Month: May 2005

Postal bollocks

Lots of scaremongering and artificial outrage on postal voting from Boris Johnson and (particularly) Ian Hislop. You would think they didn’t want people to vote.

So there we are

Polling day is over, and the counting is underway. The exit poll suggests a pretty sticky night for TB, but I think the marginals will be all over place.

Had a very pleasant day after voting – it always gives me a warm, satisfied feeling. I wonder whether voting is like a brisk walk (to be done regularly to keep you healthy) or like Christmas (more than one a year is bad for you).

Bomb the base

In an otherwise unremarkable news story about the election, the NYT comments (in the second para):

The voting seemed not to have been disrupted by an explosion outside the building housing the British Consulate in New York just after polls opened across the country at 7 a.m. local time.

Well, no. Why would it be affected by something of slight interest 3,000 miles away? To come over a bit Cyril Connolly – small explosion in New York, not many voters bothered.

Link: New York Times.

Election day has arrived

There is an interesting piece in the LA Times (reg required) on the British general election from an American point of view. Is there a quantum of nastiness in an election campaign – and do we Brits outsource it to Paxman and Humphrys? Perhaps that’s why (with some exceptions, Mr Michael Howard) the political debate is on a slightly more polite level. Or it could just be that we’re in-bred Europeans, after all.

And so to vote.

Talking therapy

There is a good article in this week’s New York Review of Books, by Alan Ryan. He’s reviewing Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity, and in the review, he writes:

No doubt there are some beliefs we ought not to subscribe to without the fiercest testing, but they are few in number. What is true of beliefs is true of our other commitments; most of what we want, hope for and think right or wrong we have to take on trust. […] We move from babyhood to adulthood by acquiring habitual allegiances to people., places and values, and that only when that process is accomplished do we have the ability to pause and reflect on which of these allegiances to retain or reject. If moral autonomy meant that all of our allegiances were adopted in the first place only after rational scrutiny, none of us would be morally autonomous.

Well, absolutely. At the moment, when every day is opinion polling day, it’s worth remembering that one of the greatest virtues of democracy is not the voting at the end of the process, but the discussion in the middle.

The BBC and other TV broadcasters come into their own in an election period. Detailed discussions of the issues, proper coverage of the different political parties, debates and public meetings. A lot of the best stuff flows from statutory requirements of impartiality, but let’s not be churlish.

All of this enables people to take part in the political process, and find out about the issues if they want to. It makes choices more rational at the end of the process, and makes the results of those choices better even for the losing side. Now can we have it more than once every four years?