Westminsterenders: Talent or Colour

[FishesaPlenty]

RTB and BCF are presumably busy with more important things. I'm clearly not qualified to start a Westminsterenders thread - but somebody has to take control and collect the waifs and strays.

The party of no talent want to introduce no colour into our lives.

6 days to the election.

Johnson is still a liar.

Corbyn is still apparently loved by Labour members and hated by everyone else.

Swinson is still a charming PTA chair.

You go right ahead with that scrolling ... ignoring reality is working out really well for Labour!

Barking dogs just inside the letterbox. I need my fingers!
Stiff letterboxes with brushes which hurt your hand.

Here you need a spatula, wooden spoon or ruler, to push the leaflets through and save your fingers.

Big houses with long paths up to the front door - a street of these can take ages to walk.

A scooter comes in handy here.

Blocks of flats which have letterboxes on the inner doors when you can’t access the main door. (‘Tradesmen’s’ buzzers often don’t seem to do anything.)

They often only work until noon - so tailgating is your answer. Start at the top and work down, so that you have an escape route if someone hostile challenges you.

People who just don’t want your leaflet and get nasty.
Smile sweetly.

Barking dogs just inside the letterbox. I need my fingers!
Stiff letterboxes with brushes which hurt your hand.

Here you need a spatula, wooden spoon or ruler, to push the leaflets through and save your fingers.

As an active leafletter, I used the wooden spoon trick after reading about it on one of these threads. At one house, the wooden spoon was wrenched out of my hand through the letterbox by a dog! At least it wasn't my fingers. I often wonder what the owner thought when he came home to find a mysterious wooden spoon inside his front door.

I usually leaflet locally for the LDs but we are a Tory stronghold and all activists have been asked to divert to nearby St Albans.

We have an excellent local butcher/deli which sells pretty much everything including chitterlings. I bought a nice little mallard for Xmas day (just me) last year. I think they have lamb shanks (but they are probably a bit pricey). It would be an easy afternoon out from Brum for you DGR!

Swedish Edith, thank you for that link. What an indictment of our media that this is the first time I have seen Johnson properly interviewed on a real issue.
We have been service users of Children’s Services for the past 2 years. The system is completely broken, and children are at real risk, and suffering harm in consequence. The professionals involved are just innured to it now. I worked in the field for years until 2012 and I am so shocked by what I have seen. The child in our family is lucky to have survived, and is now doing ok, but others are not.

Doctors are all over twitter literally begging the public not to vote for the tories.

Yes, squid.

It's quite harrowing.

led by donkeys:

twitter.com/ByDonkeys/status/1203626262020984833

My thoughts:

Many ordinary people now realise that this GE is crucial. It's a revolutionary moment, disguised as a normal election.

We are being given the pretence of voting 'democratically' for a right-wing revolution.

Many people get it.

Their/our actions to try and avert this are nothing short of heroic.

We've been so, so badly let down by the leaders of our opposition Parties. At the very least, they are still pretending this is normal. They really are.

It's not.

The GE will be won by the majority of the electorate who are going along with the pretence of this being normal, either because they don't know, don't care, are a bit worried & want to stay in denial, are a bit overwhelmed.

It's not wrong to be in that category: elections aren't supposed to be like this, with such high stakes.

But ... this is a truly awful place to be in.

I actually can't believe how amazing ordinary people have been.

Led By Donkeys are a good example.

But - why should it have been left to ordinary people to do this?

thecatfromjapan

By definition, the majority of the electorate are not qualified, nor have the time, to resolve hugely complicated issues of the magnitude of Brexit. It's not condescending, nor is it patronising, to say this.

Why? Because they/we are the majority. We are all under-informed about this. An infinitesimally small fraction of the population is qualified to make a decision about all this.

Interesting, but you could say that about almost every single aspect of public policy. Apart from Brexit, we are also being asked to choose between capitalism and socialism, and yet no one seems troubled by having to exert their faculties to solve that historic quandary.

Your argument is essentially an argument against democracy. A system in which only those expert in a particular field can make decisions in that field would be an authoritarian oligarchic technocracy - infinitely more efficient and intelligent, perhaps, but not in the least bit democratic.

I'm very angry. 😞

Pollsters on R4 World This Weekend confirm: No one is voting for what they beleive in. Everyone is voting for what they are prepared to put up with if it stops what they are not prepared to put up with.

I am voting for what I believe in.

That's my point, Cendrillon.

This is the most complicated election I have ever encountered.

The issues involved require unprecedented levels of engagement and knowledge in order to meaningfully engage.

It's not supposed to be like this.

This election is beyond what modern, mass democracy is equipped for.

BigChoc understands all of it. But - frankly - she has a brain the size of a small planet.

It's just unrealistic to expect that level of engagement & ability.

Real democracy cannot set the bar so high that the majority of us are effectively disbarred - and thus disenfranchised in any but the most per formative, going through the motions, way - from actual, real, meaningful participation.

This election actually, really breaks democracy.

It's a sham.

Yes. And while that's as may be, it swerves the question of why I can't buy a couple of raw shanks myself for c.£2.00 and sous-vide them myself

You could - but before braised lamb shanks got all trendy and prices at least doubled. Used to be a good cheap winter meal chez Continuity.

And it's not patronising to say that.

It's a fact.

And historians of the future will be saying it, I guarantee.

This election is beyond what modern, mass democracy is equipped for.

That may well be true. But then it also raises the question of what democracy is for. Is it there to choose the optimal outcomes for the country, or is it there to determine what outcome the electorate actually wants, regardless of whether or not it is optimal?

I’m actually fairly torn on this, since it’s obvious to me that too many people on both sides are too stupid for their vote to be the product of enlightened reasoning, but on the other hand, once you start restricting democracy you rapidly end up with no democracy at all...

we are also being asked to choose between capitalism and socialism

You're really not.

You're being asked to choose between a very peculiar form of no-holds-barred free market capitalism, in which people who call themselves capitalists (they are not) give money away to their chums and promote protectionist and anti-free trade policies, and what I shall henceforth call "crony social democracy" in which people who think they are socialists (they are not) buy votes by giving away public money to middle class while promoting much the same protectionist and anti-free trade policies as their opponents.

once you start restricting democracy you rapidly end up with no democracy at all...

The first to go in a failing democracy is the free press

Then an educated under/lower class is a disadvantage

Then start stoking fear, doesnt matter of what just FEAR!!!

We're well along the list of things that put democracy at risk

The thing is that Universal suffrage is only a century old
and the current FPTP system is less than 70 years old in the UK

its time to bin FPTP and then see where we go

I defy anyone to watch that Led By Donkeys clip without welling up. Those guys are so clever. I hope it gets the hell retweeted out of it.

Who was it that said democracy isn't great, but it beats the hell out of the alternative? Or something along those lines.

It's one of the reasons that I'm not a fan of referendums (even a second referendum on brexit).

However, I dislike seeing posts about whether the cold weather or flu bugs will put conservative voters off... The implication that it is a good thing that elderly people who may (or may not, of course) vote Conservative won't get the opportunity to do so. I know where the posters are coming from, but their vote isn't any less valid than mine just because I think they happen to be in the wrong.

also ditto

need to get it out on Facebook too...