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Posts Tagged ‘david cameron’

Do as I say, not as I do…

Posted in Society, The Constant Unfolding of Events, tagged , , , , , , , on September 16, 2015| Leave a Comment »

I married my wife in a Catholic Church 17 years ago, where we both promised to raise our children as Catholics, and I’m sticking with that promise. I try to live by a lot of the teaching and messages in the Christian texts, even if I don’t accept the literal story or messenger. Last Sunday I attended Mass for the first time in a while, and listened to a reading from the Letter of St James (2: 14-18)…

How does it help, my brothers, when someone who has never done a single good act claims to have faith? Will that faith bring salvation? If one of the brothers or one of the sisters is in need of clothes and has not enough food to live on, and one of you says to them, “I wish you well; keep yourself warm and eat plenty,” without giving them these bare necessities of life, then what good is that? In the same way, faith, if good deeds do not go with it, is quite dead.

Paris is worth a mass…

My thoughts immediately turned to politicians who claim that God inspires their every action. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago the Protestant Duke of Bourbon, on becoming King Henri IV of France, found that it would significantly strengthen his position if he were a Catholic: so he converted to secure the support of Spain and the Catholic League.

Especially (but not exclusively) in the US, being a God-faring Christian seems a hygiene factor to be an electable politician. The TV screens are full of mostly rich white men invoking God and Jesus at every opportunity. But their so-called Christian attitude seems largely unrelated to what I remember from the preaching of Jesus Christ: no compassion for women, even those who have been raped, who might want or need an abortion, no “Good Samaritan” attitudes to people living in poverty, ample protection and rewards for the rich at the expense of the vulnerable.

Setting the agenda

This week, the UK press has truly shown itself (as if any further proof were needed) to be ‘holier than thou’ bullies rather than enquirers after the truth. Jeremy Corbyn was elected by a massive majority to be leader of the UK Labour Party, surprising almost everyone with the scale of his democratic triumph, yet it seems that almost noone in the press (even the left-leaning Guardian) likes him, which has led to some shameful ad hominem attacks that don’t even get close to being worthy of the name ‘journalism’.

He’s faced criticism for wearing a jacket that didn’t match his trousers. He was pilloried for appointing a Shadow Cabinet in which no women held the so-called ‘Top 4’ posts, ignoring the fact that more than half of his total team are women. Currently just 1/3 of David Cameron’s Cabinet are women, and the last two Labour Prime Ministers (Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) ended their tenures in Downing Street with barely 1/4 women among their Ministers of State.

Surely it’s not about the bike…

Nothing seems too trivial or too tenuous to slip in a jibe, even if you’re the (sic) respectable broadsheet The Times of London. Mr Corbyn likes to ride a bicycle to get around his Inner London constituency. But because he’s left-of-centre, it’s now apparently acceptable to refer to his “Chairman Mao-style bicycle”… but look! David Cameron rides one that’s quite similar.

Chairman Mao Bicycle Jeremy Corbyn David Cameron

If that’s the Chairman Mao, is Dave riding the Pinochet?

Sing Up!

But that was Tuesday… Wednesday’s front pages were dominated by the scandal, the national shame that at a service to honour the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, Mr Corbyn did not sing the National Anthem. I’m prepared to concede that this is a PR mistake and lack of foresight, and even an error of judgement. But is it really more important than the facts that in the last 48 hours the UK Parliament has debated and passed two bills which both seem to target the hard-working people the Tory Party so vocally championed during this year’s General Election?

Don’t blame me…

The latest Trade Union Bill will require unions to give at least 2 weeks’ notice of an intended strike, allow employers to use agency staff to replace striking workers and require picketing strikers to give their name, address and email address to police. The tone of Government presentation of this bill would have an outsider believe that the country is held to ransom by Trade Unions. In fact, the days lost each year to strike action over the last 5 years has averaged around 650,000. This might seem a lot, until you understand  that it is 95% lower than when the country really was held to ransom during the 1970s and early 1980s.

During this same period there’s reams of evidence demonstrating how the top 1% or 10% receive a far higher proportion of incomes. The banks who caused the credit crunch have been bailed out to the tune of billions and austerity measures have frozen pay for public sector workers and ushered in an increasingly new normal of zero-hours contracts. I Reckon we are still being held to ransom, but it sure ain’t the unions that are the problem now.

Work to live…

Just a few months ago The Conservative Manifesto trumpeted that

We offer a good life for those willing to try — because we are the party of working people. The next five years are about turning  the good news in our economy into a good life for you and your family.

Except the new tax credits bill that was debated and passed yesterday will cut supplementary benefits for low income or part-time earners, by as much as £1,000 per year, and could affect 3 million of these precious hard-working families.

When is a refugee more than just a scrounging immigrant? When he sells papers…

Jeremy Corbyn’s suits have made the plight of the Syrian, Libyan and Sudanese refugees suddenly “so last week”. Then the media and politicians were brow-beaten or guilt-tripped by grass-roots groups into taking any kind of action. From scathing indifference or outright hostility, they suddenly discovered a streak of compassionate, all encapsulated in one horrific picture of a dead toddler washed up on a beach. Now they’re wondering why Corbyn wears brown and not a nice midnight blue.

The UK Government and press are alike in behaving like St James’ examples of a man with loudly-proclaimed faith, but no good deeds. They preach about making “right” choices to the people who do not have such luxuries of choice. They judge poorly those who don’t fit their simplistic paradigm, By doing so, I Reckon they demean us all.

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I believe that children are the future…

Posted in Family, Society, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 21, 2011| 1 Comment »

…teach them well and let them lead the way.

These words of wisdom (ahem) from Whitney Houston seem completely at odds both with pronouncements of recent weeks, but also policies of recent years. David Cameron has employed his most Daily-Mail-baiting sound bites in describing the recent London riots as “criminality – pure and simple” and lamenting the “slow moral collapse” of a whole generation. The press seem to revel in any incident which enables them to leer over so-called feral youths, gangs of teenage thugs, and how they represent broken Britain, while films like (the excellent and terrifying) Eden Lake depict unspeakable horrors inflicted by children on ‘innocent’ adults.

Feral Youths in the movie Eden Lake

Make no mistake, these kids are evil, but ONLY IN THE FILM...

I recently heard an excellent short lecture by Ed Howker in which he argues that young people in the UK do not deserve such a reputation. Indeed he argues that they deserve David Cameron’s help much more than his condemnation. Ed Howker looks like quite an angry young man in his profile pictures, and indeed he is, but he’s got a point.

Research studies from both the UK and from UNICEF, that date from before 2010’s student marches and more recent outbreaks of street violence and rioting, seem to indicate that the UK population are far more likely to regard their young people with fear, disdain and contempt than other EU countries. Apparently UK children feel unhappier than their counterparts in Spain or Sweden, as their parents seem to substitute giving them quality stuff for spending quality time as a family. In fact, these studies from The Department of The Bleeding Obvious suggest that children are actually quite simple types, and are made happier more by time to play outside with their friends or family, than by hibernating in their rooms with games consoles, laptops, phones and televisions.

Tessa Livingstone wrote in last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph on the same issue. She has been recording the progress of children born at the start of this Millenium for the epic TV series ‘Child of Our Time’, and has noted significant shifts in the aspirations and attitudes of her subjects’ parents.

The children I have been monitoring were born at the beginning of the new millennium, a time of great optimism. At that time, I asked all our parents what they wanted for their children. All of them told me that happiness was the greatest gift they could have. Over the past 10 years, I have seen our parents subtly changing the target. Our children and their parents may wish for happiness but they aim now for success, with material goods and money as their goal.

Our society has progressed (sic) so far that we now give children access to everything that adults have – instant information about everything and anything online, mobile phones, music downloads etc, but none of the responsibility. Worse, we don’t teach them responsibility, or (more pointedly) how rubbish it is to  be a grown-up. My daughter seems to crave an iPad: apparently some of her friends at school have one. She expects she / we could get one, because her friends do, or because it’s advertised, but she hasn’t yet quite mastered the concept of budgets and costs. I’m not judging her for that, she’s only 9.

But the wider point is that awareness and access to so many things are now virtually universal and (almost) free. Back in my day (only one generation ago!) there were no mobile phones: I got my first only in my mid-20s. There were practically no computers in our whole university, there were only 4 tv channels, CDs cost more than they do today, and downloading was barely even a concept. Children grow up expecting they can have all these things, but reality is very different.

I agree with Ed Howker when he argues that society has given up equipping the next generation for the future and the challenges they will face. We have almost systematically ruined their prospects at the same time as removing their ability to do anything about it. Politicians treat the elderly with a reverence and deference that is no doubt deserved for their historic service to their country in terms of paying taxes. It’s politically unthinkable to cut (say) the Winter Fuel Allowance or free TV licences or bus passes for OAPs. On the other hand, the EMA, student grants, free Higher Education, housing benefits – all things that were considered ‘normal’  20 years ago – are now apparently unaffordable. The young represent the future of this country, in terms of future parents, future skills, future taxpayers, but we now insist they take full responsibility for paying their way through every aspect of that after they turn 16.

And it’s becoming clear that they can’t afford it. Job prospects are terrible, with more than 20% of under 25s out of work. Graduates complete their studies with massive debts and little chance of earning enough to pay them back. Research by Grant Thornton presents three chilling examples that should be required reading in every household. In each of these, students who graduate in 2015 pay £9,000 tuition fees per year and receive a maintenance loan, so that when they graduate, aged 21, they have a debt of around £40,000.

  • Tom becomes a Civil Servant, does well and earns £70,000 by the time he’s 34. But he doesn’t fully repay his student debts until he’s 50, and repays more than double the original debt due to interest payments – £98,000 in total.
  • Janet (God Help Her) becomes a journalist – but you could substitute ‘teacher’ here as well. She earns £28,000 from the age of 22. She never repays her debt, because of her ‘relatively low’ income and the substantial interest payments. After 30 years it would be written off by the Government. She pays off a total of £42,000.
  • Leo (bless) becomes a corporate lawyer, whose employers put him through law school. By the time he qualifies in his late 20s he earns £61,500. Even Leo takes until his late 30s to pay off the debt, and repays a total of £68,000.

These scenarios starkly  suggest that only (already) very well-off students who can call on the resources of their parents, or most highly paid graduates will pay off these debts before they reach middle age, and many will never pay them off at all.

Others aren’t ‘lucky enough’ to go to university. Grade inflation means less able children are even worse off, as so many CVs now quote multiple A* grades. But the apprenticeships of old seem to have vanished. The new vogue for professional ‘internships’ are increasingly unpaid, meaning they’re practically unaffordable for people who aren’t either rich or able to live at home with Mummy & Daddy. Again, this puts all the risk and burden on the young and inexperienced to make their way. Unpaid internships effectively narrow the gene pool of people and reinforces the mental gap between the political class and the people they claim to represent. And we wonder why the kids in Tottenham and Croydon and Ealing feel disenfranchised, isolated, cut off…

We throw a celebrity / success culture at the young in countless ‘reality’ shows and magazines, then ridicule them when they try to take part. From the X-Factor to The Apprentice, we laugh at and mock young people without the real skills or experience to succeed, but who believe they can because they’ve been told they should.

I’m 42. I’m beginning to worry about my health (cholesterol, creaking hips and back) and about my pension – which despite reasonable contributions, keeps being downgraded with every annual statement. I’m lucky that my parents and in-laws are all still alive, but evidently they’re not as well as they once were, but at least they have decent pensions, and they did well in the property markets of the last 40 years.

How are my children supposed to start their own independent lives, if they dare to be ambitious enough to attend university? They’ll have massive debts that they may never pay off, they’ll struggle to save enough for a house deposit, as the average house price in the UK is now over 8 times the average income, and bank lending remains very tight. Medical science might well keep me alive a lot longer than previous generations, but my pension doesn’t look anything like as healthy as my Dad’s. Heaven help them even thinking of their own pension reserves.

If the sums remain as they are, the New Labour vision of opening up access to Higher Education looks like an insane pipe-dream. The Governing Class of 2025 will fondly recall their university education at the turn of the Millenium, but it seems that the rest will have had to knuckle down and work for a living and for skills right from the outset. There’s nothing wrong at all with that. But we should stop pretending that the model isn’t changing, and start equipping our society, employers and (most importantly) the next generations to live in that future.

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In our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up or else all go down as one people…

Posted in Society, The Constant Unfolding of Events, tagged , , , , , , on August 11, 2011| 3 Comments »

Like James Naughtie broadcasting on Radio 5Live on a Sunday morning when Princess Diana died, it takes something apparently monumental to shake the routines of the British Establishment. Today Parliament was recalled from its 6-week summer recess to debate the recent rioting that started in London but was soon repeated in other English cities. Given the initial reactions to the riots, I wasn’t feeling very hopeful this morning, so I penned a short note which I posted on my Facebook profile. It was largely unedited, stream-of-consciousness stuff, but it summed up how I felt this morning.

An open letter to our elected representatives

Dear MPs,

You’ve cut short your precious holidays that many of us can’t afford. At least have the courtesy to have a grown-up debate, considering broader social and economic issues rather than just ‘restoring order’ and ‘rooting out criminality’. It appears that the police and the courts are making pretty good progress on much of that already.

Thinking beyond next week… the Police can’t keep working 16 hour shifts. Charities & Community Groups can’t support your Big Society with no funding.

Pause for a moment to reflect on how banking bonuses & corporate tax avoidance, MPs’ expenses fraud and Media amorality might have affected those people who struggle to feed their families. How might they feel about what you have to say if all you do is condemn and talk tough, or merely score party-political points? Will that make things better?

Take a moment to review the reaction to the riots: most of the outrage has come from people who don’t live anywhere near those communities. Please note the dignity and bravery of the people affected cleaning up their own streets, the calm vigil for the murdered men in Birmingham.

We condemn Syria, Egypt, Libya and Bahrain for using force on their own people. So please make today’s discussions go beyond the use of water cannons and rubber bullets.

Certainly punish the convicted criminals, but try to reconnect them with their communities by making them contribute. Use them to rebuild, not simply punish, isolate and alienate further.

The events of the last week have demonstrated something much more important than a small number of people willing to wager their future (or perceived lack of) against the chance for a free TV. The relationships between state and some parts of our country have broken; perhaps not irreparably, but definitely seriously. This needs serious, considered leadership. The citizens of this country deserve your serious, considered leadership.

Honestly, I wasn’t very hopeful. Literally minutes after posting that note, I read a tirade from Melanie Phillips in The Daily Mail. I know I shouldn’t read that stuff, but it was so poisonous, so utterly insane today that I couldn’t keep away. Over several long paragraphs she rails at what she regards as 3 decades of failed liberal intelligentsia policies that have wrecked the moral backbone of this country. She seems to blame everything about this week’s disturbances (and a whole lot more besides) on Tony Blair and New Labour, despite the fact that the Tory Party under Margaret Thatcher and John Major were in power for 17 of the past 30 years. And even when Blair came to power, he hardly swept away the Thatcherite legacy… The very excellent liberal thicko (his words not mine) Robert Llewellyn wrote an entertaining and absolutely right-on-the-money piece about Ms Phillips this afternoon.

Now that I’ve watched some highlights (sic) and read about the parliamentary debate, it seems I was right to be concerned. Rather than serious leadership that acknowledges the short-term but also looks further ahead, and deeper into the problems, we got a lot of soundbites about the riots themselves – “sheer criminality …the only cause of  crime is a criminal”, and ‘bold’ statements about the use of water cannons, enabling police to remove hoods, about blocking social media if it’s being used to coordinate criminal activity.

Where was the recognition or even a tentative acknowledgement that there might be something deeper beyond this than just a ‘feral underclass’? David Cameron referred to pockets of society that are “not just broken but sick”, but it seemed his only diagnosis was to hunt them down and amputate them. Not so much a doctor looking to heal a wound as putting the patient out of their misery.

The rioters have rightly been condemned as criminals, who should be identified, charged and punished. In the scenes of recent days I’ve watched people whose only allegiance is to themselves and others like them, who were out for whatever they could get for themselves, who lacked any kind of empathy or understanding of the consequences of their actions on other people, and who often seemed oblivious to the shock, outrage or distress felt by the rest of us in what we might describe as ‘normal society’.

Well, if they are the feral underclass, we have a feral elite: Corporate bankers who continue to award themselves massive bonuses even after they’ve wrecked the real economy, politicians whose only remorse after being caught using our money to pay for their televisions seemed to be that they got caught, and media moguls who illegally tapped phones of innocent victims in order to sell more newspapers. These groups who rule over us have been just as oblivious to ‘normal’ codes of conduct, just as amorally self-centred and opportunistic. Peter Oborne has written similarly in his blog for The Daily Telegraph.

Franklin Roosevelt was the speaker of this post’s title. He managed to draw his divided nation together, inspire them to a better future. Today our leaders had a chance to make even a small step towards that, by rising to the occasion and taking a chance that they could actually inspire us. I reckon they failed us, because they failed to see this nation as one people, but a country still divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’. They talked almost entirely about protecting and insulating ‘us’ from ‘them’. By focusing on punishment, they will continue to alienate ‘them’ from ‘us’. If they don’t get their act together and start behaving like leaders, we will all go down as one people.

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A week is a long time in politics…

Posted in Society, The Constant Unfolding of Events, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 13, 2010| 7 Comments »

…and in the UK at the moment, 3 weeks is practically a lifetime. 3 weeks ago I had a bit of a rant at the Labour and Tory parties, but concluded with what I hoped wasn’t naive optimism.

I hope there is a genuine three-way split on May 6th. (Naively?) I hope this forces the main parties into constructive debate and discussion to represent more of the views and desires of the British population. I hope it breaks the complacency and arrogance of the Conservative and Labour Parties to create a more inclusive, less adversarial politics. I hope…

In fact, if you haven’t read that post, it may well be worth going there first, just to see how far things have moved on.

The last month in British politics has engaged me more than the past 5-10 years. Colleagues and friends have been openly and spontaneously, positively chatting about important issues and sharing personal opinions like never before. The TV debates were the catalyst for this, but then so was the chance of real change.

One of the first lectures of my degree (over 20 years ago, sigh) was about trying to define politics. Derived from the Greek polis, meaning a (city) state or body of citizens, a common definition of politics is…

…a process by which groups of people make collective decisions (so says Wikipedia)

To my mind this suggests that decisions are made through discussion and debate, through collaboration and potentially through compromise, so that the will of the entire polis is reflected or at the very least acknowledged.

For my whole lifetime this has not been true of UK politics. Our adversarial, first-past-the-post system does not promote debates where views or policies are modified, but instead a series of monologues where opposing parties simply yell at each other, declaring their own ‘rightness’ and decrying the others’ foolishness. It’s like children playing football, bickering over who gets to be captain. Except it’s bickering over how to run the country. But the party leader with the most friends (MPs) always wins. So when the others (after 5 years or so) finally get a chance, they unsurprisingly overturn half of what has been done before.

While I was studying for my degree, The Mary Whitehouse Experience was a comedy show. One of the most famous of their recurring sketches was History Today, in which two stuffy professors start to discuss weighty matters, before descending into playground banter and name-calling.

And this is what politics has been like, for as long as I can remember. If my children behaved like our politicians, they would sit on the naughty step. If it happened in a classroom, the culprits would be sent out; it’s unacceptable. My marketing clients expect their agencies (who all have their own agendas) to work together to a common goal, sometimes setting aside their own concerns. From an early age we (rightly, IMHO) teach children the benefits of collaboration and cooperation, the qualities of listening and empathy. Yet none of these seem to have been valued in British politics…

…until this week. The right-wing Conservative party won the most votes and seats at the election, but not enough to command a majority. They might not be able to be captain all of the time. So they have formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, in my mind the most progressive and left-leaning of the main UK parties. Right now, barely a couple of days in, they seem extremely serious about this. Never mind that many of their respective party supporters are poles apart on issues like climate change or taxation, the leaders have grabbed the chance to make a difference.

In fact, their early speeches and press conferences feel like they have their long-term Legacy in mind. If they can make this work, they will truly be remembered in UK political history, far more than Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. Necessity may well be the mother of invention here, but it feels to me like they are going for it.

Don’t get me wrong, every time I see Michael Gove or George Osborne, my skin crawls a little bit and I shudder.

Gove makes Peter Mandelson look like a kitten. I can only hope he fails his CRB check as Schools Minister on the grounds that he would scare the children. Osborne looks and behaves like a vampire, like he truly despises mortals. He was barely present during the entire election campaign, I can only assume because he doesn’t look good in daylight.

On the other hand, the agreement between the coalition parties is an impressive piece of work, truly a mature and grown-up piece of thinking. I truly hope they can make it work. There have been countless old-guard politicos and journalists all over the media in the last 48 hours behaving as though this is a terrible thing, as though it’s such a leap of faith that mere voters will explode before they can wrap their simple heads around it.

But in fact, it’s a truly simple concept. In order to make things work, to make things better, sometimes it’s best to work together. That might mean you can’t always do everything you want. I get it. My daughters get it. My friends and colleagues get it. But it still appears that many of the dinosaurs in British politics don’t.

I hope it works. I hope Cameron and Clegg lay down the law to their ministers, officials and parties to make it work. It needs to work, to deliver the British economy out of  recession without Thatcherite levels of social division. If it does work, it will transform British politics, in a very good way, to be more inclusive, more mature, more collaborative.

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I don’t want to sail with this ship of fools…

Posted in Society, The Constant Unfolding of Events, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 21, 2010| 2 Comments »

A couple of quick apologies…
It’s been a long time since my last post, and I’m sorry about that. Busy busy busy and then some, and then a week’s holiday without web access. I did make some time for writing while I was away, so hopefully you’ll see some more regular Reckons in the coming weeks.
Secondly, this post is unashamedly about the upcoming UK General Election. I know I have some American readers, and our election probably barely mentions a whisper in the US media (like the closure of all European air space for several days), but this is important to me.

In recent days I’ve got more interested and excited by UK politics than I have been for years, in fact since I was a Politics student 20 years ago. For the last couple of years, not just the right-leaning media in the UK have seemed to assume that the longest-serving Labour Government has been staggering to an ignominious end, and will be replaced by the Bright Young Thing that is David Cameron.

David Cameron is the leader of the Conservative (Tory) Party, whose election call to arms in 2010 is Vote for Change. I’ll pause for a moment to let that settle. Conservatives .. vote for change …?!

Anyway, Cameron rose to lead his Party in 2005, when after 8 years in opposition, losing 3 elections (2 by landslides) and 4 leaders in the previous 10 years, the Tories were at their wits’ end. He’s younger, prettier, and as his speech to their conference in 2005 showed, he can walk and talk at the same time without notes, and seem to know why he’s actually come into the room in the first place…

In short, he was the perfect vehicle to get them back into power. Just like Tony Blair had been for the Labour Party. However, Tony Blair’s ‘New’ Labour actually shared many core beliefs of the traditional UK Labour movement, and his (main) problem was that he was a bit posh for the core Party faithful. Cameron is at least as posh as his party (Eton-educated, a direct descendant of King William IV), but he’s more progressive, more liberal and tolerant, keener to be inclusive. He’s cut from the same cloth, but he thinks differently. He’s (a bit) less conservative.

Last week the UK had its first live TV political debate, featuring the three ‘main’ party leaders. Cameron was expected to easily out-perform the older, less eloquent Gordon Brown and the other one…

However, that other one (Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats) proved himself an impressive speaker and his previous anonymity worked massively in his favour to millions of voters who had barely heard of him. Now there seems to be a genuine three-way fight for votes. The Tories and Labour parties have been shaken from their complacency.

Cameron might well be attractive, moderate & modern, but many in his Party and the media that support them are definitely not. Having ignored the Liberal Democrats as an irrelevance for years, they now face the uncomfortable scenario that Nick Clegg may be a large stick in the spokes of their plans for power. And this is bringing out their true colours…

The Daily Mail outdoes even its own shoddy standards with a trivial “exposé” of the lovely Mr Clegg. He might look nice and even sound nice, but (wait for it) he’s barely even British. Look! His wife is Spanish. His Press spokesperson is German! And while he might represent a Northern City, he’s quite well-off, from a family of bankers (just like that nice Mr Cameron, oops).

Christina Odone (usually very considered) wrote a lazy, spiteful rant against Dr Evan Harris, the very excellent Lib Dem spokesman on science. Just read the comments, especially a rebuttal from Dr Harris himself.

Both main parties have shown their arrogance in assuming the traditional two-way party split. Lord Bell, a former adviser to Baroness Thatcher, said the Conservatives were “stupid” to have agreed to a debate format that gave the Liberal Democrat leader the same status as Mr Cameron and Mr Brown.

with thanks (and respect!) to "mongo" on Flickr for this great piece of work...

BBC Radio5 reported today that a sizeable part of the Labour Party view the Liberal Democrats as ‘useful fools‘. While senior Labour figures are undergoing Damascene conversions and professing a desire for electoral reform and talking about ‘a progressive alliance’, they actually look down their noses at the 3rd Party (a misguided, naive, irritating inconvenience)…

This is my 6th General Election. For 5 of these I have had to vote in constituencies where my preferred candidate / party stands absolutely NO chance of winning. As the UK Executive is effectively appointed by the Legislative Party, there is no other chance for me to get representation of my views into the national parliament. I want electoral reform.

I quite like David Cameron – he is definitely a human face in the Tory Party. But I simply can’t vote for his party which contains far more extreme views than I can tolerate. I’m naturally left-leaning. I like the idea of a progressive tax regime, and that it can help fund our National Health and other public services to protect the vulnerable, poor and weak in our society. But the Labour Party have stumbled so far up their own orifices, that I can’t support them any longer. The monolithic party mechanisms are working to their own ends, not ours.

with thanks to mydavidcameron.com

I hope there is a genuine three-way split on May 6th. (Naively?) I hope this forces the main parties into constructive debate and discussion to represent more of the views and desires of the British population. I hope it breaks the complacency and arrogance of the Conservative and Labour Parties to create a more inclusive, less adversarial politics. I hope…

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