Little bit of politics!

Yes, that's right, I still have this blog and I've decided to resurrect as a place to dump my opinions on random stuff. Today: politics!

There are some European elections approaching in the UK, where we get to elect who will represent us in the European parliament.

Much has been made in the last day or two about Labour's somewhat worrying slip in the polls. I say worrying because, even though I'm not actually a Labour supporter per se, if it's bad for Labour that generally means it's good for the Tories and that's just a horror beyond imagining. 

I can only speak to my own personal views on such things, so here they are...

I know that I for one, as a regular left-leaning schmuck with a generally low opinion of politicians, will be voting for the Green party in the approaching Euro elections.

Yes, I know, the Greens have the image of being a bit happy-clappy and hippyish but at least their message is actually progressive and positive, and at least they seem to genuinely, passionately believe in what they're saying. I look at the Labour front bench, at the likes of Balls, Byrne and Hunt, and all I see are the Coalition in different coloured ties. 

The only Labour front bencher who I can currently recall actually fighting back against coalition policies and speaking with passion and belief is Andy Burnham.

For what it's worth, I actually quite like Miliband. He might not be the last word in charismatic leaders but he seems intelligent and decent enough and I agree, for the most part, with his politics. It's just hard to look past the shower of drones he's surrounded himself with and their piss-poor attempts to offer an alternative message to the one the coalition is spouting.

I just had a look at the leaflets I've had through the door (including one from the BNP - bless their racist little hearts, they never give up do they?). Everything in the Labour one is "David Cameron is doing this bad thing, we won't do such a bad thing!". The Tory one is essentially the mirror image of that.

The Green party leaflet, on the other hand, doesn't mention the other parties, just lays out what they believe in a simple, positive way. Maybe I'm being naive but I find that appealing.

Come the General Election next year I'll probably still vote Labour, however. It's certainly not out of any great faith in them - I have none - and not because I really want to, it's just out of fear that a split vote would give power back to the Tories and that's not something I even want to think about.

Oh, and just for the record, if you vote for UKIP then you're an idiot.

Thatcher

Not my usual content for this blog (not that there's been much content at all lately - sorry!), but I wanted to express my feelings and thoughts on the death of Margaret Thatcher.
I should say at the outset that my personal politics are moderately left-leaning - I'm certainly a lot closer to socialism than I am to free market capitalism.

You would be hard-pressed to find a more divisive figure in Britain than Thatcher - there are some who worship the ground she walked on, and there are those who will be dancing in the street at the news that she's died.  My own opinion is mixed.  On the one hand, I despise many of the things she did to this country - I'm from the north east, an area that was traditionally very industrial and that was comprehensively gutted by Thatcher's policies.  On the other hand, her presence was such a constant thing during my childhood that to have her now be gone is very strange.  At the time, when she was dismantling the region where I lived, I was too young to understand it (I'm 37, by the way, born in 1976) and my family was never that politically engaged so a lot of it passed me by.
She was just this figure on the telly who made speeches and didn't like the miners and Arthur Scargill (I was only dimly aware of who Scargill was and even less idea what a trade union was), and she was the British PM who fought off the nasty Argentinians who wanted to come and take our Falkland Islands!  Again, I was 6 at the time, I had no knowledge of the history of the Falklands, why Argentina might want it or indeed where the Falklands or Argentina actually was.  All I had were the less-than-objective snatches I caught on the news when I was waiting for the cartoons to appear and a childlike view of the world being divided into "Us" and "Them" (where "Us" were the good guys, obviously).  I knew something bad was going on but Thatcher would appear on the news giving a speech and it was reassuring, and as much as I now know a lot more about the Falklands, the history of colonialism, and how hateful the idea of "Us" and "Them" is, I still feel echoes of that.

What she did may have devastated parts of this country, and I now despise the kind of right-wing politics she represented, I can't separate that with those childhood impressions.  And whatever you might think of her politics, it has to be admitted that she accomplished a huge amount.  For becoming the first female prime minister at a time when gender inequality was still very prevalent (not that it's entirely disappeared now) she deserves respect at the very least.


I don't celebrate anyone's death, whether it's Thatcher or anyone else, all I can feel is sympathy for the grief of those who cared for them.

I will say, however, that I'm not looking forward to what is sure to be the nauseatingly mawkish news coverage of the next few days.

Right, that's enough, I've had my two penn'orth, I'm going back to writing the sequel to Crystal Eyes

Anarchy in the UK?

Reposting this from my Google+ account:

This is a depressing notion:
Beware the Anarchists!
So now the Met, whose ethical and moral reputation is already doing really well after the News of the World scandal, are looking to clamp down on political ideologies they don't like.
For the record, I think anarchism is a moronic philosophy that would work about as well as communism (i.e. not at all), but to paint the idea and the people who subscribe to it as a threat? Well that's something else it now shares with communism - the McCarthy era communist witch hunts in America. That does feel like the road down which we're travelling with this new pronouncement and look how that turned out. It's not an example we should be keen to emulate.
A free, secular, multicultural society (which is what we want, surely) should not fear ideas and it should not have to fear its police.

The arrogance of politicians

Trying to keep track of what’s going on at the Copenhagen climate change talks is proving to be a very depressing experience.
To witness the self-serving, arrogant, obstructionist views of some politicians, particularly the ignorant morons in the American Republican party, is to witness some of the worst that humanity has to offer.
It’s hard to tell if it’s genuine ignorance or deliberate obfuscation but the lack of knowledge on display is staggering.
Observe the blatherings of Sarah Palin in the Washington Post, for example. A woman who seems to be so utterly divorced from reality it amazes me that she’s capable of dressing herself in the morning.

These “people” (and I use that term quite loosely) care nothing about the world, their only interests are appeasing the energy companies (amongst others) that fund their campaigns and avoiding doing anything that would upset their voters (who are frequently even more ignorant).
Heaven forbid that Mr. John Q. American should suffer at all (and thus vote for someone else) just because some poor bastard on a low lying island doesn’t want to watch his house disappear beneath the sea. Or because some parts of America get swamped by a constant barrage of hurricanes (but it’s okay, they’re poor areas so they don’t really count).
Their cowardice in attempting to shirk their responsibilities for helping to create this mess is appalling. Climate change is likely to hurt everyone. Suck it up. And rich countries like America and the UK can afford to pay what smaller, poorer countries cannot.
Where’s the downside to this? We help poorer countries be more efficient and develop faster, simultaneously reducing their CO2 emissions and increasing their prosperity. A country that is prosperous, with a strong infrastructure and a population that is not locked in poverty, is a country that is far less likely to breed the kind of dissatisfaction that allows extremist ideologies to flourish. Which is good for everyone, surely?
And then there’s investing in alternative energy solutions. Breaking our dependence on oil, increasing energy security, moving away from relying on what is unquestionably a limited resource, decreased pollution from power stations. These are all good things. People might lose their jobs, true, but new jobs will open up in new industries related to the use of renewable energy production.
There will be pain in the short term, there is no getting around that, but long term? It’s pure win, even if you’re a climate change denying moron like Palin.

Sadly, this notion that attempting to combat climate change is essentially a win-win scenario appears to escape the politicians, not just in America (though they are the most obvious example), but all around the world (Saudi Arabia, Russia and so on). They care only for themselves and their careers, and on the rare occasions when a politician looks beyond their own interests they rarely look beyond the narrow borders of the country they represent.
If their insular attitudes result in a failure to come up with a cohesive, global strategy to reduce the effects of climate change (and to mitigate the damage it will do to the poorer, more marginal countries of this world) then I don’t believe that future generations will forgive them or those of us who allowed them to get away with it, and nor should they.


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