the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Tag: politics

November 29, 2024

34:63 presents “Is our democracy functioning or funct?”

It has been over two months since my last blog, and in that time an awful lot of awful has happened. All of which I have opinions on and some of which I’ll share. But not today.

It is the so called assisted dying bill that will be voted on today in the Parliament I want to discuss. Partly because it will assist more than just the staggering few people able to meet its ridiculous threshold. Partly because it is unutterably obscene that towards the end of the second decade of the 21st Century there is even a debate to be had about this. 

And also, far more importantly, for citizens not to have  the right to die, is the most blatant example of discrimination in Britain today. 

As I understand it, the bill allows that anyone with a terminal illness and has less than six months to live could apply to exercise the rights in it. To do so, they would need two doctors not only to confirm the terminal diagnosis but also confirm their mental capacity to make such a decision. And also to satisfy themselves that no coercion was at work and options regarding palliative care had been explained and rejected. Only then could a High Court judge give approval.  

Really? Just even getting a doctors appointment is enough of a challenge these days but then I suppose if one can afford to take a case to the High Court, going private isn’t a problem. And that’s my first problem with this whole farrago right there. The wholly unnecessary and ultimately self-serving bureaucracy involved. Because no matter what is decided in parliament today, one thing will be certain; the lawyers will be riding first class on the gravy train. 

It will certainly call in at judicial review.  Possibly taking the scenic route via legal challenges and interminable appeals. Then it might call in at the Supreme Court, before heading onward to Europe.  This isn’t the way a properly functioning democracy, one that is at ease with itself should conduct itself. 

But leaving all that aside, the most fundamental issue and one which I think has been overlooked when discussing this issue is age discrimination. Age discrimination that is predicated upon unfairly prioritising the needs of the unborn against those of the undead. One that places a greater value on the the right to life than on the right to die. 

There are no preventative checks that the state places upon being able to have a child, no suitability assessment, no background checks to establish previous criminal behaviour, and no evidence of one’s financial capacity to successfully embark on parenthood.

Why all the hoops and hurdles at one end and largesse we can ill afford at the other. It may seem that I’m contradicting myself or going off on a tangent here but the proposed changes that the assisted dying bill suggests are basically trivial. Around 350 terminally ill people take their own lives every year. That’s nowhere near enough.  We can’t afford the pensioners that are alive today – over 16% of the population – never mind tomorrow. 

According to the Office of Budget Responsibility, last year £142 billions were spent on various pensioner benefits. That’s 5.1% of national income or over 48% of the welfare budget, with absolute the certainty that this number is only getting higher. By 2060, nearly a quarter of the population will be over 65, meaning that the ratio of worker to pensioner will be 2:1.

I understand why the bill only applies to the terminally ill with less than six months to live. That way it has more chance of being passed today, paving the way for more additions later. But assisted dying should be properly seen as an act of civic good, a practical way to put give back by giving up. Living to beyond 80 should be seen as an act of unspeakable selfishness. It baffles me why living to a ripe old age a good thing? Ripe soon turns to rotten. 

And I’m as guilty of age discrimination as it relates to assisted dying as anyone else in assuming that only the old might want to die.  What is so wonderful about life for a 45 year old now to make them think it’s only to get better? All that good weather we’ve been having lately?

If we had a properly functioning democracy this would have all been resolved years ago and the right to die would be a given. If we had politicians who dealt with the electorate as mature adults capable of thinking in the long term, whereas we got was a succession of career driven opportunists unable to look beyond the election cycle. But we don’t have a functioning democracy.  However I might yet be pleasantly surprised. The bill might pass. 

Then we’ll see exactly how democracy functions.

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March 22, 2024

Schrodinger’s cat meets democracy

The result of the recent Irish referendum was many things and I’ll leave it to those more knowledgeable in Irish politics to expound upon the issues it raises. Much has been made of the decision to even hold a referendum regarding changes to the constitution in the first place. There are many problems facing Ireland right now and holding a referendum on something that wasn’t one of them seemed as if it was an exercise in political virtue signalling. One which indicated how in touch with the values and language of now the political class were, by indicating how out of touch they were with the concerns of ordinary Irish citizens.

An example being that changes to the the wording of the constitution are not exactly on a par with proposed cull of 200,000 dairy cows – 10% of the total – in order to better meet the Irish governments goal of reducing agricultural emissions by 25% by 2030. And whilst tinkering with some of wording of the constitution looked good to people who are inordinately pre-occupied with looking good, it also had the added benefit of seemingly coming with no cost, whereas the cull is estimated to cost £600Million.

But come at a cost it did and whilst much was made of the seemingly low turnout – 44% as compared with 2018’s repeal of the abortion law which had 66.5% – even the most cursory of looks at voter turnout reveals just how low it actually was. In parts of the capital Dublin and at least four counties, turnout was estimated to be no higher than 12 per cent and although turnout was high in some places – 46% in other parts of Dublin – there was an overwhelmingly sense of voter apathy. This the nightmare scenario that awaits both main parties in the forthcoming UK election if they fail to engender anything even approaching a sense of it being anything other than the outcome being a foregone conclusion. The victory of George Galloway in Rochdale underlies the reality of this prediction.

As noted in a previous blog post, there were many things I found highly disagreeable about George Galloway’s campaign, but no matter how calculated one considers his campaign to have been, it was undeniably effective. Making it clear that he was targeting the Muslim community in Rochdale that made up 30% of its population and shifting the focus away from local or even national issues, but instead onto Israel/Gaza was an act of effective strategic masterstroke. It paid off, resulting him getting 40% of all the votes cast, which sounds impressive, until you realise only 39.7% of voters actually bothered to. And then suddenly that 40% seems even less impressive, especially when you realise that that once impressive 40% translates into 12,335 actual votes.

A pathetic inditement of our political apathy, made all the more pathetic when one realises there are 26 constituencies with a majority of less than 1000, each notionally at risk from a well co-ordinated and highly motivated grassroots campaign. Which is both a good and a bad thing for democracy. Good, because it allows people to become properly invested in participatory democracy in a meaningful, not theoretical way, and to decide for themselves what issues are important to them, not have them dictated by a party machine. That is also the bad thing, because as Galloway’s victory in Rochdale shows, the numbers needed to win were not big and therefore permits to a certain kind of activism, as factional as it is unrepresentative. Certainly nowhere near cohesive enough to engender solidity with other similar victors on a regional, never mind national stage.

That’s why to me, the results of the Irish referendum and Rochdale are one and the same, bringing in their wake the warning of voter disengagement with the entire political process. Of how that sense of disengagement, that apathy, could be turned on itself, be weaponised and ruthlessly exploited in the pursuit of a rigidly exclusionary agenda.

Think of those 12,335 votes and tell me I’m dreaming.

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March 5, 2024

Forest Gump’s mum meets Winston Churchill

The most depressing thing about the way in which the entire political class and their fawning sycophants in the media reacted to George Galloways’ electoral victory in Rochdale the other night was that it reminded me of how they’d all reacted after the Brexit vote. With an almost tedious inevitability, there was the same anguished newspaper headlines, the same acres of newsprint opining at length about what it said about Britain, about how it was a sad day for democracy, even down to the PM giving a speech outside No.10.

The statesman like thing to have done would’ve been for Loafer to be gracious in defeat and to admit that whilst he had lost, democracy had won. To position himself was a staunch defender of the democratic ideal, that how he felt about the result was ultimately of no consequence. But no. He somehow managed to conflate Galloways victory and the beliefs of some of the people who supported him as evidence of “our democracy itself being a target”

The thing is, it’s a teensy-teensy bit cheeky for Loafer to even mention democracy being a target, given the obscenely undemocratic way he became PM in the first place, in an act of political chicanery that would’ve made even Kim Jong-un blush. He is to democracy what Prince Harry is to reticence. At least his predecessor, Letttuce, was elected, even if it was only by 80,000 Conservative Party members. The last PM to be elected because of an actual general election was Boris’s Johnson, back in 2019.

Secondly did any Cabinet Ministers travel up to Rochdale to support the Conservative candidate Paul Ellison, especially after the Labour candidate was withdrawn? The media were all too aware of the potential for a Galloway win, most obviously because it allowed them to pontificate upon how disastrous an outcome this would be, so it follows that Loafer and Co were aware too. So where was the one time only coalition of all three main parties suspending business as usual and uniting behind a common cause to defeat Galloway? And instead of sounding all high and mighty about putting country before party like all politicians are always testiculating about, maybe actually doing it?

Galloway won Rochdale thanks in part to a low voter turnout – 39.7% as compared to the 60.1% in 2019 – and of that he only managed to 40%. Basically, 12,335 votes. Essentially if the main political parties couldn’t be even bothered to show up, then why should the voters? Worryingly, a couple of candidates whose names appeared on the ballot paper but were withdrawn before the election itself nevertheless managed somehow get a combined total of nearly 3,000 votes. And that leads neatly onto another threat to democracy.

Politicians themselves.

They are increasingly out of touch with the everyday concerns of the people they claim to serve, hardly a surprise when one realises the huge disparity between them and rest of the population. In 2019, research revealed the sheer scale of this grotesque reality. 44% of Tory MPs, 38% of Lib-Dem ones and 19% of Labour ones went to to fee paying – private – schools, as compared to 6% for the rest of us. It gets worse, as most of the Tory ones – 61% of that 44% – are in Loafer’s Cabinet, and 45% lot of that went to Oxbridge.

Less than 1% of the rest of us do. Unsurprisingly, this disparity stretches into the upper echelons of the civil service, the media and business.

No wonder then that a kind of group-think takes place, one that allows an echo chamber of ideological conformity to flourish and for dissenting opinions to be seldom heard. And that danger to democracy extends to the judiciary; senior judges being the most unrepresentative group of them all, with 67% attending private schools and 71% graduating from Oxbridge, with 11 of the judges on the Supreme Court thusly educated. Puts the legal challenges to Brexit into a harsher light, to say nothing of the Supreme Court unanimously ruling that Boris’s Johnson had “unlawfully” prorogued – suspended – parliament for five weeks. Effectively thwarting, albeit temporally, his ability to carry out the wishes of the majority of the UK population

Much like the Brexit vote, there was a lot of scare-mongering by the commentariat and grim predictions of doom that were better suited to Macbeth, but that didn’t prevent the shocked disbelief and abject bewilderment of the entire political class when the lower orders actually used democracy to be actively involved in their own lives. Possibly not enough of them made full advantage of that possibility in Rochdale, but whose fault is that? That’s one of the great strengths of democracy, which is why the right to vote was very begrudgingly and even more incrementally broadened to eventually encompass all citizens. Just as people are sometimes contrary, often unpredictable and frequently unfathomable, so too can be election results.

And as I pointed out in a previous blog, Galloways self-professed and ruthlessly focused targeting of Rochdale’s Muslim population may well have been distasteful, but from another point of view, a brilliant piece of strategic thinking, one which all of the other parties have always used. Indeed election night analysis almost fetishises the possibility of marginal seats being lost to a rival party, often cutting away so we can see the winner bask in their fleeting moment in the spotlight. And with an emboldened Galloway eyeing up marginal seats – 25 of which have majority of less than 1,000 – the results may not be to everyone’s liking, but isn’t that the point of democracy, losers consent?

To quote Forest Gumps’ mum ‘Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what your gonna get.’

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June 30, 2014

On how Oscar Wilde politics may destroy humanity…….

 

I’ve always found politics fascinating. Not the theatrical pantomime of Prime Minister’s Questions – where ironically, answers are few and far between -, but actual politics.

Quite why there persists in people’s minds the idea that politics is complicated baffles me, as politics isn’t complicated at all. One is meant to think that it is, and that suits the main political parties just fine and dandy. Political parties claim to want voter engagement but actually they fear an informed electorate. Largely because, just as Dorothy discovers in ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, the electorate will realize when they pull back the curtain that the wizard is not a wizard at all, but in fact an ordinary man, and they will react with anger that for so long the truth has been hidden from them.

In a later entry, I promise to outline my theory that anyone who understands how a family operates – the dynamics and tensions that are at play, the ever shifting balance of powers between the parents and the children and the temporary alliances built on need – can understand politics. Anything that is so complicated that at its most basic level it cannot be explained to anyone with an I.Q. larger than the radius of their kneecap, suggests that the fault lies with the person attempting to simplify the complicated. I promise I will outline my theory in another post, but now is not the time.

Instead, I want to draw your attention to Caroline Lucas M.P., who – it seems to me at any rate – is congenitally incapable of uttering anything less than common sense. Given that it is said that the thing about common sense is it isn’t very common, this is a rare quality indeed, rarer still in a politician. It matters not if you agree with what she says or not, but she says it in easily comprehensible English and not in the sophistry laden nonsense that politicians normally speak.

Here is but one example;

On Wednesday 18th June 2014, the House of Commons Environmental Audit Select Committee was hearing evidence regarding the National Pollinator Strategy. Sounds boring, but is of the utmost concern to any right thinking person. Pollinator is another word for bees and other insects that pollinate a third of all plants on the planet. Einstein once prophetically remarked that “Mankind couldn’t survive the honeybee’s disappearance for more than five years”. This will take you to a far more reasoned and coherent explanation as to why you should care. If you don’t already, that is.

Giving evidence to the committee and refuting the possibility that any research funded by the very companies that stood to lose if the research proved conclusively that there was a link between certain pesticides and dwindling pollinator numbers, was Professor Ian Boyd, Chief Scientific Officer at the Department of the Environment, Food, Agriculture and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), who said

“That’s a very relevant point, but just because they’re paying for the studies and leading the studies doesn’t mean to say that the studies are invalid” Then Dr. Julian Little, from pesticide maker Bayer told the committee that,“Yes, we are putting the money up for it but it’s being done by independent scientists, they’re sorting out the protocols, they’re working with both DEFRA and EFSA (European Food Standards Authority) to ensure those protocols are relevant.”

Naturally, I was shouting in my head at the radio – the quite excellent ‘Today in Parliament’ on Radio Four – “Has no one heard of the saying ‘He who pays the piper names the tune’’’ when just in time Caroline Lucas restored some much needed sanity to proceedings, when she said,

“In such a contested area, having properly independent peer reviewed research, rather than research that could be seen from the outside as if it would be in the interest of the person paying for it, surely that is a compelling reason to look again at the degree to which the strategy depends on research being carried out by private companies”

But proving, not for the first, and certainly by no means for the last time, that this government has taken Oscar Wilde’s quote that, “A cynic is a man who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” as part of its decision making process, Boyd then said, to my utter astonishment “The question is just whether we can afford from a public perspective, to fund these types of studies and I go back to what I said earlier on, that these types of studies are very large scale and the bigger they get, the more expensive they get”

Words fail. What could possibly be more important? In what universe is a tax cut to the top earners from 50p to 45p, more important than funding research into declining pollinator numbers? What good is a tax cut when there’s a chance that in the very near future there won’t be enough food to feed everyone? About as much use as a porcelain golf ball. A tax cut, moreover which, depending on whom you believe, will cost the Exchequer between a £100 million or £3 billion, sufficient methinks, to pay for the research. But hey, I could be wrong.

But we can’t afford this research? Didn’t one David Cameron, the former honorary president of The Oxfordshire Beekeepers Association, giving evidence to the same committee not so long ago, say,”If we don’t look after our bee populations, very, very serious consequences will follow.” After that performance in front of the committee, No.10 felt compelled to issue the following statement, clarifying his position “The prime minister is a strong advocate of beekeeping in his constituency and as he said in the house, it’s important we look after our bee population.” Only a skeptic would draw one’s attention to the careful wording of that statement, especially “ a strong advocate of beekeeping in his constituency” which carefully avoiding saying anything that might suggest advocacy for beekeeping beyond his constituency.

Step forward, then Caroline Lucas, who retorted to Boyd, “It just worries me greatly if alarm bells aren’t ringing throughout government because we can’t afford to do the research we need to do to see if we’re at great risk.”

Exactly.

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