dangerous thing to do, it’s surely not surprising that people only do if they are really desperate: that is, if their claims to be fleeing persecution are absolutely genuine. So a high rate of acceptance of those claims is just what you’d expect – higher, for example, than among those who’ve only crossed the Mediterranean and made landfall in southern Europe.

Australia is in a different position to almost all other refugee destinations; because it’s difficult and dangerous to get here, we attract very few bogus claimants (except, of course, those who are able to get visas to get on a plane). That’s not a sign that our processing is too lax, it’s just a function of our geography.

O’Connor would not dream of making this sort of comparison when it comes to other aspects of the refugee problem. If the test, for example, were to be refugees admitted per square kilometre of arable land, Australia would be close to the bottom of the table. He only wants to resort to international comparison when it might work against accepting refugees.

Refugees are a hot political topic in many places; Australia is by no means unique in that regard. What distinguishes our problem is both how small it is and how effective our geographical position is at winnowing the field of claimants. The huge majority of those who reach our shores are genuinely in need of help.

It reflects poorly on us that we seem so reluctant to give it to them.

Pakistan

Pakistan’s election results are now pretty much final, with 262 of the 272 constituency seats declared. (Earlier report here.) Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League has won 125 of those – just short of a majority, but with no expected difficulty in adding enough independents and minor parties to be able to control the parliament. (There are 28 independents, plus another ten parties with only one or two MPs.)

The incumbent Pakistan People’s Party finished second with 31 seats, closely followed by Imran Khan’s Movement for Justice on 27. It’s not at all clear how well those totals reflect the  total votes received; I haven’t gone through the time-consuming process of compiling the vote totals from the electoral commission’s website, and I can’t find anyone else who’s done it either.

Another 70 seats are to be allocated to women and minorities, in proportion to the parties’ electoral support by province. There is an opportunity for independents to join one of the parties before this happens (although they have to swear an affidavit to do so), so that process is likely to boost Sharif’s strength.

Of the four provincial parliaments, Sharif’s party and the PPP have clear majorities in Punjab and Sindh respectively; Movement for Justice is the largest party and expected to be able to govern in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; and Baluchistan is a mess of small parties and independents.

Bulgaria

Bulgaria’s results are now also final. Late results (incorporating voters from outside the country) favored the liberal Movement for Rights and Freedoms, which is based in the ethnic Turkish community, but otherwise things are very much as I described them last week. The incumbent centre-right party GERB topped the poll with 30.5% of the vote, but is well short of a majority.

My inability to read Bulgarian led me to misrepresent the system slightly in the previous post: apparently the first-past-the-post constituency seats have been scrapped. It’s now just a single proportional allocation (D’Hondt system) for 240 seats across the whole country. That slightly improves the position of the far-right Attack party at the expense of GERB, but it leaves unchanged both the order of the parties and the key fact that the Socialist Party and the MRF have exactly half the seats between them (84 and 36 respectively).

Despite being the largest party, GERB has protested against the results, claiming to be the victim of a fake ballot paper scandal just before polling day and seeking fresh elections. GERB leader and former prime minister Boyko Borisov says that failing that he is willing to propose a minority government, but he knows this will not win parliamentary approval.

Yavor Siderov in the Guardian laments Bulgaria’s dysfunctional political culture and traces its origins to various features of its recent history – it’s well worth a read. Fundamentally, however, this is something that could happen just about anywhere. (Every country’s politics looks dysfunctional if you look closely enough.) You have a far-right party that no-one else wants to co-operate with, a heavily discredited incumbent and a plausible coalition that just happened to win exactly half the seats.

The Socialists have proposed a non-partisan government of technocrats as the best way to overcome the impasse. No doubt they will soon get their chance to try to make that work.

Malaysia

Further to the scandalous Malaysian election of two weeks ago, Adam Carr at Psephos has now compiled a complete set of figures. (No doubt in due course he’ll have them by constituency as well.) I’m pleased to say they agree almost exactly with mine: he says the opposition won by 50.9% to 47.4% (I had said 50.7% to 47.6%), despite being deprived of victory by the electoral system.

Kenya

Another recent election, in Kenya, is now the subject of a very interesting briefing from the International Crisis Group. It’s reasonably positive, pointing out that “A number of factors contributed to a predominantly peaceful election, including a general consensus between the political elite and the citizenry not to bring Kenya to the brink of civil war again.” But it stresses that “a number of vital, more overarching reforms addressing systemic and structural conflict drivers … have yet to be implemented.”

In addition to, of course, getting the electoral machinery to work properly, one of the things it particularly points to is the importance of carrying through the devolution of power to the newly-established county governments. Further evidence that, as I said the other week, Australia keeps degrading federalism “at just the time when other countries are discovering the virtues of federalism and trying to revitalise or reinvent it.”

Iran

Iran goes to the polls in just under a month, on 14 June, to elect a new president: two-term incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is ineligible to run again. (There will be a runoff a week later if no candidate wins a majority.) The previous election, in 2009, was widely regarded as fraudulent, but despite (or perhaps because of) that, this one seems to be attracting a lot of interest. When nominations closed at the beginning of last week there were 686 would-be candidates.

It’s the job of the Guardian Council to whittle down that list, and it in turn is under the thumb of Iran’s real ruler, theocrat Ali Khamenei. Last time it excluded all but four out of 476 nominees. It’s expected to release its decision tomorrow, although we’ve already learned that women are pre-emptively banned.

Particular interest centres on whether or not the Council will rule out former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who at the age of 78 has nominated as a pro-reform candidate. Quoted in the Telegraph, Iranian expert Meir Javedanfar says that if reformist candidates “can demonstrate real support and that barring them from taking part will hurt stability more, Khamenei will let them run. Whether they would then be allowed to win or not is another question.”

Videla seized power in a coup in 1976 and proceeded to conduct a ruthless campaign against his real and supposed enemies that became known as the “Dirty War”. Originally directed, at least in theory, against armed left-wing guerrillas, it quickly became a reign of terror against activists and dissidents of all sorts. Estimates of the number of people killed range from about 9,000 to 30,000.

Nor was it confined to Argentina: in alliance with neighboring dictators such as Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay (and with the tacit support of the United States), “Operation Condor” targeted subversive influences across the continent. It’s the era that turned “disappear” into a transitive verb.

In 1982 one of Videla’s successors, General Galtieri, made the mistake of starting a war with the United Kingdom over the Falkland Islands. The military regime collapsed as a result and the new democratic government began inquiries into its activities, eventually putting its leaders on trial. Videla was pardoned as an act of reconciliation in 1990, but the Supreme Court later ruled the pardon unconstitutional and he was returned to prison.

You can read more about Videla in the New York Times and at Al-Jazeera and the BBC. But what none of them quite seem to convey is just how normal a dictatorship like Videla’s seemed at the time.

With hindsight, Videla’s rule took place at a time when dictatorship was already on the way out. Greece, Portugal and Spain were all moving back to democracy, and as the Cold War thawed out the United States was starting to pay more attention to human rights issues.

But no-one really predicted how quickly and completely military rule would go out of fashion, especially in South America. The continent was regarded as the natural home of tinpot military despots, where intervals of civilian government were brief and unsuccessful. (Chile had long been an exception, which was why Pinochet’s rule was especially traumatic.)

In the 30 years since Argentina’s generals gave up power, democracy has bloomed in any number of unlikely places. Back in 2006, when I compiled the Crikey dictators list, I could find only 16 remaining examples of “a species that dominated the history of the 20th century” – and six of those have since given way to something like democratisation.

No doubt the world still has many problems, and there’s a lot still to be done to secure peace and freedom to its people. But the fate of General Videla serves as a reminder of how far we’ve already come.

And sure enough, Tuesday’s election in British Columbia was absolutely fascinating. You can get all the results here, but they don’t tell you what was fascinating about it: they just show an incumbent government winning a comfortable majority with very little swing either way, beating its only serious rival by about 5% in the primary vote.

The remarkable thing is that this was completely contrary to the unanimous prediction of the opinion polls, which all said the Liberals would go down to the New Democratic Party.

I’ve written about it at some length in today’s Crikey, wondering if there’s a lesson for Australia: “could it mean the Gillard government, which has never been as far behind in the polls as Clark’s Liberals were, is still in a position to stage a comeback before September 14?”

Antony Green asked the same question yesterday. We both agree that the differences between electoral systems in the two countries make this sort of upset much less likely here. I don’t discount the possibility entirely, since “upsets tend to happen — by definition — without warning.” But for a variety of reasons our pollsters have a much better track record than their Canadian counterparts.

And spare a thought for Éric Grenier, trying to make a name for himself with the Canadian equivalent of Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com. In a long post overnight he tries, without much success, to explain what went wrong:

British Columbians collectively woke up and changed their minds and swung about 13 points towards Christy Clark. Or, more likely, something disastrously wrong occurred in the polling industry. …

There is no question that seat projection models like mine work. They are an effective way to translate poll results into seats. This is not voodoo magic, it is a rather simple endeavour. The challenge is being the least possible amount of wrong, which is the best that forecasters can hope for. But the models are only as good as the available information.

I have to admit that my confidence in the quality of that information – polling – has been profoundly shaken. …

This site was meant to be a way to cut through the confusion in polling and give a good idea of what, as a whole, the polls are saying. The site can still do that, but if what the polls are saying is not reflective of reality, what use is it?

I feel his pain. We all know the sorts of inaccuracies that polls are liable to, but at a fundamental level we still depend on pollsters being able to do their job. In the developed democracies that confidence is generally well placed. British Columbia turned out to be a striking exception.

It’s by Anne-Ruth Wertheim, a Dutch journalist and scholar. She’s trying to explain the “Islamophobia” or anti-Muslim racism promoted especially by Geert Wilders (whom we’ve come across before) in her homeland of the Netherlands. In doing so, she distinguishes between two different types of racism, which she calls (using terms pioneered by her father) “exploitation racism” and “competition racism”.

“Exploitation racism” is the attitude people take to those that they think are inferior, and whom they can use but need to keep in their place. Typical cases are the native peoples exploited by colonialism and the blacks who were victims of chattel slavery. As Wertheim says, “These workers are usually spared mass violence, since they have to be kept in good enough shape to do the dirty, hard labour.”

“Competition racism” comes when people suspect that the target group might actually not be inferior, but might be a threat to jobs and status, making it more important to demonise them. Examples include the Asians in Idi Amin’s Uganda, the Chinese in South-East Asia, and of course the Jews in Europe. “It is not uncommon for their centuries of life in a country to end with expulsion or extermination.”

Wertheim’s argument (which she has been developing for a while) is that attitudes to the Muslims in Europe have been moving from the first category to the second. From initially being guest workers to be exploited, they have begun to arouse more dangerous passions:

As long as they knew their place, it was fine for them to do the work the established population felt was too poorly paid or too unpleasant. But step by step, their descendants are qualified for all the work there is. So they are increasingly formidable rivals, especially with a recession going on.

Characteristic of the shift, she says, is that cultural factors become more important than purely racial ones. This gives a certain deniability to those who are inflaming opinion against the target population. But it also suggests that they are being disingenuous when they claim to support assimilation, since their real goal is the disappearance of the competing group (although of course assimilation can be a means to disappearance).

Do read the whole thing: it’s one of the most thought-provoking pieces I’ve read on racism. I’m not entirely convinced – I’m not sure it’s invariably true that “The driving force behind racism is economics.” (For one thing, the shift to actual genocide against the Jews of Europe was marked by greater rather than less emphasis on strictly racial criteria.) But at the very least Wertheim has an important angle on a serious and troubling issue.