Wings Over Scotland

If you're anything like me, you've probably been spending anything up to 0.2% of your spare time recently wondering how (or if) you're going to cast your vote in the AV referendum in a month's time. Because on the face of it, it looks like a lose-lose choice.

"If only there was some way we could improve this country's useless, broken mockery of democracy AND kick Nick Clegg's face off at the same time", is, if you're like me, what you've probably been thinking. But maybe there is.

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Just got back from Bath’s opulent Guildhall, where the Deputy Prime Minister held a “question and answer session” with 200 voters. For most of it, he was stood no more than 18 inches in front of me, in such a manner that I could easily have kicked him hard in the nuts without even getting out of my chair.

I must report, with dishonour, that I failed you.

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Viewers! The beloved Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is coming to Bath this [EDIT: Friday] for "an open question and answer session" with the electorate.

As a Lib Dem voter for the past 20 years, I feel I ought to pop along and hear his views on the topics of the day. What should I ask him?

A collection of some of the best pictures from the student protests.

Click for bigger versions.

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So unsurprisingly, we're already knee-deep in the pre-prepared narrative: that the unacceptable and shameful violence of the student protests has destroyed all public sympathy, and there'll be no more softly-softly treatment.

Thank heavens. I'm all for protest, but I won't stand by and watch the police have to face down a terrifying bunch of 15-year-old kids, some of them armed with sticks, with no protection other than their body armour, riot shields, truncheons, horses, vans and helicopters.

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(Click for full size)

I especially love the line about "plunging Scotland into darkness for half the year", as if what our arbitrary human clocks say actually makes any difference to how much daylight there is.

Earlier this week we pointed out that for most people in Britain, the current economic crisis is in fact no such thing. If you're in the blessed section of what in modern times is an unprecedentedly polarised society, which is defined by home ownership – something the majority of adults are – then the chances are you're doing just fine out of the banking catastrophe of 2007-8.

So the widespread vilification of Lord Young of Graffham (above, centre) in this morning's press for accidentally saying out loud what most people already know to be perfectly true is a little… well, it's not surprising, exactly, but it's another nail in the tattered, sieve-like coffin of the concept of honesty between the people and their semi-elected leaders.

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As the growing horror that is the coalition government unfolds more hideously every day, the British people could easily be forgiven for harbouring a sense of complete and utter hopelessness.

The choices presented to them in May 2010 already amounted to little more than three slightly different shades of the same colour. But the moment when even any manufactured pretence at significant difference between the policies offered by the three major parties evaporated – the minute Nick Clegg got behind his Deputy Prime Minister desk – it became impossible to maintain the delusion that Britain remains a democracy in any meaningful sense any more.

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"…and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to tell which was which."

These are really quite something.

Posted mainly as an excuse to link to Newsnet Scotland, which is vital ongoing reading for anyone with any interest in events in North Britain generally, in the case of the "Lockerbie bomber", or simply in the BBC's increasingly open disregard of the impartiality laws which are supposed to govern its conduct.

We're almost done with the politics stuff, viewers. Normal WoSblog service will be resumed shortly, but first I thought I might as well share with you an email I received this morning.

Back on Monday, when uncertainty still ruled as to who'd be forming the next government, the website 38 Degrees invited its users to send emergency emails to Labour MPs, urging them not to block any potential "progressive alliance" by vowing to vote against electoral reform, as many threatened to.

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to write anything today.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8676607.stm