Elections

Its unfortunate, but I seem to live in one of those ridings where the electorate is either red or blue, with no room for other voices.  How else to explain why the Lib Dems, who seem so energetic in other places, have such a lacklustre campaign here?  Its one of the unfortunate effects of the first-past-the-post system that voters in non-marginal constituencies are essentially ignored. 

I sent an email around to the various local candidates to see what their opinions were on the cut in university funding.  No response from the Lib Dem candidate, and the Green party candidate wanted to confirm that I lived in the riding (and why would that make a difference?  This is a national issue, not a local one!).  The Labour candidate replied, but only saw this as an education issue, while the Conservative candidate saw this as an issue of poor management of resources. 

Personally, I think this is an issue of short-term thinking. By not funding the research posts in higher education, a generation of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists will be lost forever to this country... some will go overseas, but most will simply drop out of their fields to find paying work in business.  Besides being a tremendous waste of educational investment, it also means that the brains this country needs to help pull this country out of recession will have gone elsewhere or long since left the cutting edge of their fields when the recovery occurs.  Its said that once a person leaves the sciences, they leave for good... I know personally that this is true, even if they want to return... and we are dooming a generation of newly-minted PhD's to essentially chuck away their expensive tax-supported education for lack of any other options.

Unfortunately, I don't think any of the parties really grasp that.  There are very few scientists... in fact very few people with any post-graduate technical education in the House of Commons.  Instead we have spin-doctors and party hacks, with no appreciation for the long-term future of this country

A brief detour from the reef

Just taking a little break from the tour of the museum to discuss my foray into the world of local politics.  I've just returned from a "hustings" with our four local candidates.  This isn't intended to be a political blog, but given the somewhat small turnout and the gravity of the topics under discussion I felt I needed to make a few comments on what I saw.

My main interest in attending was to see first hand our local MP, one Philip Davies (Con) who up to now I had heard little about, but was now regularly sending me flyers in which he made his fight against "political correctness" one of his main campaign planks.  Now, I can see why some people might think there is a bit too much political correctness, but its an odd thing to put in big letters on your campaign literature... and to be honest, in the part of the world where I come from, when a candidate talks loudly about political correctness he isn't advocating Chubby Brown play the Apollo... its a code word for the sort of soft racism that will let a black man sit at the front of the bus, so long as he doesn't have any asparations to drive it.  I was half expecting a posher version of Nick Griffin to be honest, and was somewhat pleasantly surprised to find that he didn't meet my initial expectation, but I have to say he reminded me very strongly of the American style right-wing rebel... a british John McCain if you will.

Now a bit of rebellion is a good thing - there are far too many yes-men elected to public office - but its only good being a rebel if you actually know what your talking about.  No real surprise, but Philip doesn't believe in global warming and even cited the East Anglia stolen emails as evidence, as though that was some silver bullet, clearly unaware of how East Anglia had been exonerated  from any wrong doing.  He was also a big fan of nuclear power, while at the same time he kept going on about the high cost of green technologies.... except aren't nuclear power plants very expensive to build, expensive to run, and even expensive to decommission? A glance at wikipedia (yes, I know...) indicated that the cost per reactor could vary between 100 million to 500 million euros or more.

Overall not a good sign from our local MP... its a short distance from rebel-without-a-cause to rebel-without-a-clue.

As for the other candidates...

John Harris (Lib Dem) came off as an academic... seemed to know his stuff, but his presentation skills could use some polish. I like that he is a biology teacher though... the more people in parliament with a grounding in science the better.

Kevin Warnes (Green) was much more polished, also a teacher, and has a PhD in political science... also seemed to know his stuff, and admitted that he is prepared to listen to the experts.  (though couldn't we get a few actual experts into the house, once in a while?)

Susan Hinchcliffe (Labour) came off well, but I can't help thinking she is pretty naive about her own party.  I think the funniest moment for me was when she mentioned the Freedom of Information Act as one of the good things Labour has done.  Now, I briefly worked in the civil service and one of the first things I was taught was all about avoiding FOI requests by not keeping records, self-censoring emails, selective minuting , and when all else fails, delay tactics. I'd be curious to see how aware she is of the inner workings of her own government, but then at the civil service we were quite good at hiding what we were really up to.