Tag - politics

Welcome to The Perfect Curve.

There are 14 posts in total.

The Crumbling of Parliament

simon gray — 2019-04-05, 09:31:10 - 432 words

So everybody laughed yesterday at the House of Commons being suspended yesterday because of water gushing in through the ceiling. But here's the thing.

The Palace of Westminster is an historic building, part of our nation's heritage. Like all our other historic buildings it's supposed to be held in trust and protected, just like the buildings and monuments from ancient history have been by their civilised custodians.

The occupants of the Palace of Westminster have know for years that the building is literally crumbling around them - not only do all the utilities within a working building need upgrading, the masonry itself is falling apart - on a near-monthly basis a piece of the stonework will fall off and come crashing to the ground. But the elected occupants have for years prevaricated about coming to a decision on what to do about it. Everybody knows what actually needs to happen is they all need to decant to somewhere else entirely for a couple of years whilst a relatively short and relatively cheap complete repair and upgrade job is done, all in one go. But a sizeable number of MPs don't want to do that, they want to instead spend a couple of [...]

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Brexit - what should happen next

simon gray — 2019-01-16, 09:16:41 - 297 words

The country and Parliament have failed to agree, and it's pretty clear they never will agree; the wheels have fallen off the Brexit train not least because the people who voted for and campaigned to leave have been unable to agree amongst themselves what 'leave' actually means. Here's what should happen next:

Revoke Article 50, make it clear to the Leave folks that the matter is not ended, spend the next two years trying to do what David Cameron failed to do at the beginning of 2016 (whilst the EU might be a bit more predisposed to grant the concessions they told him to whistle for back then, having seen that the UK actually is stupid enough to jump off a cliff if it so desires), also spend the next two years fixing some of the problems - including the UK's own botched implementations of EU directives and regulations - which led to the slender Leave victory in the first place, put the matter to The People again in a binding referendum with a properly fairly agreed franchise and a realistic enhanced majority threshold (55% / 45% seems reasonable enough), and implement any subsequent second Leave victory in an orderly manner [...]

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Brexit, omelettes, and eggs

simon gray — 2018-10-17, 07:44:06 - 759 words

This, by or via Facebook user Jane Cody, is currently being widely shared around Facebook; reproduced here as fair use to allow people to see it without having to login to Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155478789241572&id=651226571

LEAVER: I want an omelette.

REMAINER: Right. It’s just we haven’t got any eggs.

LEAVER: Yes, we have. There they are. [HE POINTS AT A CAKE]

REMAINER: They’re in the cake.

LEAVER: Yes, get them out of the cake, please.

REMAINER: But we voted in 1974 to put them into a cake.

LEAVER: Yes, but that cake has got icing on it. Nobody said there was going to be icing on it.

REMAINER: Icing is good.

LEAVER: And there are raisins in it. I don’t like raisins. Nobody mentioned raisins. I demand another vote.

DAVID CAMERON ENTERS.

DAVID CAMERON: OK.

DAVID CAMERON SCARPERS.

LEAVER: Right, where’s my omelette?

REMAINER: I told you, the eggs are in the cake.

LEAVER: Well, get them out.

EU: It’s our cake.

JEREMY CORBYN: Yes, get them out now.

REMAINER: I have absolutely no idea how to get them out. Don’t you know how to get them out?

LEAVER: Yes! You just get them out and then you make an omelette.

REMAINER: But how?! Didn’t you give this any thought?

LEAVER: Saboteur! You’re talking eggs down. We could make omelettes before the eggs [...]

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It could be the dead wot won it

simon gray — 2017-06-08, 09:02:15 - 393 words

According to the polls - varying widely between an increased majority for the Conservatives down to a hung parliament, with one little-reported poll (done by an ad agency rather than a traditional polling organisation, but with a track record of getting its guesses right) even showing a Labour win, the election is too close to call. The fact of there being such a wide variation in the predictions in the final polls from each organisation is evidence enough it's too close to call, even with some polls predicting a big Conservative win. 

So of course people are hanging their hopes on the poll which shows the result they'd rather see, and hanging their hopes on the demographic which is mostly likely to vote for the result they'd rather see. 'The old could win it', Conservative supporters say, 'The young could win it', Labour supporters say. 

With it this close to call, there's one demographic nobody has thought of who could win it. The dead. 

Eh?

In the olden days it was a pretty tricky process to get a postal vote - you had to satisfy your local elections office, and even prove so, that it would be physically impossible for you to get to [...]

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Political campaigning

simon gray — 2017-05-25, 10:06:16 - 217 words

Here's my handy cut out and keep guide to effective political campaigning:

When campaigning one needs to realise who one is campaigning to - you're not campaigning to committed supporters of the other side, you're campaigning to uncommitted supporters, or undecideds. Whilst it's unlikely that party-supporting Facebook groups will contain many undecideds, there's a reasonable chance that they might contain uncommitteds.

What this means is that when campaigning - whether that's going into the lair of the other side or what one posts into one's own timeline - you need to craft your message in such a way that it'll appeal to the uncommitted / undecideds. 

Calling the other side a bunch of nasty loony idiots, or posting pictures of their leader looking ugly next to pictures of your leader looking inspirational, might make you feel good and get you lots of Likes from your side's supports, but as a campaigning method it's probably the worst thing you can do. Insulting the uncommitteds on the other side is only going to turn them into committeds, and make the undecideds more likely to swing away from your side than towards it.

#politics 

[...]

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The failure of politics

simon gray — 2016-11-05, 17:22:31 - 97 words

Whilst the referendum itself was David Cameron's hubris, the constitutional controversy which has come about this week is entirely the fault of each and every one of the 650 MPs and 812 lords who were too bone idle or too incompetent to give the Referendum Bill the proper scrutiny during its passage through parliament to ensure all the Is were dotted and the Ts were crossed. No wonder the overriding theme of every Adam Curtis documentary the last 15 years has been about the failure of politics to organise society. 

#politics #AVeryBritishRevolution

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The UK's EU Referendum Will Help You Lose Your Faith In Politics

simon gray — 2016-06-14, 19:00:01 - 1908 words

Back in May 2014 after the results of the elections to the European Parliament, I speculated that I didn't believe  that the whole of the 17% of people who voted for UKIP were actually the xenophobic bigots my fellow left-liberal friends were painting them as; I speculated that most of them were probably simply ignorant (in the unaware sense) of what the EU is, and ignorant of the true nature of immigration into the UK, and simply wanting to give the Tories a bit of a kicking. This was a year before the General Election, when all the polls were expecting a year later to see a win for Labour (a tight one if not a comfortable one), and there was no serious expectation at the time that a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union would be happening any time soon. My response was rather than complaining about so many people voting UKIP, wouldn't it be nice instead if we could spend the forthcoming year  actually explaining properly what the EU is and isn't, how it works, emphasising the real benefits of its existence and our membership of it, and indeed acknowledging the downsides as well.

Two years [...]

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The code behind this site is a bit of an abandoned project; I originally had lofty ambitions of it being the start of a competitor for Twitter and Facebook, allowing other people to also use it turning it into a bit of a social network. Needless to say I got so far with it and thought who did I think I was! Bits of it don't work as well as I'd like it to work - at some point I'm going to return to it and do a complete rebuild according to modern standards.