virtualeconomics

Britain's search for a government...continues

I idly wonder how deliberate was the BBC's juxtaposition last night of the penultimate episode of The Apprentice with a Ten O'Clock News on the fall of Gordon Brown's government. Side by side, the two look of roughly equal gravity and magnitude; an arbitrary decision must be made by some people we know only from occasional appearances on the television as to who now gets an important-sounding job that pays extravagently well but we rather suspect will turn out to be the merest sinecure. If Margaret, Nick and the four interviewers from last night's episode were somehow announced this afternoon as the new Cabinet it would strike me as no more incongruous than whichever rabble are about to be catapulted in to temporarily replace those discredited in the expenses scandal. Alan Sugar's apparent ambition to become the next mayor of London complete the circle - indeed, I vaguely look forward to the seemingly imminent transformation of British politics into a contest to see who has appeared most recently on an almost-serious TV programme (and as an aside continue to wonder why Martin Sheen seemingly never realised he could have easily won the last US Presidential election simply by changing his legal name to Josiah Bartlett and claiming he'd already been running the country for most of the last decade).

Excercising the right not to walk

I'm grateful for my rights, truly. I appreciate that my forebears fought and in some cases died for some of them. I'm glad to have freedom of expression and I use it most days. Freedom of association I find a use for most days too. Freedom of assembly I find less regularly valuable but I'm glad it's there when I need it. Freedom of worship is of no practical benefit to an antitheist, but I'm still in favour of it being available to me. The right to a trial by a jury of my peers...well, I'm very happy to say I've never needed it, but again it's nice to know it's there. And the right to vote, of course, that's something I'm grateful for. If it should ever arise that one of the parties that might credibly be elected to office seems sufficiently different to all the others on an issue which matters to me, I'll vote for (or against) that party. It's important to have the right to keep any hypothetical Nazis out, just by turning up and voting for someone else. But I don't feel any pressing need to exercise my every right - however hard won it may once have been - every time there's the slightest opportunity to do so, and today is no exception. Today I have the right to vote for one of several parties all of which promise, if elected, to do what I consider to be identical things and I don't think it unappreciative or disrespectful of my rights to let matters rest there.