The electorate strikes back

27/6/2016

Woke up at 4am, checked the tablet, realised it was so close that I wasn't going back to sleep. Stayed in front of the TV until after nine. Facebook reminded me of after the General Election - a lot of talk about we'd got it wrong, disaster, run a second referendum, petition, some talk on the news about how it wasn't binding. Cameron resigned, Osborne disappeared, polls discovered that the old voted out and the young voted in, which was apparently taken to mean that the old had deliberately voted against the young's interests, the Labour leadership disintegrated, everybody started talking about Boris and Theresa and whether or not they'd have a mandate without a General Election. Gordon Brown got a mention.
Osborne reappeared early this morning with a statement intended to calm the markets (no emergency budget required just yet), and I think I saw earlier that the run-it-again petition is a fraud after all. Some comment online about how the 'liberal' side didn't seem prepared to accept the 'democratic' result when it went against them. Polls suggested that educated people had voted to remain. A young woman stood up on Question Time and asked how many times we'd be prepared to re-run the referendum to get the right answer.
We have the undivided attention of the EU leadership, and John Kerry has diverted a trip to Rome to come here - that queue of Obama's was a short one. The sun came up this morning. 'Change' was until recently one of those political words - we're always being promised change, in ways that always make it sound positive. Now the electorate has delivered change, and along with it, some hard choices.

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Read My Shorts?

Here is yet another page of old blog posts and other writings. Sorry, but I need my metaphorical sock drawer for metaphorical socks. The link to the page is right at the end of the paragraph here.

A very green picture. I can't remember where I took this.

Roads without end

Here is a passage from a review of the book The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart. I haven't read the book (yet), but the collected reviews would make a worthwhile set of political arguments in their own right. More.

Also available in English. 'Can I Quote You on That?'

State of the Union

Several commentators today saying that they've lost confidence in the US. Making their point by talking up the glories of the past. After two weeks of this administration, they're not going back.
Were they wrong, and they've seen the light? Or has the US changed? I guess the latter is the intended meaning. But we should at least acknowledge the possibility... More.

Categories
(Started 4th November 2017; forgotten shortly after that.)

Kitchen parenting

I have teenage children. When they're home, sooner or later one of them will come to me and say: "Dad! We're going to make a mess in the kitchen!
   "Great!" I will reply, picking up on the tone of voice. "What are you going to do?"
    "We thought we'd slice up some peppers and onion and bits of chicken and leave them glued to the bottom of the frying pan. Burn something in one of the saucepans and leave it floating in the sink."
    "Anything else?" More.

No pinpricks

Okay, so a certain President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. More.

Making mistakes

We all make mistakes in our relationships. Some are mistakes that can be corrected with an apology. Sometimes - "if only I'd said that, and not that." Sometimes, they're mistakes that are incomprehensible even to ourselves, and sometimes, we do things that show us up as not quite the likeable hero of our own story that we want to think we are. More.

Man down?

There's a report by the Samaritans about men and suicide. It's titled Men, Suicide and Society, and it finds that men are more likely to take their own lives than women (in the UK and ROI). More.

Offending the status quo

Looking at both the US election and the revived Brexit debate in the UK, the question is not: who wins? but: how did we get here? More.

Thinks: populism

Bright, sunny morning. Breeze. Weather forecast said fog, but it's a blue sky overlaid with vapour trails. Windy season, drifts of Autumn-coloured leaves. Thinking, on this morning's walk, about populism. More.

Early morning, Church Street, Falmouth

Not available in Vietnamese. Sorry.

9th May 2014

On the day that I wrote this, the early news told us of a parade in Moscow to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. Crimea remained annexed, and the Russia/Ukraine crisis was not resolved. At around half eight, the BBC’s reporter in Moscow was cut off in mid-sentence summarising the military display; the Today programme on Radio 4 cut to the sports news. More.

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