CLEAR, Corby and Statistically Insignificant Margins

Author: James Collins

CLEAR, or Cannabis Law Reform, or just Peter if you like, has run for office in Corby.  He is quite proud of the election results.  A whopping 137 people voted for Peter in Corby.  That’s pretty exciting if you plan on staying in the “my parents shed” territory of politics, but a closer examination of that figure will reveal the complete insignificance it represents.  Peter couldn’t get elected Dog Catcher apparently.

In previous elections in the UK, the Legalize Cannabis Alliance drew in far greater support than this.  Most notably in 2001, LCA representative John Peacock managed to get 1040 votes, representing 2.5% of the electorate in Workington.  That’s actually a fairly impressive feat, for a single-issue candidate to breach the 2% margin is surprising.  People don’t generally vote for single issue candidates, because elections are about far more than just one issue.  John Peacock must have been one charismatic guy, and really got a good-sized ground game going in the election.

John Peacock wasn’t alone in his bid, either.  The LCA ran a number of candidates in both the 2001 and 2005 general elections.  It was at this point the cost-benefit analysis of the situation determined that spreading awareness was probably more efficient than trying to contest deeply rooted parties in a corrupt parliamentary system.

Turn to Peter Reynolds and the newly branded Cannabis Law Reform, and we see an even more dismal showing.  It is the case that the previous LCA had abandoned the political party model in favor of a lobby group simply because of the political realities of party politics.  While it may bolster one man’s ego to get a few hundred votes, in reality you probably only got the votes of people who weren’t going to vote until they saw a pot leaf on a pamphlet.  You’re never going to get anyone into office, and with less than one percent of the vote the other parties are never going to take you seriously enough to hear out your whole pitch on any subject.

It’s a huge waste of time and money.  You don’t make new friends, you make an insignificant impact in the election, and you appear amateurish and pathetic in the process.  The world has changed significantly since 2001.  Internet usage was not quite so ubiquitous at the time, now we live in a world where almost everybody in the industrialized world and well into the wilds connects to the World Wide Web with some device.  Interconnectivity has greatly increased, and the opportunity to spread information through social networking and website forums is far greater than being a tiny voice in the din of a national election or the pinpoint circus of a by-election.

Aside from the odious viewpoints and irrational behavior of Peter Reynolds, CLEAR is employing obsolete techniques to achieve its ends in an era where the political landscape has inexorably changed.  Rather than adapting to the times, Peter shows that he is living in a distant past when Britain was mostly white, people had genuine respect for politicians even when it was undeserved, and running for office was the most efficient way to get your message out on political issues.  None of these things are true, and his dated approach shows that rather than living in the present, he very much clings to the past and conducts himself accordingly.

The voter-sponsored initiatives in Washington State and Colorado are not evidence that CLEAR is pursuing the correct or effective course of action.  In those cases the voter was asked to vote for cannabis itself, not a representative who claims to advocate cannabis legalization.  If such an initiative were to be held in the UK tomorrow, polls indicate that the voters would support it by a fairly comfortable majority.  The election in Corby shows that only 0.4% of the population would be willing to support a candidate on the basis of a single issue.

Peter wants to spin this as a victory, of course.  What else could he possibly do?  Admit to the few people that are willing to donate to his organization that he just pissed their money away on a pointless venture?  He says those 137 people mean that the Tories and Labour and everyone else from Barack Obama to Kim Jong Un supports him.  How precisely he extrapolates that from the elections data is beyond me.  All I can surmise is that his weed is a hell of a lot better than mine, because his interpretation of events is way on the other side of the “foo-foo-la-la” zone of deluded optimism.

He even goes so far as to assume 300,000 supporters nationally on the basis of the vote in Corby.  The problem with that hallucination, aside from his completely defective math, is that the whole of CLEAR only managed to scrounge one candidate, and enough money to have him stand about pestering people with fliers for one day before the election.  How exactly do they hope to run in more than one riding in a national campaign?  This is why Peter chose the by-election; CLEAR doesn’t enjoy enough support to fund anything more than a single-riding campaign, and it was a pauper’s campaign at that.

You can fork over your “donation” to CLEAR, but all you’ll be buying is a few glossy fliers and a trip out-of-town for Peter and his two buddies to go out drinking, all the while pretending they are a “political party” who is “campaigning” for the legalization of cannabis.  Schlepping about the town square with your crudely produced pro-weed literature in the midst of an election where people have real issues on their mind didn’t raise the profile of cannabis legalization issues in Corby, or anywhere else.  It just made Peter feel like he was a real somebody for a few hours, and I can’t imagine any sensible person wants to waste their hard-earned dollars doing that.