The third installment in my Political Apathy series of posts is here and will follow the same format as its predecessors: a review (merciless slaughtering) of the incumbent government, followed by a quick look at the state of affairs in the constituency of Brighton Pavilion.

One of the hypotheses that I have offered previously is that Gordon Brown is intent on becoming infamous. He knows that he isn’t getting re-elected, indeed might not even make it to the next election as leader of the Labour Party and has decided to guarantee his place in history by demonstrating ever increasing levels of ineptitude. Even ignoring his inability to criticize the illegal exploits of the U.S. in Pakistan (breaking news indicates that another winged deathbot has been dispatched into Pakistan to do what winged deathbots do – fly and kill things) and his willingness to blame everybody but himself (the Chancellor of Britain for most of the previous decade) for the state of the British economy, I still think he is succeeding in his quest. The most poignant evidence of this being the reinstatement of Mandy into the cabinet, a decision which requires no heaping of scorn, mockery and/or sarcasm from me.

Before writing off Mr Brown and Labour as irrelevant, I would just like to rejoice in the glorious moment that occurred on Question Time this week. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was rendered utterly speechless when someone in attendance suggested that Mrs Smith is brilliant evidence of how out of touch the government is and that should their poor performance continue, the electorate would be all to willing to “kick them out”. The fact that Jacqui Smith proved a less popular figure than Janet Street-Porter suffices to prove how poor her performance was.

I don’t really have much to say about the Tories this time around. Dave hasn’t really fallen under my cross-hairs much in recent weeks, other than a fleeting glimpse of some Torie party conference where he said lots without saying anything at all (a skill that is cherished by politicians), whilst being flanked by Mr Osbourne and Mr Hague, who coincidentally looked more like Dave’s personal security than part of the Shadow Cabinet. Kudos to Mayor Johnson though, his decisiveness in getting rid of Sir Ian Blair should be applauded (a decision maker making decisions!) and his speech at the aforementioned conference, containing a combined one-two combo on the Governator and Ken Livingstone, was superb.

Chris Huhne also popped up on my political radar. In my opinion, freedom is paramount to life. It was nice to see Mr Huhne standing up for free speech by pointing out that Dr Fredrick Toben had not committed any crime under British law and that his arrest was not necessary. Now Dr Toben’s anti-Semitic views and denial of the Holocaust make him a douchebag (great word) of monumental proportions, an abhorrent little man, that should he spontaneously combust, I would not extinguish even with a full bladder, but they do not make him a criminal in this country.

What of the local politics scene? Well, no more candidates seem to have been confirmed for this area (still no Lib Dem candidate).

David Bull, the Conservative candidate, has still not done anything worth mentioning. No blog posts or news since October 2007, in this case, no news is not good news. I can’t honestly believe that any professional person would sanction a website and blog that serves only to advertise how stale and static they are.

Nancy Platts has at least made an effort on the blog/news front. The last update was August, which I still find unacceptable, but is certainly better than David Bull. Nancy gets brownie points for supporting the improvement of the Level and recognizing that wearing baggy jeans and a hoodie doesn’t make young people criminals. Still, she gets plenty of Brown points for being associated with the current regime and so is not really an alternative and that is what I am looking for, an alternative, something a bit different.

The logical decision is to vote for Caroline Lucas and the Greens. She cares about the same issues as me, in particular Animal Rights, something that I have never even heard mentioned by any of the other candidates. She isn’t Labour, an obvious but important piece of information. She updates her blog, so I can track her progress. Think about it, I have no evidence to even suggest that David Bull is still wandering the earth, voting for Nancy Platts would mean more Labour (and I don’t think I can stand any more of them), so even if I was using a simple process of elimination, the Green Party would still get my vote!

The world we live in is not black and white, nor even grey scale, it exists in full infinite bit colour. To my mind, decision making is about logically considering the colours, quantizing as necessary, and essentially deciding whether something is black or white. Without this certainty, the world as we know it would not be able to function. A computer is completely dependant on knowing if something is a 1 or a 0, can you imagine how crippled and slow it would become if it spent the majority of its time umm-ing and ah-ing: “well it looks a bit like a 1, but it could be a 0″. I’m not saying this process is easy, some find it very difficult indeed and that is why we elect leaders and appoint managers – people that are able to get off the fence and make the decision, black or white.

Now the dilemma here is that not everyone will arrive at the same decision, some people might decide that the colour is red, some will see it as green (I’m colour blind, so this metaphor is particularly relevant). You cannot possibly get everyone to agree. Again, we deal with this problem by electing leaders and appointing managers to make the decision for us and hopefully they make a decision that the majority of us agree with (although this isn’t always the case).

Now my problem with this process, is that in my experience, the people who are elected/appointed seem to suffer from an horrific affliction, manifested by a complete inability to make a decision. When the time comes to make a decision, a look erupts across their faces like an angry bee has become entangled in their pants, “But it’s hard”, they moan. That really isn’t news to the rest of us, we already knew that, that’s kind of why we decided that we needed someone to make the decisions in the first place. Why, oh why, do these people become so shit scared of making a decision that someone, somewhere is *guaranteed* not to agree with, simply because someone, somewhere is guaranteed not to agree with it?

A great example of this problem was observed by me this weekend. Gordon Brown, the elected (no he wasn’t! – another post, another time) decision maker for Great Britain was being interviewed by Murdoch’s minions. They asked him about the United States recent excursions over the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan. They asked if it was right or wrong for the United States to conduct military operations in Pakistan, given that they had not been given permission to do so. Surely we (Britain) should be applying pressure to the U.S. in order to get them to respect the sovereignty of a fellow ally? “Well”, he uttered, “it’s not something that we [Britain] would engage in”. The next question was easier to see coming than the Sun covered in high visibility jackets – “Because it’s wrong?”. Mr Brown did not want to answer the question, which was both surprising – considering that this decision was easy to make, indeed I would guess that most people had already made the decision, as well as unsurprising – considering that politicians seem to consider questions to be a challenge to their ability to avoid answering them.

There were only two options, right and wrong – requiring the utilisation of a decision making path eroded into most human brains at a very early age, but he couldn’t do it. For this reason in part, Gordon Brown sucks. In fact, most of the government sucks. In fact, all you people that have found yourselves in a decision making position, but are unable/unprepared to make decisions – you all suck!

Of course the paradoxical irony of this situation is that these people are so crippled by their aversion to decision making that they are unable to make the decision to stop being a decision maker!

Sigh!

Back in March, I blogged about the fact that my MP, Dave Lepper, whom I voted for, had chosen to step down at the next election and about the process of determining who to vote for instead. Part of this process was the realisation that making my decision based on a national viewpoint was pointless, since only Labour and the Conservatives have a realistic chance of being elected – one party will tell you what they are going to do and ram it through the houses whether the electorate agrees or not, the other party currently has a policy of having no policies – but can’t be trusted to tell the truth about them once they exist. Still with me? So according to Wikipedia – and if it’s in Wikipedia then it must be true – there are only three confirmed candidates, for the constituency of Brighton Pavilion, at the next UK general election:

The Conservative candidate for Brighton Pavilion is Dr David Bull and since the last time I checked up on him he has achieved, well… er… nothing, or at least nothing that he deems worthy of adding to his website (nothing in the news section since November 2007) or blog (nothing here since October 2007).

The Labour candidate is Nancy Platts - I finally found her website! Unfortunately, she to seems to have not been up to anything worthy of mentioning either (last news dated April), but this is a moot point really, since I have already decided not to vote for Labour. Why? Human-animal-hybrids, the European Constitution/treaty, 28 days (nothing to do with the film – doofus!), 42 days and the fact that the Labour whips look unlikely to ever allow Labour MPs a free vote again.

The Liberal Democrat candidate has not been confirmed yet, I didn’t think this could be true, so I checked their website and it would seem to be so. Is this a step beyond Cameron’s no policies policy, a no candidate policy?

So the final candidate is Caroline Lucas, the current MEP for the South East and a member of the Green Party. Actually, she is the reason for this post, since a leaflet promoting her campaign was deposited through my door. It contained lots of information about the different issues that she is focusing on, some were national, some were local, all I agreed with. A quick check of her website and blog showed that she last did something worth telling people about… yesterday. At last, someone who updates their blog!!! Now my major sticking point with the Greens is what they would do with Britain’s armed forces (although I agree with their stance on the renewal of Britain’s nuclear deterrent). More accurately, my fear is what they wouldn’t do. Regardless of why we are in Iraq/Afghanistan (and whether you agree), there can be no argument that justifies a cut and run solution (IMO). All of this has to be weighed up against the fact that, although Labour recently signed the cluster bomb treaty, they are in favour of a replacement for Trident (is it wrong that I always think of toothpaste instead of a nuclear weapon?) and recently introduced some nice new thermobaric weapons that suck out the air from the victim and then crushes their body. Nice!

But here’s the kicker – and it’s something I hadn’t really considered before. As strong as my feelings on “military issues” are, they are ten orders of magnitude less in strength than my concerns over animal rights/welfare. So any ground Caroline Lucas loses to the other candidates is more than compensated for by her love of creatures. None of the “major” parties can claim this accolade, the number of animal experiments performed has increased under Labour, David Cameron would likely make his first speech as PM a top a horse and with a pack of hounds around him (the cabinet?) and there is no Lib Dem candidate.

So for the moment at least Miss Lucas, you have my vote!

Is it just the frustrated emo kid in me, or is Gordon Brown on a mission to screw things up for Labour?

Could someone please explain to me why we need this most recent law “clarification”, that says that it’s OK to charge men more money for car insurance than women, since they are statistically a higher risk group, but not OK to refuse an octogenarian travel insurance for an extreme sports holiday. What gives?

And why is it OK to hire a woman over a man just because she is a woman? Harriet Harman says that it would be OK to hire a woman over a man if you already had a lot of male employees, but what if you picked the man for the same reason – you could argue he would fit in better.

Call it positive discrimination, call it affirmative action, call it whatever you want. I bet the lawyers are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of all the extra litigation they can profit from as the Government unleashes another half cocked clusterfuck of an initiative that aims to unite the nation and will do nothing more than divide it. David Cameron’s no policies policy looks increasingly like a stroke of genius.

And when you think about it, it’s simple really – equality comes from treating people equally and positive discrimination is just that, discrimination.

Mind you, that’s what you get for letting women help run the country!

;)

It’s just not fair! I mean, how does the United States end up with a guy like Barack Obama (surely nailed on winner?) and Britain ends up with Brown, Cameron, and one of the Cheeky Girls. Oh sorry, are the Cheeky Girls not in charge of the Lib Dems? My bad.

It would seem that Gordon Brown has decided that Labour are never getting re-elected, so his only chance of a lasting legacy is to be as much of a douchebag (great word) as possible. Think about it, either he knows that the European Constitution/Treaty (if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck and it’s name is Ed) is something that the public would want a say on and is ignoring it, or else he is so out of touch that he doesn’t have a clue – either way he comes off worse than Ribena on a dress shirt. Then you have his recent yearnings for human-animal-hybrid embryos, something else that the public would want a say on, however he will only allow a “free vote” in the House of Commons as long as he knows he is going to win. Doesn’t that somewhat circumvent our democracy?

Then we have the Tories, gotta love em! David Cameron seemingly didn’t think that people had enough reasons to dislike the Tories, so he decided to become a cyclist and ignore some of our laws. Genius.

As for the Lib Dems, they claim to be the “real alternative”, but when they had the opportunity to speak for the people and vote on a referendum on the afore mentioned constitution, or even Britain’s continued membership in the EU, they abstained! Evidence that the entire party is still on the NHS waiting list for spines and not cut out to lead anything! Did you watch The Apprentice Sport Relief Special? I have never seen a man so far out of his depth as Lembit Opik, when he was elected as leader of the mens team.

Since none of the above people/parties are electable when judged from a national viewpoint, I could simply employ the same method as I did during the last election, where I voted based upon the people who were running in my constituency, regardless of party. I did some research and made an informed decision to vote for Dave Lepper and I have to say that he has done a reasonable job of representing me (I keep a close eye on him via this RSS feed). However, he is not standing at the next election and so I am left with the following options.

Labour: Some lady who wants to tell me how opposed she is/was to the Iraq war and George Bush, without realizing that I quite like GW and was in favour of action in Iraq (and still am). She has mentioned nothing about the economy, animal rights, the state of the NHS, or any of the other national subjects I am interested in. She has not mentioned any local issues, like transport, or the fact that our hospital is among the worst in country. The fact that I don’t know her name and couldn’t find it very easily via Google, just about sums it up.

The Green Party: I consider myself to be quite an environmentally minded person, however the Green Party suffers from the same problem as Senator Kerry (the guy who lost to GW last time out) – completely one dimensional. War is bad, green is good, nowt about anything else.

The Conservatives: You know that Doctor off the telly, Dr David Bull, well he is the Tory candidate. Well presented, good website (wouldn’t have expected anything else from the Tories) but he seems a tad preoccupied with the NHS (I know…he’s a Doctor). I just can’t bring myself to trust a Tory.

In summary, I can vote for the party who will tell me the truth, but won’t let me vote on it, the party that will let me vote on stuff, but won’t necessarily tell me the truth, or the party that doesn’t know what it stands for so there’s nothing to vote on!

Suddenly, the Cheeky Girls don’t sound so bad!