More Zonkyness

Category: Politics

  • Would Real Left Wing Policies Really Be Bad For Labour?

    With all the fuss about Jeremy Corbyn being nominated for election as the Labour party leader, anyone would think that the mainstream (read "parliamentary") Labour party is terrified that the slightest whiff of a genuine left-wing agenda by Labour will make them unelectable.

    Perhaps so. Anyone who remembers the height of the Thatcher era when Labour was unelectable could well be worried that Labour might again make itself unelectable. And some of that distant past unelectability may well have been caused by the policies.

    But not necessarily the 'left-wing' part of those policies.

    In the recent election approximately 1/3 of the electorate chose to vote for the Tories which means that 2/3 did not. And that does not inlcude those who failed to find somebody worth voting for. And given the widespread revulsion at the early plans of what the Tories plan to inflict on us indicates that people could well be interested in a genuine alternative.

    And that alternative is not "Conservative-light" (I refuse to use the trendy spelling of "light"; apart from anything else, there's a word for someone as old as I am trying to be trendy … and that word is "pathetic").

    There is nothing more repulsive than a politician pandering to the lowest common denominator, and modifying their principles to make them more appealing to "middle-England". Perhaps this is why Labour is loosing their core work-class support.

    Labour should be for the working classes, but the working classes including everyone who isn't a member of the idle rich which includes many people who don't traditionally think of themselves as working class. Such as doctors, solicitors, surveyors, bank managers (not "bankers"), etc. 

    Take a look at the results of the Green party – a genuincely progressive party with left-wing policies – who went from 1% share of the votes to 3.8%. Despite being an unelectable fringe party with no hope of being elected, they massively increased their share of the vote. 

    Perhaps a Labour party with sensible left-wing policies would not be electable, but at least it would be honest. And who knows? Maybe it would be electable after 5 years of Tory mismanagement and punishment for those who weren't born with a silver spoon.

    Elements Have Their Way

     

     

  • UK Wealth Inequality

    The usual response when someone brings up the subject of the rich being just too rich, is to mention the "politics of envy".  Which is a great way of suppressing a reasonable discussion of the matter; anyone would think that the phrase was invented by the rich to protect their excessive wealth. Most people would agree that those who work hard, are creative, and contribute towards the nation's wealth should get a bit more than a chav living on benefits.

    Fair enough, but they already do – and far more than people realise. And not all of the rich do contribute a great deal towards the nation; many of them are merely sitting on growing piles of wealth.

  • Welsh Parliament To Ban Public Vaping

    And Just How Dumb Are Welsh Politicians?

    According to the news this morning, the Welsh assembly is to prohibit vaping in enclosed public spaces in the same way that smoking is banned; a bit of cut&paste on the old law. You might expect a moron in a hurry to look at vaping, and say "It looks like smoking so it must be bad." but you should be able to expect that politicians would make a decision based on the available evidence.

    However it appears that Welsh politicians have more in common with a moron in a hurry than an idealised poltician.

    Before I carry on, let me explain that despite being a vaper (and ex-smoker), if I were to live in Wales, this ban would make practically no difference to me. I don't vape at work (in the office!), in pubs, shops, on trains, or anywhere you can expect the Welsh ban to take effect. I do sometimes wish there was a vaping lounge I could go to on occasions.

    The main reason this is such a stupid ban is that it treats vaping as if it were as harmful to the health as smoking. There is not a single serious person who would claim that vaping is as dangerous as smoking. And treating it the same as smoking tells smokers (remember the moron in a hurry) that there's no point in switching to vaping instead because vaping is just as harmful.

    There is an argument that whilst the risks are unknown for sure (there is no evidence that secondary vaping is harmful; and plenty of studies that show that secondary vaping is harmless [1], [2], [3]), that it would be nice to stop vaping in public enclosed spaces; just not on the same level as smoking. For example :-

    • Allow pubs to decide whether they allow vaping or not. And to encourage a bit of trendy localism: Why not allow the pub regulars to vote on whether vaping should be allowed or not?
    • Ban vaping in restarants (some of the strange flavours could easily put people off their food) but allow vaping in a lobby area or other ventilated but isolated space.
    • Allow other work-places to set up isolated "vaping lounges".

    The intention is to minimise a probably non-existent risk to non-vapers whilst letting vapers get away with just a bit more than smokers. 

    Amusingly enough, by consigning vapers to the same sin bin as the smokers, these dumb politicians open themselves up to a class action suit in the future – why should I have to endure the risk of secondary smoking?

    There are two daft arguments that I heard used this morning which indicate that some of the Welsh politicians realise just how dumb they're being :-

    1. Allowing vaping in enclosed public spaces normalises smoking. It doesn't normalise smoking unless you're a moron in a hurry – it's quite easy to tell the difference between vapour and smoke. The smell of vapour is far nicer! It "normalises" vaping as a better choice than smoking.
    2. It acts as a gateway to smoking. No; it's a gateway out of smoking. 

    Even if you were to disagree with my assessments of these two arguments, the fact they are being made at all indicates just how poor the argument for banning vaping in public really is. 

  • Bring Back Hunting? Sure, But With A Couple Of Small Changes …

    Apparently there is some senile old fart who has decided to try and turn the clocks back to the 18th century and wants to bring back hunting with packs of ferrocious animals desperate to rip apart cute fluffy animals (with the assistence of a few hounds). It would seem that wannabee toffs have been nagging their Tory glove-puppets and David Cameron has caved in to their whispers.

    For those who were too young back in the day, or for those who have forgotten, we used to let inbred morons ride around the countryside on horses (often crashing through land they didn't have a right of way over) with a gang of yapping hounds chasing around something they could kill – foxes, deer, peasants (well perhaps the later wasn't too common). During the Great Debate on hunting (which wasn't that great really as their excuses for hunting were really quite pathetic), the hunting lobby tried to convince everyone that they were only hunting for the good of agriculture. 

    Which had us all rolling aboutt the floor laughing of course.

    Perhaps the most ridiculous comment about the prospect of removing the ban on hunting comes from the Countryside Alliance who clain that removing the ban will eliminate the risk of their supporters from being prosecuted for "accidental" fox killings whilst they are playing at hunting. A bit like claiming that murder should be made legal because if I fire off a shotgun repeatedly in a crowded supermarket, I might "accidentally" kill someone.

    It's strange how easy it was to ban certain cruel "sports" (such as cock-fighting and bear baiting) which were more popular with the working class whereas the "sport" of the wannabee toffs is trying to make a comeback. Anyone would suspect that class differences are still important today.

    But yes let's bring back hunting with a couple of small changes :-

    1. Hunts have to turn in their hounds in favour of Chihuahuas.
    2. They have to release and hunt Grizzlies.

    That should either make hunting less popular, or at least reduce the number of hunters to an appropriate level (zero).

    Just to pierce a few pre-conceptions about those opposed to hunting :-

    1. I don't like animals much.
    2. Whilst I live in a city, I grew up in a semi-rural area

  • UK Election 2015: What Went Wrong?

    Well if you are a Tory supporter nothing went wrong; indeed you must be cock-a-hoop given that you have a Tory government when 64% of the voters wanted something else! But if you are against the Tories, you have to be wondering what went wrong.

    The most obvious problem is the broken medieval electoral system we have. For practical reasons it made sense in the days of horse-drawn carts to ask each area to appoint a representative in parliament. But today we should be able to design an electoral system where MPs represent people not places, and where everybody can say their vote helped appoint someone to parliament.

    As an example if all the votes for the Green party were distributed amongst the smallest UK consituencies (you did realise they are different sizes didn't you?), they would have ended up with 23 MPs instead of just 1! The Tories would end up with 240 seats rather than 331, which basically means that the Tories are very good at distributing their supporters.

    In my case, my vote went towards a loser which means I'm "represented" by a politician whose policies and attitudes I find totally repulsive. There is nobody in parliament that I voted for. And the same applies to a huge swathe of the population who are now feeling alienated by the whole process.

    And that is something that can and should be changed.

    The alienation caused by the first past the post system is probably one of the causes of the low turnout; what is the point in voting if you live in a "safe" seat?

    The most obvious difference in this election is the wholesale take-over of Scotland by the SNP, which surprised everyone. Which leads the new Tory government to a bit of a problem – with just one MP in Scotland, they essentially have no mandate to govern Scotland. 

    And even in England, the Tory majority is nothing to crow about – a majority of 5 is what would have been called a "fragile majority" in the past. A Tory leader with such a slim majorty is likely to run into problems if they try and ram through a radical programme.

    The Tories managed to persuade many of us that a bit more self-flagellation is necessary, and punishing the poor and unfortunate is good for the country.

    The effect on the Liberal Democrats is both surprising and entirely predictable. Joining a coalition with the Tories was always a mistake in terms of future elections – it was always seen as helping to put the Tories into power, and many Liberals were far less accepting of this than they would have been to see the party join a coalition with Labour. What the Liberal Democrats failed to sell was the idea that their presence in government helped to amerliorate the Tory extremes.

    Labour's failure was probably down to several things :-

    1. The failure to demolish the myth of Labour's economic incompetance that "caused" the recession. It was the global failure of the banking system that caused that failure. Labour's spending was actually reasonably restrained until the need to rescue the banks arose.
    2. The failure to come up with a true alternative to the austerity plan of the Tories. Given the level of government debt that would be a hard job, but it could be started by pointing out (quite rightly) that simplistic austerity makes the debt problem worse.
    3. The inability to persuade that most voters are actually "working class". There is a historic problem with the class system by which people think of the working class as cloth-capped horned handed manual workers of one kind or another. In reality, everybody who works for a living is working class.

    Of course whinging about it is not going to change things. We have five years of Tory mismanagement and punishing austerity to accept now.