I always vote, even for Town Council elections, but most of the time it is tactical voting rather than believing in a particular party.

I'm not very well versed in political history but talking to some of the older generation they mention such people as Aneurin Bevan, evidently a brilliant orator and someone who had fire and passion for their country.  These days it seems no politician has that, they merge into one another, practically indistinguisable, and aiming for their own glory (and lining their pockets having seen that the taxpayer footed Tony Blair's gas and electricity bills and his new kitchen not to mention John Prescott's £4000 per annum food claim).  And in relation to Mr. Blair I think it is appalling that he has such a large property portfolio.  I'm just so disillusioned with the lot of them and I think they are totally out of touch with ordinary people (witness the 10p fiasco)

John (she says donning her Feminist dungarees and Doc Martens and again thanking the Suffragettes for gaining Wimmin the vote  ) if the 35% who never vote did vote then they could make a difference surely?  What is needed are politicians who actually care passionately about the country, the people, who have some reforming zeal.  I know that sounds like some evangelical stance but where is the fire in their bellies? (as we do say down by here!) where are the Nye Bevans of today?  Or even the David Lloyd Georges?  Hmm.  Funny that, the two greatest politicians ever seem to be Welsh 

a box with 'None of the above' and compulsory voting?

thoughts on Brown

it is not events; it is his character:

first the election decision, in not going to the country he undemined the ritual magic of his authority - his party just simply crowned him, and i think we like to see a leader win, not just take, authority;

second - the 10p move was part of a clever plan to cut the bsae rate to 20p and undermine the tory tax position, 12 months later with rocketing inflation in food energy utility and local taxation it was dumb to stick with the plan - out of touch means not doing the sums, as Anna says;

third his duck out on the Dalai Lama reinforces the perception the he runs scared - that he is a coward not a prudent risk manager, reinforced for the chattering classes by his woeful appearnces at PMQ

the 'prism' is now a dumb dithering coward and that is every story, he now has only one route to survival and that is to take the equivalent of a risky gamble with death in public and win handsome, not lucky,...or go soon or slowly with ignominy in either case - this is tragedy on an epic scale unseen for generations.....years of scheming to come to this...

i saw an excoriating quotation from Pope in reference to the present circumstances, but maddeningly can not find it if it was on paper, nor recall what it was from...any suggestions?

I'm not so cynical as to believe that when politicians choose that career, they intend purely to line their pockets. But years in power (Thatcher, Blair, their close associates) simply isolates them from ordinary life. Harold Wilson, though PM for a good many years on and off, used to go to his house on the Scilly Isles where I gather he lived a reasonably normal life for part of the year. Jim Callaghan, if I remember rightly, kept a farm. Can't see Blair retiring to one, can you?

Lloyd George was actually born in Manchester, so he was not Welsh by birth (not a lot of people seem to know that....)

Although born in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, England, Lloyd George was a Welsh speaker and Welsh by descent and upbringing, the only Welshman ever to hold the office of Prime Minister of the British government. In March 1863 his father William George, who had been a school teacher in Manchester and other towns, returned to his native Pembrokeshire due to failing health. He took up farming but died in June 1864 of pneumonia, aged 44. His mother Elizabeth George (1828-1896, daughter of David Lloyd, a shoe-maker and Baptist pastor of Llanystumdwy, Caernarvonshire), sold the farm and moved with her children to her native Llanystumdwy, North Wales.

Not a lot of people know that    Milly, I had never before equated being Welsh to being Jewish 

So perhaps we need a resurgence of The Liberal Party?  Not, I hasten to add the wishy-washy Lib-Dems but some reforming zeal and passion?

Oh, incidentally I see the Bishops of Rochester and Carlisle are again forming an unholy alliance <sigh>

yeh but this won't dig GB out of his black hoe will it, wait till the approx £2.5bn on the tax allowances kick in tho....and is it pissing the police off......42 days?

i think it takes a great deal of political genius to get the policies to matter more than the personality and the gossip mentality of our collective id (as manifest in the red banner press, and indeed the tabloids) so that the story is most often about the person and on this scale of life GB is sunk unless he does something truly remarkable and mebbe  not even then (see Hari in the Indy)


there have been no Welsh PM's in my lifetime, was Kinnock the sole post war Welsh candidate for the job?

... not forgetting Roy Jenkins, who, despite all appearances to the contrary, was the son of a Monmouthshire NUM official.


And of course Owen and Jenkins, not Tories in name, did as much as anybody to keep the Tories in power in the 1980s ...

I think the reason why we are a nation depressed with ourselves is the one alluded to by Oliver James - the appalling cognitive dissonance between the claims of market capitalism and the reality.  In particular, we have been sold claims of increasing prosperity when, in a holistic sense, the opposite is the case - more privatisation, the resultant poorer services, less job security, the rampant bollock-speak of consultancy invading every aspect of our lives, increasing stealth charges on public services (like the NHS parking charges we've been discussing elsewhere - when people start burbling on about stealth taxes they should really take a look at the impacts of privatisation and PFI), the destruction of our environment and the evisceration of our local communities by the big supermarket chains, the illusory nature of the ideology of choice.  We are less equal, less cohesive and more privatised as a society than we have ever been.  And above all, how can a society like ours possibly see the massive increase in the cost of houses as a sign of prosperity?