To the polling booth at 08.00 a.m. to beat the crowds (voting is obligatory in Belgium and long queues form later in the day) for, in Belgium at least, I have the right to vote in European elections. It still pains me hugely that I am no longer able to vote in the UK, but in a sense voting in Belgium is more fun. Certainly, Belgian voters are more sophisticated in calculating the nuances and balances of coalitionary forces and, although there are so many different layers of government, politicians are, if only because of the small size of the country, closer to the people. Nevertheless, I am nothing if not consistent in my support and so the choice for me was relatively simple. The polling station was in a nearby school. Not for the first time, I admired the organisation and the efficient infrastructure that made these elections such an apparently simple and straightforward affair. Last year I read an excellent book entitled In Praise of Bureaucracy by Paul Gay, a political philosopher. One of his neo Weberian arguments is, quite simply, that democracy cannot exist without bureaucracy. The holding of elections graphically demonstrates that point (and also why, simply on grounds of infrastructure and resources, it is so much easier to hold a democratic election in a developed country). But another lesson about Belgian democracy was on show; the strength of its civic culture. On Friday evening, the lady who was cutting my hair explained that she would be spending her Sunday acting as a teller at one of the polling stations, and through her I learnt that the whole workforce for these elections is generated through random selection from the electoral rolls. Serving at the polling booth is as much of a civic duty as serving on a jury. So I was effusive in my gratitude to the people at the polling station who made my vote possible.

Not from the Airbus

This morning’s news carried a strange but revelatory twist in the tragic tale of the ill-fated Airbus A330 lost somewhere over the Atlantic. The searchers had found debris and an oil slick. However, they have now announced that these did not come from the Airbus; ‘a large slick spotted in the area most likely spilled from a ship rather than from a downed plane’. So what exactly was a ship doing spilling a large slick in the middle of the Atlantic? If you do a Google on ‘ships dumping oil at sea’, you’ll find your answer. Here are some choice quototations from one of those reports that give you an idea of the sheer scale of what is going on out on the open seas where normally nobody is watching…

‘According to Poux, the amount of oil illegally dumped by oceangoing ships has a far greater impact on the environment than accidental spills. Some estimates, he said, put shipboard waste-dumping at more than 88 million gallons a year — some eight times the amount of crude oil spilled when the Exxon Valdez hit a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound 20 years ago.

‘Sludge filtered out from the low-grade fuel burned by many ships is particularly bad for the environment. It is supposed to be incinerated or off-loaded in port.

“It’s almost like tar; that’s what they are putting in the ocean,” the federal prosecutor said.

The oil dumping doesn’t have the immediate impact of an Exxon Valdez disaster, in which the thick toxic goo released from the ruptured hull of the grounded tanker suffocated or poisoned hundreds of thousands of seabirds and marine animals. But it is by no means benign, said Michael Kennish, a marine scientist at the Institute of Marine & Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University.

‘Salt marsh sediments can retain oil wastes “for years and years and years.” Emulsified oil solids sink to the bottom, where they affect bottom-feeding marine life.

“Oil is picked up by plants and animals everywhere,” Kennish said. “Dump it into the Continental Shelf, and that’s where our fisheries are. So the oil gets into the food chain.”

‘One study has estimated 300,000 seabirds are killed annually along Canada’s Atlantic coast from the type of routine discharge of oily waste, federal officials said. A chemical “oil fingerprint” analysis conducted by the Coast Guard found the bilge waste from one ship charged with environmental crimes was consistent with oil found on nearby beaches. ‘

David Butler

As the European elections campaign creaks to a close, one familiar figure has been missing from the corridors of Westminster and Whitehall, Brussels and Strasbourg. In 2006 David Butler, grand old man of British psephology, decided to hang up his pen. Butler, Emeritus Fellow of Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford, and for long a familiar face on election night television specials, has been associated with ‘Nuffield Studies’ of British elections since 1945 and has been the author or co-author of each one since 1951. After writing the 1951 and 1955 studies alone, Butler fell into the tradition of co-authorship; with Richard Rose (1959), Anthony King (1964, 1966), Michael Pinto-Duschinsky (1970) and, most enduring authorial relationship of all, with Dennis Kavanagh (1974 onwards and through till 2005). Each of these studies had been ‘Butler and …’ but, in 2005, in a symbolic recognition of the changing weight of responsibilities, it became ‘Kavanagh and Butler’, and from now on it will be ‘Kavanagh and Cowley’ (as in Philip Cowley, of Nottingham University). (more…)

Over the past couple of weeks I have whitewashed a bedroom, touched up the woodwork at our Brussels house and, today, helped de-reed a pond. The pond in question is at my father-in-law’s garden on the border between the Belgian Famenne and the Ardennes. It was a simply glorious day. This region can be austere and harsh in the winter (a season that has its own beauty), but on a spring day like today, with swallows soaring high in the sky and the trees and meadows in full leaf, it is an earthly paradise. Some of our favourite nephews and nieces were there, which added to our pleasure. After a late breakfast, everybody got to work on clearing up the pond. My job was to don a chest-high pair of waders and start de-reeding (pulling up fist loads of reeds where they encroached on the open water). I always feel virtuous after such physical labour, and in a way that you don’t (or I don’t) after more intellectual or administrative endeavours. But the fact is that, unlike the previous day’s running, such labour leaves the mind to think about and work on other things. So I didn’t just get the whitewashing and the touching-up and the de-reeding done; I also wrote quite a lot of stuff in my mind and thought through quite a few problems at work. The rest of this week is going to be very tough, so I was grateful for these ‘Zen’ interludes, and I am sure I’ll return to the peace they gave me as the week hots up.