Month: May 2014

Politics should be about principles and policy.  Inevitably it is also about personalities.  Ideally it shouldn’t be about propaganda.  If you believe in something you shouldn’t want to win a point by misleading someone.

In the eighties and nineties the Liberal Democrats used to engage in what they called pavement politics.  This involved focusing their efforts in particular areas where they thought they had the best chance of being successful.  This involved one particularly underhand tactic.  In areas where the Conservatives were strong they would do their best to ‘squeeze’ the Labour vote by putting out leaflets pointing out that Labour couldn’t win.  This was often done in local council wards where Labour in fact certainly could win, and from time to time where they actually did win.

Handel's Theodora is a masterpiece that has to be seen. If you like good music, drama, history or a mix of all three you won't be disappointed.

Around the world green politics is more closely aligned with the left than the right.  It has been said that greens are like tomatoes.  They start green but they always end up red.  Why is this?  There doesn’t seem to be any particularly strong reason why people who believe in the free market shouldn’t also believe in protecting the environment.  Even fascists can like trees.  So why are greens not only pretty consistently liberal, but are also generally liberal even by liberal standards?

I finally gave in to biology and went to bed at 1.00am last night, after 2 hours of political coverage on the telly which did not mention the Green Party even once.  You wouldn’t know they even existed.  Meanwhile the effect of the large swing of votes to UKIP was looked at from every imaginable angle.  I imagine that Green activists were probably getting a bit frustrated.  But as an interested but not particularly engaged observer I concluded that the Greens were probably better off without it.   The Greens have never really attracted much attention in the media, but have managed to win a Westminster seat and to control a local council.  These are significant achievements.  UKIP haven’t managed either yet.  Solid achievements like that don’t just happen.  They must have assembled a team of committed people to do it and to have won over a lot of people who don’t have much time for politics.

An intriguing poll was published just before the European Election.  In it the Greens had overtaken the Liberal Democrats leaving them in fifth place.   At time of writing I don’t know what the real results will be.  Polls are just polls and what happens on the ground can be very different.  I’d be surprised if the Greens were actually to outpoll the Lib Dems in the real world.   A lot of the MEPs defending their seats will have a strong incumbency advantage.  And even in these online days organisation on the ground counts for something, and the Lib Dems are better organised and better funded.

I have just finished watching all five seasons of Breaking Bad.  If you haven’t heard about it yet I am not sure where you hang out, but it is the story of Walter White, an unsuccessful and morally ambiguous chemist and his remarkably self centred response to a diagnosis of cancer.  This involves using his technical knowledge to come up with a superior quality grade of illegal drug that becomes very popular in New Mexico.

There is a notion that the history of Britain has been written by the Whigs, and that they have put their moderate progressive slant on events.  Lady Antonia Fraser would certainly fall into that mould.  She is famous enough as a historian for her family and marriages to not be the things that define her.  But on this particular subject it is impossible not to remember that she is from a very political background.  Her father was Lord Longford who served in a Labour government.  She has a distinctly establishment background, and this is an account from the point of view of the establishment at the time.  We don’t hear much from the point of view of the common man, or at least not directly.  Their main role in the story is breaking the windows of the elites.

May day has always seemed to me to be a day in the calendar that cries out to be celebrated.  It is about this time of year that the evenings become light for long enough to enjoy.  If we are lucky we can pack away our winter coats and jumpers for the year.  A bank holiday moved around from year to year to suit commercial requirements has never really seemed adequate to it. Even the bank holiday seems to have been conceded rather grudgingly.  I am old enough to remember the first one.  I seem to remember a conservative politician suggesting dropping it in favour of a day to commemorate the battle of Trafalgar.