shewhomust | Entries tagged with politics

The biggest news of the week is that the Council came on Monday and collected their plastic barriers. We were very glad to have these while there were no railings to stop people falling off the pavement onto our area, but now the repairs are completed - indeed, were completed more than a month ago - we are very glad to be rid of them.

I believe there were some by-elections, but any pleasure I might feel at the government losing two seats by a spectacular margin is eclipsed by the realisation that yes, they really are going to conclude that the Tories held Uxbridge because of the Low Emission Zone, so they'd better abandon that idea. Message to Sir Keir Starmer, if he happens to read this: if half the people who voted Green in Uxbridge had thought they could trust Labour to implement those green policies you have postponed - you'd have won the seat. Meanwhile the world goes up in flames.

Admittedly, the local expression of that 'going up in flames' is steady rain. J. came to lunch, and we ate salade niçoise and pretended it's summer. I have spent the afternoon sorting out photographs from last month in Fife, and I have reached the wettest day of that week, when we were in Crail. Have a water feature:

Courtesy of Crail Pottery, whose courtyard display space is at its best in the rain.

( More pictures under the cut. )

My radio tells me that if an MP absents himself (or, presumably herself, but the examples discussed were all men) for several weeks to pursue a legal career in the Caribbean, this will be frowned on, but is within the rules.

If, on the other hand, while at Westminster he takes time out to hold a business meeting in his office, this is an outrageous breech of the rules.

Because reasons.

Also, many MPs have paid work outside parliament: among other examples, there is apparently more than one GP. Given the demands of both jobs, I am less worried about my MP moonlighting as a GP than I am about my GP moonlighting as an MP, but perhaps that's just me.

Anyway, all this is a good thing, because it keeps MPs in touch with real life outside Westminster. I was waiting to hear the counter-example of Sir David Amess, who kept in touch with real life outside Westminster by taking up issues brought to him by constituents in distress, but his name was not mentioned. That was so last month.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/770422.html

... is a shiny new Azuma model. Which apparently means that it can accelerate away from the stations faster; also that the interesting tilt, which tries to slide me down my seat towards the window, is a design feature: for wwhatever reason, it is supposed to do that. But we are on the train, and the friendly staff have supplied us with food and drink (and wifi); and we are heading south to family and friends and carol singing and other pleaqsures. So that's all good.

But as that title line may reveal, I have earwormed myself with Worried Man Blues (one of that minority of the songs of my childhood which I associate with my father rather than my mother). Every prospect is that I'm worried now, and I will be even more worried before long. I sat up until 1.00 am, but I might as well have gone to bed after the exit poll. It was, in the end, not quite as bad for Labour as that forecast, but it was quite bad enough. The one consolation, I suppose, is that Durham City did pretty much as I expected: Labour held the seat with a reduced majority, the LibDems, despite what their election material claimed, came in some way behind the Tories, and the Green saved his deposit. Now to find out what our new MP is like...

We watched the reporting on BBC, which may have been a mistake. I still look to the BBC in times of crisis, but I begin to wonder. Too many opinions, too little information, even before you start to ask about the balance of those oinions. Too much carrying on talking when the results are beginning to flow in; too much evident enjoyment of Labour's losses. Talking head after talking head repeating that canvassers encountered criticism of Jeremy Corbyn on the doorstep, while no-one, apparently, had a bad word to say about Boris. Yes, that Boris, the Boris who's been kept away from members of the public over primary school age. Now that Boris has his majority, apparently, he will be free to reveal his true self as a one-nation Tory (yes, and that one nation is England)...

The consensus seems to be that the early result from Blyth Valley set the tone for the night. And yes, Blyth Valley voting Conservative is a shock and a reversal (and clearly threw a spanner in the works of the attempt to beat the record for the speed of the count) and a sign of worse to come. But the repeated assertion that Blyth Valley had been a Labour seat continuously since the 1950s overlooks the brief but notorious interruption caused by Eddie Milne. A pedant concedes that Milne stood as Independant Labour, but feels that he doesn't deserve to be forgotten. File this paragraph under I think you'll find it's more complicated than that.

Meanwhile, on the train, heading south, planning to have fun...

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/702784.html

The doorbell rang late this afternoon, as I was doing some frantic gift-wrapping - because tomorrow we catch the train to London for our anual seasonal visit. I was sufficiently in the mode to wonder whether it was carol singers, but no, it was a canvasser, our first of the entire campaign, very wet, wanting to know if we had voted yet. We had: after much hestiation we had filled in our postal votes and

durham_rambler had delivered them to the polling station, avoiding the hazards of the Christmas post (and those of County Hall, too).

In the end, I voted Green. The seat is not as safe Labour as it once was, and the news at the pub quiz last night was that Labour are now seriously worried: they have been putting their efforts into canvassing the surrounding villages, which were strongly for Leave. It's very hard to imagine them voting Tory, though. Nonetheless, I wavered. But, taking a parochial view, the Labour candidate shows no sign of interest in the local concerns of the City; and to take a digher viewpoint, I do think that Green issues are the most important thing at the moment.

So the die is cast, the polls are about to close, it's time to move the half-packed suitcase from the bed, round up some whisky and go and watch the news - or as much of it as I can bear...

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/702714.html

I dreamed last night that we were canvassed by the Labour party.

In waking life, this has not happened. Each day brings another missive from the LibDems, each carefully drafted, it seems, to stamp out any thought I might have of voting for them. Their latest argument is that in Durham only the LibDems can take the seat from Labour, so I should give them my vote rather than waste it on the Conservative candidate. There was never any risk of that.

I vote for the LibDems in local elections, because my local LibDem councillors support the City against the (Labour) County Council. I voted for Roberta, the retiring Labour MP, because (among other reasons) she does likewise. But Roberta is not standing for re-election, and her successor is an unknown quantity. I would guess that Roberta has a substantial personal vote, and that the LibDems are correct in claiming that they could win the seat: so why are Labour not making more effort to hold it?

The canvasser in my dream was unimpressive. He wasn't keen to stop and talk, but dropped a bunch of leaflets in at the open window (not this house, then, and not this season either). We raced to the front door, and engaged him in conversation: but the leaflets included praise for the benefits brought to the City by the new county headquarters under construction on the Sands... So my dreaming mind does not expect great things of the Labour party, locally, at least. My waking mind thinks I will probably have to hold my nose and vote for them regardless (but this could still change).

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/701375.html

Mostly I don't post about politics here; mostly I have nothing to say that you aren't hearing from everyone else, and mostly I get it out of my system by shouting at the radio. But these are exceptional times.

So, to begin at the beginning: in a parliamentary democracy, we elect representatives to study the evidence, debate the issues and make the decisions. They then work out, in detail, how those decisions are to be implemented. This is a full time job, and we pay them a respectable salary to do it. If they decide that a question is too hard for them, and hand it over to the public to give a simple yes / no answer - well, then they have already suspended parliamentary democracy. And I do wish someone would ask David Cameron how he feels it's going so far.

But we have a new Prime Minister, and I'm tired of hearing that this is undemocratic because we didn't elect him. At least, it may be undemocratic, but it's the system we use in this country: the leader of whichever party can cobble together a majority in parliament is chosen by the Queen to be her Prime Minister. She doesn't ask questions about how you got to be party leader, or achieved that majority. We don't have a directly elected President. Once upon a time, an MP who became a minister had to stand for re-election by his constituency, but we don't do that any more. What seems to be provoking these accusations of being undemocratic is that the Conservative Party has decided - err - to elect its leader in a democratic manner, by allowing its members to vote.

Plus the whole parliamentary and political timetable which has allowed Boris Johnson to take office largely in the absence of Parliament. I think the opposition (in the broadest sense, the soft Brexiters as well as the Remainers) have allowed themselves to be outmanouevred: Boris has had the long summer recess to trot about Europe trying to look as if he wants a deal, and to swan around London making pre-election promises, with no-one to ask difficult questions. He likes that: he doesn't need to do press interviews, so he doesn't submit to them, just as he didn't have to participate in the leadership debates. It's possible that proroguing parliament is a way to block legislation, but it could just be a way to prolong the period without scrutiny. The length of the recess makes the parliamentary time lost look less on comparison: I wish someone had had the nous to say, at the beginning of the summer, "You know, these are interesting times, perhaps we should cut our holidays short this year." Similarly, is it too late to say "Perhaps we should defer Conference until November"?

We shall see.