Electoral Reform & the Conservative Party

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has come round to the view that we should replace our "first-past-the-post" voting system with something fairer. The cynical view is that, having recognised that he looks like losing the General Election this year, he has come up with this wheeze.

Personally, whatever his reason, I welcome his proposal that Parliament should vote on providing us with a Referendum on whether or not we should switch to the "Alternate Vote" system. As the Liberal Democrats have said, it doesn't go far enough towards true democracy (they want full-blown Proportional Representation), but this is a welcome step in the right direction.

Instead of placing an X against one candidate, we would be invited to number the candidates 1,2,3 etc. in order of preference. Candidates losing out on first preference would have their votes redistributed until such time as one candidate commands the support of at least 50% of the voters.

This at least would get rid of the current preposterous system, whereby any candidate who manages to get more votes than his nearest rival is elected - and more often than not finishes up representing well under 50% of the vote. When this is magnified across all the constituencies we finish up with the Party gaining the most seats forming a government which in reality often represents only 30% of the popular vote. And they call that democracy!

Whenever I hear the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, or any of his pompous acolytes supporting the present system on the grounds that it has "served us very well over the years" my blood pressure rockets and I'm tempted to reach for the nearest supply of Valium. What they mean is that it has served them very well over the years .. to pretend that it is democracy is nothing short of criminal stupidity.

It is only democratic in a two-Party system, and we do not have a two-Party system.

Wake up Conservatives! You are not getting my vote until or unless you agree to a fair voting system.

Cheese and Chocolate

After last week's takeover of the UK chocolate company Cadbury by the US Company Kraft, I was amused by an observation made by Michael Portillo the other day.

He said a British company who made chocolate that was not recognised by the rest of Europe as real chocolate had been taken over by an American company producing something that he could not associate with cheese.

We understand, of course, that Kraft does rather more than produce cheese (real or otherwise), and that Cadbury does produce a darker, more cocoa-rich product for the purists. The fact remains that for a few days Britain felt sad to see such an iconic British independent company with an illustrious past (originating with a Quaker family with the typical social-reformist and caring attitude towards its workforce) at last succumbing to the cruel winds of international capitalism.

As usual, though, the Daily Telegraph's resident cartoonist, Matt, was able to lighten our mood with a picture of a Kraft executive yelling down the phone, "I told you to buy the whole of Cadbury's except the Coffee Creams!"

Ted Kennedy's Senate Seat

I see Massachusetts has landed Obama in the Brown stuff.

As an unashamed supporter of universal health care I regret the difficulties this loss of Ted Kennedy's senate seat to the Republicans might cause for the Health Bill.

Kennedy's successor supports "waterboarding" as an interrogation technique, and opposes measures to reduce carbon emissions. Nice to know the Republicans are still such a loveable party!

Haiti Disaster - Finding the Better Side of Humanity

As we sit in our waterproof, weatherproof, heated homes complaining about life, government, the cost of living, and the weather, it is sadly true that it takes something like the Haiti earthquake (or any other major disaster, come to that) to bring it home to us that, for the most part, we have little to complain about.

I have been moved to tears by the images daily shown on our TV news reports of the injuries and deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the absence of basic facilities, the difficulties in getting aid to the places where it is needed. You would have to be a hard person not to be affected by the sight of a young child dragged, still alive, from days of captivity beneath mountains of rubble.

And I have been heartened by the coming together of nations, organisations and agencies in the joint effort to bring back some semblance of hope to this devastated country, a further example of which was shown on today's news: a young girl in a rural area with a damaged leg urgently in need of hospital treatment. A French camera crew came across her. The camera crew then encountered a British rescue team and told them of the girl. The rescue team went and collected her and did basic first aid but were unable to give her further medical treatment. But medical treatment is what she got, because of the arrival of an American helicopter that took her to a hospital.

That was one small example of an international effort that paid off. There are doubtless countless others occurring all the time.

If you have not already done so, please donate some money (however small the amount) to an appropriate disaster emergency organisation or national committee existing for that purpose; in the UK it is the Disaster Emergency Committee, and you can donate on-line at https://www.donate.bt.com/dec_form_haiti.html

Doctor Who "The End of Time". From David Tennant to Matt Smith

It's still Winter like it used to be!

The whole of the UK is now in the grip of ice and snow.

In my part of North Yorkshire we had 8 inches of snow yesterday evening (on top of the of the 4 or 5 inches we already had).

Today all the schools were closed - a source of relief since, as a school transport driver, I doubt if I could have even got out of my road, let alone reach the outlying farms and villages on my run.

My neighbours and I have just spent a back-breaking two hours snow shovelling and salt spreading. Our road is now just about passable (until the next snow fall - forecast for today).

We seem to be breeding a society of idiots: I've been watching a news item on TV about young people in Newcastle determined to ignore the sub-zero weather conditions, snow and ice, and attend city night clubs for their usual bouts of binge drinking, drunken fights, street urination and vomiting.

What are the girls wearing as they stagger about the streets? High heels, miniskirts, and sleeveless tops. What are the boys wearing? Jeans and short-sleeved T-shirts. Moreover, there is a charitable organisation that makes a practice of touring the streets with the specific purpose of providing thermal blankets and hot drinks to save these guys from their own stupidity.

Another example of current society's madness was recently provided by the final TV episode of David Tennant's portrayal of Dr Who. His final moments saw him dying and metamorphosing in time-honoured fashion into the regenerated Dr Who (now to be played by Matt Smith). As the new Dr Who checked himself out - arms, legs, face, etc., he found everything in order, and also noted he was "not ginger".

Most people I suspect would find this amusing, but of course about 140 people apparently complained to the BBC about this shocking piece of anti-ginger prejudice! More people, I regret, with tiny brains, who are quite happy to turn their own kids into "victims".

Pathetic.

Happy New Year!

Tall Tale of the Enigmatic Christmas Bottle

Well, that's another Christmas gone, and a new year to look forward to. Of the many, varied, and wonderful Christmas gifts this year was an unlabelled bottle from a nephew, containing a home-prepared concoction.

It was clear, straw coloured, and contained a selection of seeds, a cinnamon stick and a couple of small red chillies. It provoked much discussion around our Christmas Dinner table about its properties. It was necessary to experiment, in which context I sent an e-mail to my nephew thanking him for his gift, explaining that thanks to him I had ..

• successfully de-iced my front garden path;
• dabbed some behind my ears (which didn't make me any more attractive to women) but did keep the flies away;
• destroyed a couple of wasps nests;
• cleaned all the brass and silver in my house;
• removed some unwanted pubic hair;
• run my car on it at illegal speeds.

It had then occurred to me that we were supposed to drink it. My son successfully set it alight, suggesting alcoholic content, then drank some. This provoked a stream of somewhat unseasonal profanities.

I followed up with some of my own bravado and took a swig, as a consequence of which my trousers fell down, my ears started revolving, and I swallowed my tongue.

I hope to be free of the oxygen cylinder within a couple of weeks.

Happy New Year!!

Winter like it used to be!

Here in Yorkshire I have 5 inches of snow in my garden, and the snow on the tree branches has remained in place for several days. I'm not complaining; it's all very picturesque, and I've just read that Virginia USA has, in some parts, just received 2 feet of snow! (For the benefit of metricated readers, that's 130 mm of snow in my garden and 610 mm in Virginia).

Yesterday morning I ventured outside to do some energetic snow clearing and apply some rock salt. The salt idea didn't work out too well, because it had frozen into one solid lump. The snow clearance idea was even worse because I fell flat on my back and, whilst I was somewhere between upright and horizontal I managed to hit myself in the face with the handle of the snow shovel. It would have been highly entertaining to anybody watching, but they weren't, so my performance was wasted.

I therefore decided to return to the warmth of my home and succumb to the affluence of incohol.

My wife put scraps of food for the birds on the front lawn; she put it all on a flat baking tray to prevent the scraps becoming lost in the snow. A few minutes later a big fat pigeon made a fast landing on the tray, and stood there methodically picking up each scrap of food and tossing it remarkable distances across the garden, resembling nothing so much as someone tossing frisbees. Well, I thought, we put it there for the birds, and a pigeon is a bird, and if it wants to chuck stuff about instead of eating it, who am I to give it lessons in table etiquette?

I do hope the bankers are feeling the cold. I keep reading (and hearing) politicians, bankers, and political pundits wailing about the UK Government's proposed 50% tax on bankers' bonuses, and the phrase that keeps on coming up is, "If we tax the bonuses we are going to start losing talent to other countries". Excuse me, but would that be the same talent that got us all into this fine mess in the first place?!

By the way, I've just received from the UK Government my senior citizen's £10 Christmas Bonus. We really should be doing something about this Bonus Culture.

Merry Christmas to my two readers and their friends!