Round 2...

[smokingboot]

So much better than Round 1.

Sky production values were a vast improvement on those of ITV. I must defer to steve_c's comments on my last entry, when he challenged my words about nobody benefiting...he was quite right. The country's talking, people are interested. Hopefully this will be reflected in the turn out. If the libdems do well, it may well indicate a time for constitutional reform. A powerful time for British politics, and not just another election...

In the Hammer Horror story that is the British Election 2010, Nick is our hero, square jawed, clear eyed, a little disingenuous perhaps? I felt my first real ripple of disapproval for him when, as an example of why we should stay in the European Union, he quoted the co-operation of European police forces to bust a paedophile ring. Uh, right, so we couldn't do that without being part of the EU? It's like invoking the nazis. I'm pro-Europe to a greater extent, but that way of justifying it was a very cheap ploy. It made me sad to see him use it. Having said that, it was my only real demerit against him.

Cameron burst out of his bubblewrap, a determined escapee from Vincent Price's House of Wax and tried to talk like a human being. I'm going to go a bit wild here and say he nearly succeeded. I applaud his basic attempt at animation, particularly when it came to defence, which I think was his strongest moment. But having listened to him, it is clear that he is just too right wing for me.

And then...the cabinet of Dr Polidori rattled. The wind howled outside the Arnolfini. A raven cawed and the cabinet door creaked open. And Gordo emerged.

Do not think I detest Brown with the special loathing I keep for Galloway, or Baroness Davros herself. I just don't like him very much, and I have finally worked out why; he keeps trying to be the authoritiiii. the elder statesman, the one with gravitas, the nation's daddy. Well, I don't need another daddy thanks, one's quite enough. At least mine would occasionally give me pocket money. As for the moment when Gordo described his rivals as reminding him of his two boys squabbling at bathtime, the audience liked it, but suddenly all I could see were Clegg and Cameron fighting naked in a bath, and Gordo sitting beside them stroking the towels and perusing their pale bodies, that terrible smile on his face.

What a peculiar election this is.

Comments

[cat-that-walks.livejournal.com]

I dislike PR. Italy at last count used PR, that`s why their governments don`t last. Plus let us not forget that PR gave us a German Chancellor called Adolf...

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

No - Italy's governments don't last because Italy as a nation is largely a fiction invented in the early part of the 19th century by Italian nationalists and monarchists loyal to the House of Savoy endeavouring to establish a united kingdom encompassing the entire Italian Peninsula. Before that time the entire post-Roman history of Italy was that of squabbling city-states mounting frequent mercenary wars against each other. There was no such nation as Italy prior to 1816 and they have only been a republic since 1946.

Italy is a terrible example to use for any serious examination of how PR might function in a country with a more stable history and with a stronger national identity like the UK. Better to compare us to somewhere like Germany or the Netherlands, but taking on board your comment about Hitler, it was not PR that led to his rise but the punitive demands of the post war settlement for WW1 which helped create a climate of desperation in which such a man could come to power. He then engineered a suppression of other parties following the Reichstag fire and used violence and anti-communist hysteria to win the election. He would quite possibly have come to power in a FPTP system as well.

[november-girl.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that you suggest using Germany as an example, given that it has a very similar history to Italy i.e. being squabbling city states and smaller kingdoms until the nineteenth century when one of the kingdoms decided it wanted more power. And of course it spent half of the last century occupied and partitioned.

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

A good point - though the nature of Germany as a nation and it's various splits is slightly different - where Italy was an amalgamation of small city states that had not been joined since the days of the Roman Empire, Germany had at various times been part of a far larger 'super state' encompassing what are now completely separate countries - the Holy Roman Empire.

Where it starts to look like a situation with warring states is the Thirty Years war, and then you have the formation of something resembling the much smaller modern Germany and then the German wars of unification - but the period from 800 to 1618 had seen Germany as part of something larger that was comparatively stable compared to Italy.

I think it is an important distinction that Germany formed out of something larger where Italy formed something larger out of smaller states. Italy was not a part of something bigger than itself since Rome and did not have the same sense of a larger national identity that Germany did.

My point with PR being that to work well on a national scale you need areas to have a cohesive sense of a national identity (so regional needs can be related to national ones with less squabbling), and that countries like the UK and Germany have a far stronger one with a longer historical tradition than Italy does. In fact arguably, since both Scotland and Wales have their own Parliaments now (separating out the UKs areas with a historical sense of their own separate identity), the UK is in an even stronger position for PR to work very differently than in Italy than Germany is.

My argument is largely about the particular forms of national identity as opposed to regional and how people consider where their interests lie.