From Bremner, Bird and Fortune. Election slogans I liked:
Vote Blair, Get Bush
Vote Conservative. It couldn’t be any worse.
And in the news…. “A ‘huge drive’ to ensure that no pupil is able to leave school without basic skills in English and maths is to be unveiled by the Labour Party. Education Secretary Ruth Kelly says “It will represent a dramatic change from where we are now.”
I am puzzled about how these school lock-ins are going to work. And are they not going to be sending them all to university now?
We also have an invisible MP. Our sitting MP, Harry Barnes, is retiring (good bloke, kept voting against the Government) and the new Labour candidate, Natascha Engel is, well a New Labour candidate. Female, off an all female short list (please explain to me why that is not sexist?), track record of think tank type jobs in London, you know the sort of thing. I scoured the web and could only find a reference to her on So Now Who Do We Vote For – which was a discussion along the lines “who the **** is she,then”, “**** knows”.
In the end I tracked down her cv from the candidate selection on the local party site. They use a daft Java menu, so none of the pages get picked up by Google. Natascha Engel’s CV. Think I will give her a ring on her mobile and ask her how things are going.
North East Derbyshire constituency sits between two Lib Dem seats, Harry Barnes was a personally popular MP, so maybe Natascha Engel is smart in being the only one of the big three candidates we haven’t heard from.
bloody short cv. mine is 18 pages! And whats more it is repeated garbage type stuff. i can’t beleive that is all you need to be an MP for a cv just not good enough!
yeah voting is going to be tough – was wondering whether we would be disenfranchised by the move, but as chris pointed out, we have postal votes, so poss not.
Although I had an intemperate moment and did a rantlet on gills blog – sorry gill, i actually agree with a lot she says. voting seems to me to be rubber stamping the validity of this form of government, rather than being an agent of change or participant.
I wonder whether government woulld run better/be more innovative if elements of it were more like jury service – have trained people – ie civil servants, economists etc with the eye on the future and effects as employed by the country for job of running, and then co-opt on a random basis members to serve. though unlike jury service, would receice their normal pay plus something for inconvenience, childcare etc and travel paid on top. [would still be cheaper than MP’s] You may just then get innovative ideas looked at and costed, even if not carried out due to breaking power of civil servants/economists etc.
save all that money on political rhetoric as well.
I don’t know about co-opting people.
I think the sensible think would be to select MPs via a permanent TV series called Poll Idol.
And we should have an annual lottery for King/Queen. We could make a fortune in foreign currency, the Americans would love it. We could even keep close to the current system and bar English people from buying tickets.
ROFL Tim!
I think I may have been marginally serious, but give in to your idea, as then governed by idiots would at least be overt
Um, I hate to say this, but they did a pop idol for politics…
Aagh noooooooooooooooooooo
Roughly what I said when she told me.
Vote LibDem – we haven’t screwed up yet
In a way I’m glad that I won’t have to work hard to ignore the UK election. Being around for the Aussie election was bad enough. I love politics but elections are just marketing campaigns with about as much honesty as the “health facts” on a pack of breakfast cereal.
Choose carefully, folks. Sometimes the best choice is none at all! 🙂
and this is who won!!! aarrrgggggggggghhhhhhh some more
http://www.voterodders.org/
Aargh and double aargh! I don’t think I could vote for anyone called Rodney, whatever their party. It is like Colin, how can anyone called Colin be sexy? Rodneys laugh like horses, Colins live with their mothers and wear hand knitted sleeveless cardies.