Exhibit A: the comments on an Observer article claiming that climate change exists. All in agreement with the Channel 4 lunacy about climate change being a big hoax, plus personal invective at the author and RANDOM capitalisations to SHOW that there is GREAT CONSPIRACY afoot. Thank you, representative sample.
Exhibit B: A poll on the website of the Sussex Express, whose question is “Do you think the Council tax has gone up too much?”. Amazingly 88% of people think it has.
If you ever doubted the case for reform of the House of Lords, take a look at this PDF which bubbled up onto the frontpage of Parliament.uk today.
The document is the notice of an election – yes, an election – for a Tory member of the House of Lords. It’s to replace one of the hereditaries who died the other day, and the most extraordinary thing is that the electorate is 47 other hereditary peers.
No, wait, the most extraordinary thing is that the people eligible to stand for election are only other Tory hereditary peers.
No, no. Surely the most extraordinary thing is that the election result will be decided on by proportional representation.
Must be great to be a hereditary peer – you get to stand in a restricted pool, to be selected by a restricted electorate, using a more representative system than that for the Commons.
Remember that survey I mentioned on the Democratic Society’s website? You know, the one that would help us map how different political opinions relate to each other? Well, we’re up to 2,990 responses – and you could be the 3,000th respondent. Not that you’d win anything. Or even know. But … you know … would be kinda cool.
Anyway, here’s that link again.
Downing Street is running an new online petitions page. Here is a selection of open petitions.
Martin Kettle in a Guardian article unpicks some new Eurobarometer surveys that suggest that the British trust less than anyone else in Europe. The EU, politicians, the media, corporations – they are all apprarently a bunch of lying scumbags.
The Cuba Solidarity Campaign’s FAQ asks “is Cuba democratic?” Realising that the simple answer might be a little discouraging to their supporters in western democracies, they then take 1,187 words to say “no”.
The Today Prorgramme is once again running its public vote on ‘a law we’d want to repeal’, and like so much of the programme these days, it’s completely uninformed pub politics. They’ve had people on the programme making more or less (usually less) cogent arguments about various candidates, and have now whittled the long list down to six.
You can vote on them here, though to be honest I wouldn’t encourage it. Indeed, I wouldn’t particularly encourage visiting the page, as there’s very little information either pro or con on any of the options: just audio clips of people condemning the laws.
And what are the laws in question? Two of them are perhaps reasonable candidates – the provision to ban protestors outside Parliament, and the Act of Settlement that prevents Catholics becoming monarchs. Two are pressure-group related – the Hunting Act and the Dangerous Dogs Act. And the final two are ill-informed bits of nonsense that neither the voters or the programme presenters appear to understand – the Bloody EU telling us what to do, I hate the bloody French Act of 1972, and the And they let out the black blokes what do murders but they won’t let me do fifty in a thirty zone, bloody human rights act, innit Act of 1998.
The worst of it that this circle-knee-jerk is presented as some form of grassroots democracy – a way for ‘the people’ (or at least that microset of them that listen to the Today programme) to kick back at the excesses of the ruling class. No matter that understanding the EU and our relations with it is a lecture series not a soundbite, or that arguing against Human Rights is perhaps a little 1930s Germany. Why would discussion or information matter when you have prejudice? What’s the point of treating the people with respect when you can have Oxbridge-educated radio producers pat you on the back for how democratic you are and then ignore you the other 364 days of the year?
I’m a conscientious abstainer.
Helen Cammack joins the call to the Democratic Society’s question calibration test. We are almost at 3,000 answers: let’s drive that data on down! Take the test.
Congratulations to Andrew Hardie of the Democratic Society, who has been given an grant by UnLtd to progress his work on a participation and engagement web application.
I’m working with a few others on a new non-profit to re-engage people with politics. As our first bit of work, we are trying to work up a set of axes to use in describing users’ political profiles. To create a map of opinions and axes, I’ve set up a small quiz, in the format “if someone thinks X, where would you place them on a scale Y to Z”.
Take it here.