Foreign Perspectives

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.

All being well, I’ll be off to Mount Stewart with the school tomorrow though I’ll not know for sure about it ’til later today.

The problem is that two of the normal class helpers are stranded thanks to the grounding of the planes but then they’re opening up the airways again later today, or at least in some areas they are. Thus, I don’t know if they’ll be back today. It’ll really mess up James if I’m not there though as he’s really set on having either me or Wendy along with him.

One other downside is that the forecast isn’t looking too good for Wednesday at the moment and Mount Stewart doesn’t seem like a great place to be if it’s raining.

Except for several volcanoes of course.

The problem is that in recent years we seem to have had such a series of global problems that I’m sure that many people figure that it just can’t get any worse. Starting with the economic woes we seemed to be teetering on the abyss a number of times yet it just seemed to get worse for quite a while, far surpassing the worst that anyone thought they’d see at the outset of the difficulties. At least the swine flu seemed to be a non-runner in the disaster stakes. Yes, people died, but they all seemed to be people who’d have died with any flu that came along and the numbers overall, so far, were less than in many normal flu epidemics.

We’re not quite at the end of the volcano problem as I write this so who knows when that will truly end? In the 1820s it ran for over a year but, of course, none of the modern technology that we take for granted was in place at that time. Right now, nobody knows just when the eruptions will stop and there’s talk of another volcano in Iceland going the very same way (a bigger one too).

What we’ve not seen, yet, though is a really major solar flare. Little ones happen all the time but really big ones have only happened in other stars and, so far, there doesn’t seem to be any way to predict whether or not they’ll happen one day with our own sun. Still, at least that’s one natural disaster that we’d not need to worry about too much as within 24 hours we’d all have been wiped out.

Puts the last year in some context, eh?

The cancellation of pretty much all air travel throughout Europe this week has shown up just how radically different people are when they need to take responsibility for themselves.

This was a pretty much unprecedented event. With 9/11 the flight cancellations were short and for a known period. This time around, they’re for a completely unknown period and the way that this period has been extended seems to almost have been designed to create the maximum amount of stress for all concerned. If it had been announced at the outset that flights were off for the next week then those affected could have reacted better. Being stuck in a foreign airport for a day isn’t an unknown experience but a week is a whole different ball game.

Thus, people have had to reach the point all by themselves where they needed to say that enough was enough and it was time for them to work out an alternative means of getting to where-ever they needed to be. That’s hard to do. Few people decided to search for that alternative right away and those that did seemed to end up doing crazy things like spending a thousand pounds or more on a taxi when clearly a train would have been cheaper and more practical. We’re seeing the effects on the ferries now for the second wave who have now decided that they really need to get home: early on the ferries could easily cope, now that’s not so much the case obviously.

However, I suspect that there are still considerable numbers of people waiting for “someone” to do “something” for them and get them home. That’s unlikely to happen. The majority of those stranded will have gotten to their destinations by way of a discount airline and one of the features of such airlines is that there is little or no slack in terms of staff. Even with the best will in the world, it seems unlikely that they could get everyone from what’s usually an isolated airport to another isolated airport: as we all know, the transport infrastructure around the airports that they use is almost non-existant.

So, how long will these people wait around? Will they still be there this time next week if the planes still aren’t flying? I suspect that quite a number will be if some of those on the phone-in programmes is anything to go by. For instance, during the week one distraught lady phoned in to complain that the airline wouldn’t fly her with her severely disabled daughter. She wanted the plane to take her regardless of any grounding: her reasoning seemed to be that since her daughter was severely disabled then she had the absolute right to get on the plane regardless of anything else. This was someone who was in Paris and who would have had no problem going by train if she’d just paused to think about it.

How many other people are thinking that this will go away in a week or two and are already booking their flights for the bank holidays in May? Quite a lot if the pricing on some routes is anything to go by: they’ve gone up almost ten fold in the last two weeks.