UK GENERAL ELECTION & the VOTING SYSTEM

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Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg (left), Conservative David Cameron (centre), Labour's Gordon Brown (right), debating on TV, an event that transformed this election from plain boring into mildly exciting.

The most significant aspect of this first-ever national TV debate between Party Leaders is that it has propelled the Liberal Democrats to the forefront of the national consciousness. Because the vagaries of the British "first-past-the-post" electoral system have tended to give the Liberal Democrats only 60 or so Parliamentary seats on the back of 25-30% of the popular vote, they have hitherto been given less prominence in media coverage.

The new national TV debates have changed all that with Nick Clegg being given equal prominence to the other two Party Leaders, a prominence that has done him no harm at all!

Conservative and Labour votes tend to be concentrated in certain constituencies, whereas Liberal Democrat support is more widely distributed, resulting in their failing to succeed in the same way. Even though they are now riding high in the opinion polls, pretty much on equal footing with Conservatives and Labour, projecting the polls into actual seat gains on May 6th indicate perhaps a hundred or so seats (in a 630-seat Parliament).

Ironically, Nick Clegg's rise and rise has led to the other two Parties making the following statements ..

Voting Liberal Democrat will let Labour in.

Voting Liberal Democrat will let the Conservatives in.

If this doesn't expose the ludicrous nature of our electoral system I don't know what does!

Here's a radical thought: what about having a system whereby voting Liberal Democrat lets in the Liberal Democrats?

I know, too silly for words.

UK GENERAL ELECTION & the VOTING SYSTEM

I asked my Conservative Candidate Anne McIntosh whether she would sign up to Electoral Reform.

She replied (predictably) - “I support the tried and tested first past the post system”.

She has therefore lost any chance of receiving my vote.

One of the reasons people have become disconnected from Politics is the increasing realisation that the governments we elect bear no resemblance to the feelings of the voting public.

The Conservative slogan is Vote for Change and yet David Cameron has set his face against the only change we are crying out for: an end to a so-called democratic system that allows him to say things like “A vote for Clegg is a vote for Brown”, “A Lib Dem vote is a wasted vote”, and then for Anne McIntosh to say this is a “tried and tested system”.

It is a system that has given us governments with huge majorities based on the support of less than 40% of the voters; a system where politicians insult our intelligence with this garbage about wasting votes and voting for one person and getting another. Such unrepresentative governments gave us the Poll Tax, destroyed manufacturing industry, took us into an illegal war, and smothered us with “political correctness”.

Tried and tested?

Tried – Tested – Failed!

UK GENERAL ELECTION - The Usual Farce

Current opinion polls suggest that about 62% of the British Public do not want a Conservative Government, and yet such is the stupidly undemocratic nature of our voting system, that if people vote as they say they intend to, then the likelihood is that we shall finish up getting a Conservative government anyway, and it will be representing about 38% of the population.

I've been driven to distraction by this tyrannical system for the whole of my life, and I'm fed up to the back teeth with it. As a point of principle, whoever I vote for in this election, I shall be making a point of ensuring it is not for any Party that refuses to accept the need for electoral reform.

I guess that rules out the Conservatives. Labour are promising a referendum on the need for electoral reform, so that puts them in a slightly better light. The Liberal Democrats, Greens, and UKIP are all in favour of a fair voting system.

I'm sure most of the rest of Europe think we are completely barmy to put up with this kind of thing.

UK GENERAL ELECTION

So now we know .. it's May 6th.

For the first time in my life I am a "floating voter".

I am a "don't know".

I am looking forward to the first-ever TV debates between the Leaders of the Labour Party, Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats, even though I'm sure it's not going to be a very spontaneous affair. It's a step in the right direction.

Even if (and it's a big IF) the Conservatives come up with some attractive policies, they are still opposed to the reform of the voting system. Our voting system is not democratic. I am, heart and soul, a democrat.

Therefore, as a floating voter, if I finish up floating in the direction of voting Conservative, then we can all look forward to some skating sessions on the frozen lakes of Hell.

Afghanistan

With President Kharzai making more and more frequent statements criticising NATO countries and their role in Afghanistan, coupled with his failure to address the question of fraud and corruption in his government, now would appear to be a good time to get the hell out of that place.

YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP!

Life is getting sillier by the day.

Insurance Industry

Earlier this year I booked a Thames Cruise in a holiday boat. Of course I was asked to take out travel insurance. I found a company on a price comparison website, and applied for insurance for the dates of this UK river cruise. Having completed all the questions on destinations, dates, health matters, etc., they took my money and sent my insurance policy.

Two weeks ago the ship company said they were being forced to make alterations to the boat to meet disability access regulations. Reluctantly they had to offer us alternative dates for the cruise. (Good news - at a discounted price!)

So I notified the travel insurance company of the new dates, whereupon they came back and said your insurance policy is invalid: we don't insure cruises in the UK. (Good news - they agreed to refund my money). Forgive me for wondering why they would issue me with a policy in the first place!

Power Industry

The glass front of our electricity meter got damaged a week or two back, by an electrician doing some re-wiring in our house. I notified the power company and they sent me a letter saying someone would call on 31st March to replace the meter, and it would be between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m.

By 4.30 p.m. he hadn't turned up (though at some stage my wife had noticed a meter company van near the end of our road). We rang the power company and were told that the meter man had been unable to find our address. We asked what address they had given him, and it was incorrect. We were instructed to phone again in the morning to arrange a new date.

Next morning (after negotiating a 7-item phone menu list, and being held in a queue for 15 minutes) I was notified that the power company would have to notify the meter company of our correct address and this would take until the 7th June (!!!) Would I then please phone them again to arrange a new visit date. When Margaret Thatcher privatised the electricity and gas boards we were told that this would lead to much greater efficiency than the old nationalised industries were capable of.

Bathroom Equipment & Courier Industries

We are clearing out the bathroom, reorganising it, and fitting a new bathroom suite. The other week the new toilet unit was delivered. The cistern had two great chunks knocked out of it.

The suppliers sent a replacement. (Good news - very quickly). The cistern arrived in three broken pieces. I suggested to the supplier that they change their courier. The guy said, "We're on our third one now."

The next replacement was OK. Then the vanity unit (mirror and shelves above the wash basin) arrived. When I started to attach the three shelves to the back board, I found the holes drilled and plugged in the back edge of the shelves were set 96 mm apart, and the equivalent holes drilled in the back board were set 100 mm apart, and at three different distances from the left-hand edge of the board. Also one of the three shelves was marginally larger than the other two.

The replacement is awaited.

The UK Government IT Industry

The firm I work for uses a payroll and income tax program provided by Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs. After downloading a recent update to the program we couldn't get it to work.

We e-mailed the Help Desk, and they came back with this classic ..

Please be advised that we have identified that there is a bug in the
system which causes the CD-Rom not to function on the last day of any
moth which has 31 days. This should however have returned to normal
from the 1 April onwards.

Aside from the unbelievable concept of critical software that doesn't understand the days of the month, we couldn't help noticing that in their response they managed to mention the word bug and moth in the same sentence!

Enough of this nonsense. Onwards and upwards!

What do we want from our Political Leaders?

All this media furore on the subject of Prime Minister Brown's alleged bullying of his staff (most of which has recently been thrown into doubt anyway), coupled with our apparent obsession with the man's general character, likeability, and so on, leads me to wonder why our democratic process has progressively turned into an "X Factor" competition without the music.

The Conservatives have been putting up huge billboard posters showing an airbrushed pretty-boy photo of their leader David Cameron and a message saying "we can't go on like this".

It's all become too personalised. It's a beauty contest. Where is the information on what the Parties are really proposing to do? Even when the Conservatives feel able to feed us with the odd policy proposal or two, after a couple of weeks have gone by they've changed their tune and the policy's been altered.

Who cares if Gordon Brown is a difficult man to work with? Who cares if he gets angry when he can't get things done that he wants done? It's what you might expect from someone who has anything about him with the demands of the top job on his shoulders.

Successful War Leader, Winston Churchill, was famously grumpy, irascible, prone to excessive drinking and bouts of depression. The people who worked with him accepted that and got on with the job. Now we have a load of wimps in No.10 Downing Street who can't hack it.

Clement Attlee, who led the immediate post-war Labour Government wouldn't have had any success at all in today's popularity stakes; he was quietly spoken and looked like an old-fashioned High Street Bank Manager. And yet Attlee successfully led a government that revolutionised a bankrupt British society after the ravages of war; he nationalised the railways, gas, electricity and water, and set up the National Health Service. And he did all this within 5 years.

I don't want our political leaders to be fussing about how popular they are, how nice they are, how good looking they are, how well they come over on television, how many people they are going to upset with some policy or other. I want them to be people with some kind vision about what kind of society they want, and have the ability to inspire the people around him to come up with the goods.

I don't think it is necessary for our Prime Ministers to be invited on to chat shows to demonstrate they are normal human beings who are able to weep in public about their personal tragedies.

Whatever one might think about Labour Party policies, Gordon Brown stands head and shoulders above the Conservative's David Cameron and the Liberal Democrat's Nick Clegg, both of whom appear to me to be lightweight wimps blowing around in the wind.

British National Party

Now that the BNP has changed its constitution to comply with a legal judgement against its original policy of allowing only white indigenous British membership, I wait with bated breath for the headlong rush of non-white UK citizens who have been waiting impatiently to join the Party!

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

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!

Bonus Culture

I've just received my Senior Citizens £10 Christmas Bonus from the Government.

Something should be done about this Bonus Culture!

Climate Change

The theft and publication of e-mails originating from climatologists in the University of East Anglia has given a morale boost to all those who would have us believe that mankind has had no effect on the our planet's climate.

These Cambridgeshire Scientists have, allegedly, skewed some data to support their strong belief that climate problems are man-made, and have rubbished other scientists who take a contrary view.

If that is the case, then they have covered their own heads in the brown stuff, for science is surely the development of theories and subsequent proof of them by demonstrating incontrovertible facts. In short, they cannot call themselves scientists.

I see the climate change affair like this .. there are two arguments:

1. Climate change is or is not occurring.

2. If the change is occurring it is or is not being caused by our own activities.

With regard to No.1 I believe you would have to be some kind of blinkered nut-case to say climate change is not occurring. After all, we can see it with our own eyes. We can see the ice caps melting, we can see shipping lanes opening up in places where previously shipping was impossible because of ice, and we can see the increasing incidents of extreme and sometimes lethal weather conditions.

With regard to No.2 I have to defer to the opinions of scientists, but some scientists are more scientific than others (it would seem). Nevertheless, I feel that even (at one extreme end of the argument) if mankind is not the major cause, and it is mainly down to natural cyclical changes, then that does not excuse us from polluting our own environment, or even just running the possible risk that we are going to make things worse. Whether or not we are the cause we have to plan for how we are to manage the effects of climate change, whilst simultaneously ensuring that we are not actually contributing to the problem.

So to anyone who saying to me that the Cambridgeshire scientists' e-mails indicates that we can carry on doing whatever we like, I say, "On your bike!" (And out of your car, by the way).

Software Companies are as good as their Help Desk

After many years of using Windows PC software from both the giants and pygmies of cyberworld I have concluded that however good a product appears to be, the company who sold it to you stands or falls on the quality of its Help Desk.

I do not think we should be wasting our time and increasing our blood pressure by using anything that cannot be quickly resolved by an efficient and responsive technical help department each time one of our applications falls over or produces difficulties to the user.

If you go to a software company website and you have to dig deep to find any contact phone numbers, e-mail addresses or other useful methods of contact, then quite frankly they don't deserve to be receiving your hard-earned cash.

Two of my most recent frustrating experiences both relate to Anti-virus and Internet Security products.

For two years I used Symantec's Norton Antivirus product. For two years I was constantly frustrated by my computer working slowly and frequently seizing up completely. In addition it was hardly ever possible to close the PC down without manually closing a selection of small system applications first. The cause was a file called ccSvcHst.exe which is part of the Symantec product that beavers away in the background. Investigation showed that lots of other people were having the same problem and were reporting frozen computers caused by this application taking up 100% of their CPU useage.

Symantec's Help Desk certainly responded to my frequent pleas for help, but in the end it was a matter of them just going through the motions, since it seemed on investigation that they were well aware that ccSvcHst.exe was an issue. But rather than admit this they went through the motions of taking remote control of my computer on two separate occasions, turned it inside out, only to report back to me that everything was in order.

And so it was .. until the next time it froze.

In desperation I came to the point where I wiped every last vestige of Symantec's products off my PC and purchased an Anti-virus application from an alternative provider. (Kaspersky, since you ask.) I am now enjoying a computer that flies along without a hitch, and one that closes down properly when I tell it to. I look back with regret that all those months of difficult operation, calling IT consultants in, and wondering if something was wrong with my machine.

The other bad experience was with the Internet Security system on my employers' PC. Our subscription came up for renewal and we were invited to download the latest Internet Security package, which we did. Immediately after we had done that Internet Explorer would not connect with the Internet. So we tried our alternative Browser, Mozilla Firefox and this also reported that it could not connect. I downloaded the Google Chrome browser and that wouldn't work either.

If we disabled the Internet Security application we could connect, but then of course we were unprotected. We were damned if we could, and we were damned if we couldn't. We called in an independent IT consultant, who removed the offending application and downloaded a fresh copy, after which he was faced with all the same problems.

We phoned the Help Desk and couldn't get speak to a human being. We were invited by recorded message to send an e-mail (which we could have done if only we could safely connect to the Internet!) I sent an e-mail from my private address. We had a reply after a few days, suggesting a 5-step procedure. We followed it, but to no good effect. From this point on, we couldn't get any further responses via phone or e-mail. Our IT consultant completely removed the product and we subscribed to an alternative product. (Kaspersky since you ask!) Since then we have had no problems. We sent letters by snail-mail to the company's head office requesting a refund of our subscription renewal. No reply. We have now sent three letters, all yielding nothing. I actually managed to speak to a human being 2 months ago and he promised a refund. It didn't come, and when I spoke to another human being a month later he argued strongly against the possibility of a refund, but would take it further with his head office. Watch this space.

"What is this abominable product?" I hear you cry. Well suffice to say it survives on a diet of bamboo shoots.

Unhealthy Republicans

I was pleased when I read that President Obama's Health Bill had been passed (albeit narrowly) by the House of Representatives because I believe that all people should have access to good health care.

I was astonished that every single Republican Representative voted against it, and incredulous at the demonstrators outside holding up placards saying "Kill the Bill", and "No to big government".

What are these people saying? Are these slogans code for "We don't really care that 46 million Americans do not have / cannot afford / cannot get health insurance?"

And what's all this about "Big Government"? It's not as if a UK-style National Health Service is being created. It isn't.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with "Big Government". Its virtue or otherwise depends upon the areas in which it is being imposed. For example, America could hardly have an Army, Navy and Air Force, and a Defence Strategy, without "Big Government".

I wish the Health Bill well.

Sgt. Kimberly Denise Munley

My congratulations to Sgt Kimberley Munley. She was the one who fired the first shot to bring down the crazed psychiatrist major who turned his gun on his own men at Fort Hood army base in Texas.

The phrase "Physician, heal thyself" comes to mind.

Fortunately, though incapacitated, Major Hasan was not killed. This means that someone (presumably some other psychiatrist?) might get some insight into this man's motives.

* * *

Remembrance Day

There is a group of people called the anti-war coalition who oppose the expectation that we

should all be wearing red poppies this month. Their reasoning is that they symbolise support for our military campaign in Afghanistan. This is, of course, quite wrong. They symbolise our communal remembrance of all those who have fallen in military conflicts since the 1st World War.

Having said that, it has to be recognised that the anti-war coalition has a point, for the following reason: certain football teams are being required (even coerced) into wearing the Poppy "In support of our troops". There is a subtle difference between remembering the dead and supporting our troops. By all means support our troops if you want, but wearing the Poppy has nothing to do with it!