A CLEAR perspective

Author: James Collins

Peter Reynolds has been boasting of the “enormous achievements” of his party.  I wanted to take a look at that in detail.  When CLEAR states its case to the public, it is always in terms of platitudes and broad generalizations.  What specifically they have done to forward the cause of cannabis as a political party, above and beyond what everyone else with a website has done, is never detailed in any way.  There is a reason for this – the facts have a distinctly anti-CLEAR bias.

Peter’s favorite boast is the fact that he got 0.4% of the vote in the Corby by-election.   That percentage represents exactly 137 people, according to official tallies.  Now, as we have discussed before at PRWatch, that number is a complete fiction in terms of election mechanics.  Human beings simply can’t be counted on to accurately tally so many votes, cans of soup, or anything else that you can say with certainty 137 people voted for Peter Reynolds.  What it means in mathematical terms is that Peter got something close to, but not quite zero.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_uncertainty

Elections have systematic errors.  That is to say, nobody is perfect, and people fuck stuff up all the time no matter how good their intentions might be.  They miscount, they lose things, they count stuff twice, and they make incorrect notations of both correct and incorrect measurements, sometimes compounding mistakes into even more egregious ones.

To put it in the most basic arithmetic terms – we’ve all forgotten to carry the 1.

Peter’s 0.4% result is roughly 30% of the amount of votes you need to be certain he got any at all.  Go ahead, I’ve referenced my point, if you’re capable sit down and crunch the numbers.  That’s the math of it.  No tongue-in-cheek, no acerbic remarks; CLEAR won kinda-sorta-not-really slightly more votes than none.

Now on to the funny part, where the joke called Peter Reynolds gets a zippy punch line.

In 1979 in Canada a group called the Rhinoceros Party ran a national election campaign.  Their party platform included such out-of-the-box thinking as repealing the Law of Gravity, tearing down the Rocky Mountains to provide sunset views to the prairies, and repatriating Great Britain “home” to become Canada’s 11^th Province.

Nationally they enjoyed 0.55% of the popular vote.  That’s more than a 25% increase over Peter’s results, which I will note were only in one riding.

Both countries have pretty much the same election system.  It’s known as First Past the Post. The minutia is a bit different, largely because of entirely different geographical concerns, but underneath both Canada and Great Britain have functionally the same model of government.  If you can win more votes flagrantly threatening to maim the landscape, unravel the laws of physics and reshape the globe for the sake of ego, then you can win that many votes by not showing up at all.  Peter could have stayed at home, not embarrassed himself and saved you all a five pound note.

Bringing it home, in a general election in 2010 in the UK, Citizens for Undead Rights and Equality ran four candidates, and split 317 votes between them.  This amounted to a total 0.2% of their respective constituencies.  Promising rights for horrific things that don’t exist is at least half as popular as CLEAR, and has a far more broadly-reaching political profile, with four people willing to make asses of themselves by mocking the election system.  CLEAR only has one guy for the job.  What if Peter Reynolds takes ill?

In 2010 in the city of Reykjavik, Iceland, the “Best Party” actually won a municipal election.  They offered such satirical promises as a drug free Parliament by 2020, and they took 6 of 15 council seats with 34.7% of the vote.  When the time is right, and the people involved are charismatic, even a joke can take a slim majority.

I guess Peter just wasn’t that funny.

This is a politician who can’t convince a room full of liberal-minded college students that the dope they already smoke should be legal.  These people attended a debate about cannabis legalization, so the topic is in their field of view.  They’re university students, so they’re probably info savvy and up on the fact set surrounding cannabis.  They didn’t vote slightly less for cannabis after the debate because they were convinced, they just didn’t like Peter Reynolds.  Watch for yourself.

Peter Reynolds loses cannabis debate in room full of students. 

He was funny though, in his own little way.  He even appeared in his own campaign video, chasing the people of Corby about the town square with his fliers.  Wait though, what happened to poor Peter?

It looks like some people want him to leave.  Why would that be?

You can first note that Peter seems a bit off his game.  At one point he asks one of the officers confronting him for a name and address, which he then sloppily amends to mean his badge number.  I guess nobody told him you have to be a little more attractive to flash some side-boob and get lenient treatment from officers of the law.  He might not be aware his unkempt hair is comically disordered and his manner swaying and slurred.

Why am I showing this injustice, the law coming down on the man I dislike so much?  Well, frankly that is because this is entirely Peter’s fault.  Peter Reynolds hasn’t done his homework here, and if he had then he would know you have to get a permit to canvass a public shopping square like this, as the bemused gentlemen in the video explain to him.  It isn’t even public property he is on, it would seem the land is privately owned and maintained, with the shops the tenants of this land-owner.  If Peter had of gotten off his drunken behind to properly research local municipal procedure for political canvassing, scouted out a proper location for his little home video session, and ensured his ducks were in a row, then this wouldn’t have happened.

Peter Reynolds is just really lazy.

This is why CLEAR couldn’t get as many votes as candidates promising geographic and economic devastation, who were I will point out living in a far more conservative political climate than today.

What are his other accomplishments?  Well, he claims to have submitted his book report to a committee many years ago.  His mom and his ex-wife will both swear on a stack of Bibles they saw him do it.  The Home Office inquiry had never heard of him.  There was a commission of sorts on drugs, but Peter’s own FOI request shows that they didn’t acknowledge receipt of any documents from Peter Reynolds.  One of his pretend lawsuits is over this issue, where he insists people deny that a Home Office Inquiry ever occurred.  That isn’t what is at issue.  People don’t deny the existence of that; they deny that this body accepted evidence from Peter Reynolds.

Ask for his FOI request on the subject.  You will see clearly that at no time does it ratify Peter’s claims of significance.

He’s just making shit up.

The other major accomplishment they seem to boast is the number of “likes” they have on Facebook.  Once again, the problem here is that pages featuring cats with funny captions get many times what CLEAR gets.  It simply isn’t a metric of political support.  That has been proven by various joke pages where some inanimate object is placed in competition with a public figure, often to outpace the person in question rapidly in terms of Facebook attention.

Facebook is not a way to gauge political support.  CLEAR is, and I use this term in the loosest possible sense, a political party.  They have a mandate to gain clout, win votes and take seats in Parliament.  That is the function of a political party.  Any other objective consigns you to the realm of the Rhino Party and Citizens for Undead Rights and Equality, it’s good for a chuckle and that’s about it.

Five quid buys you vacant platitudes, election results that test the limits of statistical drift, and one raving madman pretending to be a politician, a journalist, another fake journalist, and a decent human being.  He isn’t a good imitation of any of those things.  He’s a cheap dime-store knock-off of a real man, and you’re best saving your hard-earned cash for a product that won’t fall apart as soon as you open the whisky bottle.