The People's Jury: Guilty or Not Guilty?

In his excellent piece for the Telegraph (here) blogger Graeme Archer does a grand job of knocking down the rather, ahem, inetresting idea in the Guardian (where else?) that a randomly selected "jury" of 1,000 Britons ought to hold court on some of the big issues facing the public.

Putitng aside Archer's point about this unelected clique telling our elected parliament what to do and think (I am rather fond of the idea of parliamentary sovereignty and voting at election time to make my voice heard) the idea is doomed because it almost certainly won't get the protagonists what they want.

By dangling 3 big issues - MPs expenses, the banking crisis and phone hacking - in front of the public, all issues where the public take issue with "vested interests" and "big businesses" - they make the idea sound attractive. But consider this. Britain is - wait for it - a conservative (small "c") country. For the vast majority of the last century or so, we have had Conservative, Conservaive-led or Conservative-dominated National governments. There is, as we are now finding out, a big conservative element to the LibDems and also to the Labour Party too. We have had precious few radical socialist, or even just socialist, governments and the only time recently when Labour have "won big" is when they shifted to the right (i.e. to where the people of Britain are). Sorry Guardian readers, however few of you there are left, it is true. Go to a council estate anywhere in the country, where you might expect Labour support to be strongest. Ask them about Europe, or immigration, or taxation levels and see what they say; I distinctly remember one voter last time in the heart of Lakeham lecturing me about the evils of Europe, too many immigrants, tax too high etc etc and - you guessed it - he would still be voting Labour. Even Labour folk have a conservative element to them.

So if you take 1,000 random Britons you wouldn't get the spread I think The Guardian expect. And instead of asking them about MPs expenses, as Archer suggests, you put other issues in front of them, you might not get the answer you expect either.

So I lay this challenge to The Guardian, The People's Jury and its fans. With some polls putting support for a return to the death penalty at over 70%, would you be happy for the first idea for discussion to be the death penalty?

Dontcha just love indrect democracy - when it suits you, eh, Guardian readers? ;-)

Endorsements et al

We've been getting more endorsements in:

Conservatives 12 (+5) : The Financial Times, The Sun, The Times, Mail on Sunday, News of the World, Sunday Express, Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, Economist, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Daily Express

Labour 2 (-7) : Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror

LibDems 2 (+2): The Guardian, The Observer

No Endorsements: People, Independent on Sunday

What the Papers say (Part II)

We've been getting more endorsements in:

Conservatives 9 (+5) : The Financial Times, The Sun, The Times, Mail on Sunday, News of the World, Sunday Express, Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, Economist

Labour 2 (-7) : Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror

LibDems 2 (+2): The Guardian, The Observer

No Endorsements: People, Independent on Sunday

The Papers Say...

I am surprised that some papers are declaring in the election already; I don't know if this qualifies as "old politics" (because some people believe that newspaper endorsements make no difference) but it does alter the media narrative. What would be interesting is the total readership for each group (now I talking like a teacher...) if anyone has the figures?

Running Tally:
Conservatives 3: The Sun, The Times, The Economist
Labour 0
LibDems 1: The Guardian
Others 0

The Daily Mirror: A waste of paper and ink

Whilst trapped inside of a soft-play centre during a rainy time I was forced (i.e. boredom drove me to) to read all of the newspapers on offer. It included my staple diet of the Evening News and EDP, plus also a few titles I hadn't read in a long, long time.

I was deeply shocked by the Daily Mirror; aside from being badly written and utterly misguided, it seems to have totally missed the point. Luckily the whole newspaper took me less than 2 minutes to "read". The political stories were laughable; I didn't think anybody or anything could still support this government like the Mirror does. I was told about "desperate Cameron" who was "trying to con people into thinking he could be trusted with the NHS"; this wasn't in the opinions page or the letters page, this was the news stories!! The Paul Routledge column actually made me double-take it was so out-of-touch; we need more proper socialists writing this stuff because, God knows, with this government in power we need a laugh. The headlines make The Sun look rational and the choice of celebrity gossip was, frankly, second class indeed.

The whole content and structure of the paper lacked anything approaching clarity. It was devoid of a single interesting article. I understand that I am part of the Telegraph faithful, but I cannot stand the Daily Mail and have more and more been taken with the Indy (which, although it contains little to no news, always has something worth reading), and so the Mirror probably isn't designed with me in mind. But even so, is this really the best they can do?

It's got Brown, it's got Cameron but no Clegg ... what does this tell us about LibDem literature?

When a lady in Thorpe Hamlet waved a political newspaper at me, all I could see was Gordon Brown's head. Then on turning to the inside there was David Cameron (both deliberately unflattering pictures I should add). On searching through, I discovered that it was a LibDem newspaper yet nowhere could I - or the householder - find a picture of Nick Clegg (who aparently leads their party). The lady was most put out - not because she was a Tory and wanted to attack the LibDems but because she likes Nick Clegg and was outraged they could show their 2 main opponents but not their own leader. Her killer line to me was a good one. Why should we trust a party that won't even advertise their own leader? Any ideas on why they did this would be welcome; it seems to break the political rules of not giving your opponents free advertising?

Do the LibDems know where Norwich South is?

Apparently not.

Now, before I go into this I should say that I did pledge to put less obvious point-scoring posts on my blog and focus more on the work of the council and national politics generally. I have failed miserably on this, and will continue to do so today.

The LibDems appear to have been delivering a newspaper - an awful one to boot - around the place and a neighbour kindly put one through my door this afternoon. Attached was a note which says:

"They don't know North from South and clearly their arse from their elbow."

And ringed on the front of the newspaper, amongst the places this was delivered to (which include Eaton, Bowthorpe, New Costessey etc.) was two words ... Mile Cross.

Oh, dear. Now for the uninitiated, Mile Cross falls into Norwich North, not Norwich South. You might have thought that this was a City wide newspaper then? Well, if that was the case then Catton, Sewell and Crome were mysteriously missing. Only Mile Cross made it into the wrong constituency.

As my laughter drew to a close, after some minutes, I am ready to draw one of two conclusions.

Either the LibDems don't know where the constituency boundary is or the LibDems are as fixated on Mile Cross as Steve Morphew is meant to be. We wonder why ...

Cheap party political point scoring over, begin the angry LibDem posts...