Over and out

I thought I ought to post a final message to round off the Geek the Vote campaign.

This campaign started because I felt that no party was courting the science and technology vote, but that the Liberal Democrat manifesto, plus their history on key issues put them head and shoulders above the other parties in representing us on so many important questions: research funding, independence of expert advisors, internet freedoms, libel reform and support for school and higher education in STEM subjects.

It’s been great to have been a small part of a campaign in which voters have been more interested and involved than in recent years, and in which the geek community has rallied around a number of central policy points and brought them out into the public consciousness. Though we have been arguing for the Liberal Democrats, we were pleased that science and technology issues hit the headlines with the campaigns by the Science Party, running against David Tredinnick, and the Pirate Party, raising awareness about internet freedoms. CaSE, the Vote Geek campaign, the Skeptical Voter campaign, the science debates run by the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Eureka blog in the Times, the science survey put together by Martin Robbins et al. for the Guardian and the hugely active Twitter community have helped to clarify the positions on science and technology issues held by each party and by each candidate so that people can make informed decisions in the future and hold ruling parties to account on the promises made to those involved in science, technology and engineering.

It goes without saying that the result was a huge disappointment for the Liberal Democrats. It was even more so for the Lib Dem geeks because of the loss of Dr Evan Harris as MP for Oxford West and Abingdon. In fact supporters of all parties have expressed regret at the fact that the commons has lost such a capable and committed champion of science and evidence-based policy. Whether Cristina Odone will take out a centrefold spread in the Telegraph to rejoice at the news remains to be seen.

One heartening piece of news is the performance of the Liberal Democrats in Cambridge, who saw in computational biologist Julian Huppert as their MP and also took most of the seats in the City Council.

While it is easy to be disheartened by the outcome of the election last night, I think the grassroots skeptic/science/geek community has a lot to be proud of in how it has come together and brought minority issues into the mainstream. The result reminds us that we are a minority: that, while everyone we interact with on our social network appears to be singing from the same hymn sheet, that social network is a very narrowly self-selecting group of people. If we are to make a campaign for these issues work in future, the key will have to be reaching beyond the networks of people with similar views that we build around ourselves and putting real effort into outreach and communication programmes. The fact that Brian Cox has managed to make arguments for supporting funding for physics research in the Sun is a great start.

The result also demands that we don’t stop campaigning here. Without wanting to put too much pressure on Julian Huppert as “the only rationalist in the house”, lacking voices that we can depend on to speak up for geeks in the Commons means that the responsibility lies with us to write and ask that our MPs represent our views in debates and to engage with policy-making through pressure groups like CaSE, the Open Rights Group, the Libel Reform Campaign and the various learned societies. Why not start by joining CaSE right now?

Once again, thanks for supporting this campaign. Let’s make sure that geeks have a voice in the new parliament, whoever ends up in No 10.