HARBINGER

With the sack full of  rats -aka the latest Tory Party leadership - contest drawing to conclusion,I thought I'd amuse myself by reposting some really optimistic posts from around this time in 2016.   originally posted on June 25 2016 as  And So It Goes...#784 at wordpress.com   I sure do like the smell of Victory on a morning.  I’ve been on a high since waking up just after 4 a.m. Friday 24th.to listen to the radio, expecting to hear all about a huge triumph for Remain. The disbelief in the broadcasters’ voices was palpable, they were genuinely astounded.  I imagined that BREXIT was having the kind of visceral impact that Orson Welles’ notorious 1938  ” War of the Worlds ” broadcast had had on an unsuspecting  U.S. public tuning in mid way through that broadcast.   I am so chuffed that the first letter my local newspaper published,all those weeks ago now to start the EU debate, was mine.The one, here on record at this bl...

There are 1,001 vastly more challenging issues and problems that ought to be occupying our attention, but still it all comes down to being stuck in the Leave /Remain quagmire. I'm sure that the likes of Thomas Cromwell had pretty much the same view about how the Reformation was panning out in the 1540s. Apparently WE - the royal "we" aren't voting the way that the generally smug,middle class EU funded public sector bureaucrats,professionals,academics,luvvies and shysters would like us to vote. The "We" are still being stupid,ignorant,xenophobic etc etc. And the way they can "prove"(  as they did back on June 23 2016,that in actual point of fact 48% is numerically equal as well as  intrinsically morally superior to 52% ) that pro- Brexit parties lost the EU elections 2019 is by adding up all the votes cast for all the parties and arbitrarily assigning them top pro and anti-brexit forces.  Or as I tweeted somewhat more succinctly at the time:...

There really is nothing new under the sun. It's 2018 and we are still stuck with an ossified voting system. Labour and Conservative perpetuate,to their mutual advantage,the FPTP system and so keep the Punch & Judy tropes of British political discourse on an interminable respirator instead of switching it off. So here's my original blog post And So It Goes...#768 from May 6 2016. A timeless classic... Democracy.Voting.The democratic process.Ballots.Universal Suffrage. These are terribly important,not only concepts, but practices for the acolytes of that most noble of specious secular quasi-theologies, Democracy. It has always struck me as an indelible flaw in their national character for the British to have persisted for as long as they have,with the eccentricities of  " The first past the post " system. Back in the days of the Reform Acts, of 1832 and 1867, there was plausibly nothing amiss with such a constricted,parochial settled kind of way of ascertaining...