Pitchforks

Although Prime Minister Gordon Brown may have fled the capital to his home turf, the Labour government is still in place, in a manner of speaking Gordon Brown is still in Downing Street. Its a nice image, the thought of a mob, armed with pitchforks and burning torches, marching down Whitehall to Downing Street to oust the defeated leader.

So I almost attended a protest at the weekend, a hastily organised affair, that later I read about on Twitter. It was odd though, the mob with placards aloft didn't march on Labour, they marched on the Lib Dem HQ and then the Conservative HQ.

Sure, they were protesting for electoral reform, but it didn't quite make sense in my head. The people they were shouting at had only been elected the day before, yet already the mob were protesting. Had the mob somehow elected the wrong people? Already?

Back to Copenhagen, when tens of thousands of protestors descended on the environmental talks, tens of thousands of activists from all over the world. Did it make any difference to the handful of world leaders who were inside discussing what measures they were to take to tackle climate change? I doubt it.

If climate change is anthropogenic, then there's only a couple of countries responsible, the top five polluters responsible for 90% of emissions, all the other countries are essentially the same as the mob outside, posturing to no end.

Back to the protest mobs, I marched against the war in Iraq back in the day, but I can't march for electoral reform. Iraq was a binary issue, against the war or not. But electoral reform is a rich tapestry.

Personally, I think equalising constituency sizes is far more important than PR, STV, AV or FPTP. Others feel that PR is the issue worth breaking the stability of a nation for, STV has its merits.

But it's all burocracy, admin, red tape and paperwork. There are more important and urgent issues to address in the UK today. Electoral reform is merely a 'would be nice to have' issue. Jesus, how long did Labour spend trying to ban fox hunting?

Stuart Sharpe stuck a wee line at the end of his last blogpost which I feel is very profound:-

I would be fascinated to hear evidence that proportional voting systems directly contribute to improved social or economic outcomes in other countries.

The Tories have no mandate to rule Scotland

I've been invited to join a Facebook group entitled "Tories have no mandate to rule Scotland".

Does the government rule? Or does the government just govern and its either the people or the queen who rules.

Does the statement "Labour has no mandate to rule England" stand up as much as the former?

Supposing that ruling and governing amount to the same thing, and that somehow the Conservative party form a minority government, would cutting off Scotland's funding satisfy those who joined the Facebook group? It would sure help with reducing the deficit. But I doesn't see an independent Scotland getting a bailout from the EU, there's a long queue.

Anyhoo, the Westminster parliament is an English and Welsh affair, which has temporarily allowed the Scots and the northern Irish to join, to the mutual prosperity of all the UK nations. Its only fair that in this period of economic decline those who wish to be cast adrift are.

How about "The Tories have no mandate to rule Brent North"? Would that work?

So how did we do

A number of friendly bloggers and twitterers were standing in the election, lets have a quick look at what political upsets they caused.

Old Holborn (Ind)
Cambridge - 7th - 145 votes (0.3%)
Mark Wadsworth (UKIP)
Uxbridge & Ruislip - 5th - 1,234 (2.7%)
Martin Cullip (Libertarian)
Sutton and Cheam - 9th - 41 votes (0.1%)
Nic Coome (Libertarian)
Devizes - 7th - 141 votes (0.3%)
Anna Arrowsmith (LibDem)
Gravesham - 3rd - 6,293 votes (13.3%)

Fair dos to Mark Wadsworth and Anna Arrowsmith, for getting four digits, but they did have their parties' brands to draw people to the cause, so its kind of like cheating.

Gotta say, its all a bit pathetic for the Libertarians. I can just imagine Devil's Kitchen doing his own Downfall rant, for fucks sake 41 votes and 141 votes, I got more than that when I stood for president at Strathclyde University, twice, naked, with adverts that read "Don't just vote for him, Worship him".

But Old Holborn's 145 votes, that's complete pish too, he's an internet celebrity and maverick of the political blogging scene and he's barely rounded up the guys from the pub.

Its just a bit disappointing. Like there are some who'll say well done for taking party, for trying to make a difference, but that's far too generous considering the result.

Back to Strathclyde University 2000 and 2001, when I stood in the student union elections, the first time round I campaigned hard for weeks and secured 172 votes, the winner got around 8,000, the next years I stood in the elections again, but this time didn't bother to campaign, I just stayed in bed, and got 255 votes. Doing nothing was more successful than doing something, but that's nothing to be proud of.

Cashing in while they still can

God knows where I read it, but there was a thing about whats going down in Greece where civil servants get paid a huge lump sum when they retire, and they can retire from the age of 45, its all unsustainable and as a result of the government trying to do something about it, the country is on fire and dragging the European Union into the flames.

Anyhoo, elsewhere in the European Union, on the sunny shores of Camden, Jim Wintour, the Housing Director chap, has resigned from his £158,000 a year job. Tracy suggests three reasons:-

Much speculation as to why he quit:

A. He finally met and experienced first hand the gaggle of truly awful graspy, lying, devious so-called 'leading' tenant reps we have lurking about in Camden and thought 'what the fook get me out of here'.

B. He has taken the fall for a workforce that is a law unto itself.

C. He made the mistake of giving interviews to a local newspaper and admitted that the council was at fault over a matter to do with the housing of a local disabled woman who died in her council flat. This type of behaviour (displaying a degree of integrity) is wholly unacceptable when working for the 'firm' and will be punished accordingly.

I've heard differently, that he actually emailed out his reasons for leaving to all the council employees, that like in Greece, Jim Wintour heard that the powers that be were going to be tinkering with retirement packages, so he's jumped to maximise his pension.

However much is in his pension pot must dwarf the £158,000 he's currently on.

New blog design ahoy

Got bored of the old one, then I was listening to a thing on Radio4 about The FACE magazine, and thought I'd strip my blog design down to black and white, to give it a more stark look.

Hopefully I'll include more photies in the future, and make them all black and white halftone images, and it'll all look cool.

Videos of Indietracks bands 2010 - part 1

There's only a few days left to buy earlybird tickets of Indietracks, earlybird tickets being slightly cheaper then regular tickets, and Indietracks being an indie music festival at a railway museum near Derby on the 23rd to 25th of July.

As with last year, I haven't seen or heard many of the bands playing at this year's Indietracks music festival. So, to help me, and you to chose which bands to check out, I'm putting together a list of all the bands and their videos from YouTube, trying to find three videos for each band.

Its going to take me ages, but, well, this is what I do.

Bands with videos on YouTube

'Allo, Darlin'




Ballboy




Betty and the Werewolves




The Just Joans




Mexican Kids at Home




MJ Hibbett and The Validators




Veronica Falls




Bands I haven't yet found videos for

Be Like Pablo
The Blanche Hudson Weekend
Boy Genius
Burning Hearts
The Callas
The Cannanes
Cineplexx
David Tattersall
The Felt Tips
Foxes!
The Give It Ups
The Hillfields
Jam on Bread
Internet Forever
La La Love You
Lime Chalks
Linda Guilala
Love is All
The Loves
The Middle Ones
The Millipedes
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Paisley and Charlie
The Pooh Sticks
The Primitives
Printed Circuit
Onward Chariots
Pale Sunday
Sarandon
Secret Shine
Shrag
The Smittens
The Specific Heats
Springfactory
Standard Fare
Stars of Aviation
Stars in Coma
The Sunny Street
This Many Boyfriends
Urbantramper
White Town
Winston Echo
Yokoko

Any better offers of videos cheerfully accepted, its going to take me ages to get all the bands.

NHS cuts

I know its controversial, but I don't see anything wrong with cutting NHS budgets. Its not going to affect front line staff much, most people will barely notice.

I don't mean uniform cuts across the board, 10% off every department budget, just a couple of well placed drastic cuts. Here, look at this graph.

Can you envisage cutting GPs pay by 50%, so it has parity with MP's pay again? Same comparitive remuneration as they had before 2002?

There's about 36,000 GPs in the UK, so currently they get paid a total of about £4,500,000,000. The total NHS budget is around £102,000,000,000. So aye, cutting GP's pay by 50% would cut the NHS total budget by about 2%.

Maybe, this is a little heartless and before 2002 GPs were woefully underpaid, and its only now that they're paid as much as they're due.

Up until very recently I was working in a sandwich factory making sandwiches for minimum wage, I feel I was woefully underpaid for the job I was doing. Without sandwich makers such as myself thousands of office workers would starve, should I have been paid more?