Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

In principle, it sounded like a good idea. Other countries have organised debates between their potential leaders in the run-up to an election, so why not do it in the UK too?

For one thing, by the time they’d gotten around to running with the idea, the UK had saddled itself with three separate regional governments in addition to the Westminster parliament and therefore there needed to be four separate debates running in the pre-election period. Not a big deal to be sure but it meant that the heavy-hitters in terms of presenters were snapped up by the main debate so the other debates seemed very much a down market affair in comparison.

The biggest problem though is that we don’t actually elect those leaders directly. They’re selected from amongst all the people we’ve already elected around the country in the regional assemblies and in Westminster. Those regional assemblies are a problem too because their election periods aren’t in sync with those at Westminster so there wasn’t a lot of point in having the regional debates on air now.

But then it descended into silliness with the little worm thing going across the screen as the second debate progressed. What was the point of that? It was driven by people the TV companies had selected from amongst the “I want to be on TV” crowd (we noticed several on the programme who’d clearly joined that bandwagon some time ago). That in itself wouldn’t be so bad but it ended up with a reliability that must be close to zero given that the TV people had “balanced” the audience controlling the thing thus making it highly skewed towards minorities (the “token white” syndrome) but did they really think that everyone would remain alert to what was being said throughout the long and tedious debate?

Perhaps if it had been a debate, they might have but it seemed more like isolated presentations for the most part, particularly in the regional debates.

All it really showed was that the leaders are quite good at making presentations and that leaders of parties with no real hope of forming the next government can really let their total lack of responsibility run wild.

Last night there was the choice between watching round 2 of the UK wide debates or, for those of us outside England, watching our own local guys debating instead.

In the end we opted for the local guys simply because the UK-wide debate was getting really boring with all the expected reactions trotted out on cue. There’s only so much interest you can drum up to watch a fairly calm debate: what’s needed is a bit more fighting between the parties I think as there didn’t seem to be any real depth of feeling coming across this time around.

Our local debates were even more calm and collected if anything (there was the one with the main leaders, another with the also-rans). As in the national debates, the parties that have no real power had all the wonderful ideas to put forward but with no worries about taking responsibility of implementing whatever grandiose ideas that they could come up with. As usual, the greens came across as wanting to take us all back to that calmer and gentler time that was the middle ages when we could all grow our own food, didn’t pollute too much and died horrible deaths at an early age. They generally don’t mention that last bit for some reason.

There wasn’t even much following up of the scandals that the two major party leaders had been involved in which seemed a shame in some ways as it was the only part where the level of debate even approached an interesting level.

Why are they all so boring? Everyone says that they want to encourage people to become interesting in politics but they don’t seem to do anything substantial about it. That’s a shame because it is interesting and affects us all: it’s just that the debate format being used at the moment just isn’t a suitable means to generate that interest.

Going by the debate last night, immigration would be a very easy thing to control (so, why hasn’t Labour done so already?).

However, it’s not nearly so simple as it appeared in the debate. The problem specifically is in the measurement of immigration and the definition of an immigrant. As far as the immigration goes, counting is a very dodgy affair as it relies on people falling into normal categories so that they can actually be counted. The snag is that significant numbers of people don’t fall into neat little boxes like that. Take the travelling communities that seem to be forming an increasingly sizeable chunk of immigrants (or at least the more noticeable ones): in some cases a number of these people will escape the statistical net. Wendy, for example, lived in France for over five years yet never received any official letters and therefore was never recorded as officially having been there (which, I’m sure, will cause us problems at some point).

The definition of what a migrant is is quite difficult too. In most peoples’ eyes, it’s anyone not British (though the Irish would take issue with that!) yet on official stats, it’s only those who are not European. Therein lies the problem as significant numbers of “problem” communities have arisen in some areas of the UK consisting entirely of European migrants from economically poorer regions of Europe. In fact, they’re the kind of people who wouldn’t get in with a normal visa if they needed one. Some councils have so many of these non-migrants that the quality of local services is dropping dramatically as they simply don’t have the resources to deal with such an influx of people in such a short time.

The snag is that the number of these non-migrants aren’t something that can be controlled by the UK government. All the talk of schemes in Australia and Canada where immigrants are allocated to regions within the country is irrelevant in these cases. Just as the Australian government can’t tell a Sydney born person that they have to live in Western Australia so the UK government can’t tell a Bulgarian that they have to live in Yorkshire.

In reality the problem is one of Europe’s making. The countries most recently added in to Europe had economies that were just too far out of whack with the countries that were already in Europe. The net effect of that is that clearly it was to the advantage of citizens of those countries to move (not migrate) to richer European countries and naturally many did exactly that. European problems need European solutions but the snag in this case that the only short term solution would be to set migration quotas which would be contrary to the free movement ethos and difficult to implement, alongside a long term move to elevate the poorer economies to the level of the richer ones or, rather, to speed that up as it will happen in due course.

Physically disabled people obviously need a bit of a hand in the ever larger car parks outside major supermarkets these days but the problem is in identifying those people who actually need that bit of a hand.

At the moment, the identification is purely through possession of one of the “disabled parking” badges on a car. The problem is that these seem to be handed out like confetti with many people possessing them who clearly don’t need them but get them purely through reason of them being old. Yes, some old people need them but those are disabled old people, not those that are simply old and see it as their right to have one of those disabled badges. It’s as bad with the parent and child (formerly mother and child as it remains in some places). Yes, you need a wider bay to unload the kids into a pram, but you don’t need a wider bay for teenagers (unless they’re so stupid that they just swing the doors out).

What’s really needed are two stickers: a “parking close” one and a “wide bay” one.

At the moment, there seem to be very few people in our local supermarket who would need the “parking close” one which is as you would expect. After all, even if you parked in the closest disabled or child parking spot to the door, you’d still have to travel several hundred yards within the store to get to the back and would probably end up travelling something like a mile or more if you went round all the aisles. Thus “disabled” people who claim that they need to park close to the shop really only need to do so if they have a wheelchair in which case they actually need a “wide bay” sticker.

It’s obviously different in smaller shops but for supermarkets it appears that a massive reduction in the “disabled” slots (and probably in the parent & child ones too) would help those people who really need them.

One of the most striking things about the Gordon Brown entourage this morning was just how staged it was.

Although he passed numerous people along the way, strangely his entourage of supposedly the normal public were about as diverse a mix of races as you could possibly manage to collect anywhere in the UK. Of course, they weren’t really the normal public at all: the majority of these were labour party supporters bused in especially to make sure that Gordon Brown came across as being attractive to all races represented in the UK today.

Incredibly cynical, wasn’t it?

Yes, the UK is now, as it has been for centuries, a multi-cultural country but do we really need artificially created entourages to try to show one party or another is the one to best represent the UK today? I think not.