How We Voted

When the time came to send off our postal votes; we did not take up the kind offer from that very nice man dressed in combat gear, big boots, a badly washed T shirt saying “Gordon The Great” and carrying a baseball bat; it was difficult to decide.

Normally, we would go down the list of candidates and simply roll the dice. It has worked very well in the past, up to a point. The year I voted for the Monster Raving Loony Party candidate got me a tapped phone and regular visits from the Special Branch man anxious to check my gas boiler. I had some fun with that.

But alas we could not find the dice. So we had to resort to a random sample approach, if you can call it that. We allocated a particular event to each candidate and then sat down by the window to see which happened first. In the old days this might have been done by watching out for a postman or a parcels delivery or a policeman on the beat or a doctor or a nurse or other things very likely to appear. This no longer works.

So our list included an urban fox, a rat, a environmental inspector doing a sneak check on recycling bins, a junkie burglar, a serial arsonist, an unlicensed driver with a foreign number plate trying to do the ton in a hundred yards and an elderly man using our hedge because the council have closed all the local W.C.’s.

Use your skill and judgement to work out which event was allocated to which party candidate and which one turned up first.

Choice Or No Choice?

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the National Health Service is the Chinese Army/Praetorian Guard/Janissaries of the General Election campaign, take your pick. Important as health matters are to all of us and admitting the large number of people it employs directly and indirectly it remains that the health provision we get is only that which we can afford.

My local constituency seems to have five candidates. Generally regarded as a “safe” Conservative seat this has coloured the stance of all of them. My previous home was in an ultra safe Labour seat, once held by a local man who had done real work who was replaced by a media shoe in from London to suit Big Tony.

Our present MP is to retire to concentrate on, errr, media work. Quite how much of the past vote was “personal” or not is an interesting question but not one that should have much effect. The person was as good at giving offence to particular interests as garnering votes by effort and publicity.

What have I got? There is a UKIP candidate, a local who does not look tidy in a suit. There is no leaflet yet, but the UKIP web site tells me that the views are “right on” with the things that UKIP is most determined about. The level of interest locally suggests that this candidate will be lucky to save the deposit. This person is the only one who apparently does not list the NHS high on the priority rating being concerned more with economics and self government for the UK.

The Labour candidate is the most remarkable. An NHS doctor, so very much of the client state, apparently in October 2008 was in Florida securing the election of Barack Obama to the American Presidency (was this paid secondment?). This was achieved by reading out at major rallies the text on the back of the Labour Party Membership Card which includes “for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many and not the few.” In your dreams, matey, in your dreams, if you do get elected, Mandy will want a quiet word.

I do not think the chances are great if only because amongst the many pretty pictures is one that really will frighten the locals. It is one alongside a man with staring eyes who carries a big banana, indeed Miliband The Merciless. Fear gripped my vital statistics. Oddly it was this bit of the leaflet that refers to the candidate’s medical career. So vote for me or else.

We do have a Green Party candidate. For disgruntled types like us this might seem to be the best option, however Green it might be but it is not without problems. The NHS features at number three behind living wages and a million new jobs with bashing the bankers to follow. It is possible to discern the Militants of the 1970’s and 1980’s behind the fog of promises. This party means state controls and spending on a much greater scale and to allegedly “community” purposes whatever that means.

For the Lib Dem’s we had the ultimate accolade, a personal appeal from St. Joanna Lumley of Sagarmatha. Her commendation of our local candidate reads like a cross between a Nobel Prize eulogy and the compulsory compliments paid by visitors to the Emperor of China. Nobody, nobody can be that perfect. A local worthy with a clean record maybe and one who knows how to present the party line.

But my dear, the policies as well as the people. Never mind the lack of realism. For the UK to be bundled into Europe in the middle of the present financial mess will mean a bigger and fuller surrender than even Heath and Wilson achieved between them. The Lib Dem sent us two things, in one the NHS was in prime spot and the other was going on about community in a town stripped of its greengrocers, most of its pubs and post offices as well as almost all the local shopkeepers.

Which leaves us with the Conservative. Alas a lawyer who is given to good causes but at least with some mention of business and the private sector. But the NHS is there at number two in this case as well as the genuflections to the altars of community. There are claims to local commitment but there is no hint of what other interests might be tucked away. What lobbyist or consultancy interests might be lurking behind the curtains? If they are not there now, the Conservative is elected and Cameron has a majority then our MP will be getting offers that may be impossible to refuse.

I keep complaining that there are things that are missing in the Election Campaign and it shows in the offerings of the various candidates. The war, the debacle of the drugs trade, the increasing divisions and tensions, the sheer incompetence of much of government, the challenges we will have in maintaining a great deal of the basic structure of our living and the loss of much of our law and ability and the degradation of the urban areas.

As for the NHS; are any of them aware of the disastrous shambles it has become? Are they aware that it might be close to meltdown and that as the largest source of employment and incomes in the UK it could become the quicksand of the economy?

If all the other candidates in the UK are like this lot it can only get worse.

In The Lap Of The Gods

Poseidon has developed a couple of itches, perhaps too much of the wine and nectar, and has begun to scratch himself again. A big earthquake in Tibet/West China, a few other big ones around again, one down by the Macquarie Islands, always a worry, and Baja California has been rumbling away now for days. Also, a couple of big deep sea ones but no tsunamis of any size, yet. Don’t forget he has an ongoing rash that we call the North Anatolian Fault.

Iceland is having one of its bumps and bangs, a largish volcano may or may not be in the process of erupting. Unluckily it is under a large glacier so we do not really know but big eruptions and big glaciers make for a dangerous combination. Being Iceland if one vent goes up there are many more that could follow. Just like their banks used to be.

It is no use whatsoever asking our politicians about what their earthquake/volcano policies are in the coming election, or what they might do to prevent them, or to control them or to plan their output, frequency and effects. Quite rightly they will tell us that it is all down to the scientists and entirely unpredictable. Basically, it will all happen and then the mess will have to be cleared up, at taxpayers expense.

What we cannot accept is that as far as economics, international finance and trade, money matters and similar things they are in much the same situation. Asking them to have definitive policies or to be able to guarantee delivery of this or that or to be positive about most things is a waste of time. They know it, or at least they should, the media cannot afford to admit it because it makes them useless and the rest of us simply do not realise how little we can control our futures.

As you trawl the web we can see that there are many peaks and troughs. Amongst the peaks are food production, oil supplies, energy supply, asphalt, tin, copper, gold, lithium and a few other basic resources. There are bitter debates about all of them. If the logic is that more people plus more fiat money plus more demand then where resources are either finite or now at their limits of productivity then something has to happen to pricing and the allocation of those resources.

If the troughs include climate induced change, hot or cold, or wet or dry, transport capabilities, fiscal deficits, inadequate forces, effective law and order, and a few other things, then everything becomes even more complicated. Experts in the field of Collapse Dynamics, Catastrophe Theory and those who enjoy nothing better than a wild and woolly picture of uncertainty and confusion are having a golden period.

We are left with a choice between an obsessive bean counter who keeps losing count of his beans, a charismatic researcher whose information was always too little and too late, and a crew of other worldly types whose perceptions of reality are now defined by what next appears on their Twitter feed and the latest from the polls or this or that think tank (think septic tanks) or focus group.

They and we are all hostages now to fortune, to uncertainty, to the decisions of others in other places and to things they neither comprehend or recognise. The next few years are going to be a grim scramble for survival.

I can remember a time sixty odd years ago, when a good many people in the UK lived in what amounted to shanty towns, with little food, no water supply and no electricity. Also when money was short, taxation heavy and many if not most real transactions were in barter or mutual service. It may or may not come to that, but the risks are there and it has happened before and more than once.

In the meantime we must hope that Poseidon doesn’t develop an allergic reaction to human beings and blame them for his itching. His Trident is bigger and better than ours.

What Is It All About?

At the time of the general election in 1945 everyone knew the scale of the mess and the nature of the disasters that the war had wreaked. In most places we could see it, smell it and it affected almost every aspect of our lives. The politicians then admitted most of it but even then we were not told the whole story by any of them.

Too many Conservatives retained illusions of imperial grandeur, too many Labourites wilder illusions that the centralised state could cure all and too many Liberals all the vague notions and muddled thinking left over from 19th Century theories. We were given a United Nations but what we got was the Atom Bomb and forty years of Cold War.

At least then we had a relatively coherent system of government. It might have looked like a patchwork and certainly had many variables but we did know who did what and why and where they worked from. It is striking to think that the Counties of Rutland, Radnor, Clackmannan and Fermanagh and for that matter County Boroughs such as Oldham had a greater measure of independent responsibility and scope of action than does the United Kingdom at the present time.

What do we have now? In the world of law there is a Supreme Court whose function seems to be to agree to a collection of supreme idiocies pronounced by others. We have a set of courts where most of us have lost sight of who does what or why. What we do know is that absent minded pensioners who sell a goldfish will be severely punished but serial violent burglars will be able to chalk up hundreds of offences before recognition and murdering drug dealing gangsters are protected. Libel law allows the rich and powerful to defame anyone they like, break laws, stop criticism even if they are killing people and punish and ruin the innocent, especially anyone devoted to the idea of scientific debate.

There is a House of Lords which meets and deliberates at huge expense for very little reason or rhyme. These hundreds of appointed cronies, time served politicians, party political subscribers and occasional nods to a limited number of minority interests with an effect on marginal constituencies occasionally gather to mutter into their microphones words that nobody listens to.

The House of Commons is the Deserted Village of representative government. Once a busy place on screens now it usually appears a sea of green (benches) with very little activity that is either productive or makes any sense. The administration rams through ramshackle, badly drafted, damaging laws in which the only certainty is that the unintended (expensive and damaging) consequences will outweigh by far any real benefits.

Each of these laws will impose great extra burdens on the taxpayer. Most of these laws give the administration vast uncontrolled and unchecked power to do what they will through agencies and non-government organisations that each has a life of its own, largely free from any legal or other controls.

We do not have a “government” as such at any level. We have a confusing collection of entities that rarely act either in concert or with any logic. I have not even mentioned Europe that real controller of our destinies. Despite “Freedom of Information” finding out what is going on is very difficult and the media have given up the job, now relying on interns reworking the output of all the public relations staff now employed and trawling the internet to pick up odd items.

So all these “campaigns” going on are a lot of clatter by power seekers hoping to get hold of the levers of finance and means of “added shareholder value”. What they are not telling us is how little either the House of Commons or the House of Lords do, the way in which they have lost or surrendered authority and power, the scale of the mess, the spread of corruption, the extent of the destruction, or the kind of world or future we face.

What is it all about? We are not being told and we are not going to be told. But we will have to pay.