Don’t get me wrong I believe in Democracy, I don’t believe in any of the MPs ! The ones I have met are all the same “playing the game” and thats all party’s!

We are mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed on shite. You may think I’m mad or wrong but the world I’ve come to know is run by Corporate and the Governments are its puppets. All for each other and all for sale.

If you have time Id really like you to tell me how wrong I am here and that its not just about the Dollar and spinning out there stay in office.
act2bmp

If we expect our leaders to be in the cabinet / shadow cabinet before the age of 35/40, that automatically excludes a huge swathe of possibilities. Only someone who is confident of their financial future can make the investment necessary to get into parliament at a young age. The rest of us need to work hard, buy a house, save some cash, get our kids through school, before we could take the risk.

Let’s wait and see what Boris the Mayor (as opposed to Boris the Buffoon) comes up with before condemning him out of hand, purely on his (media shaped) background.

I’m from Manchester so I really have no direct interest in London’s affairs but as someone who has always advocated dispersal of effective UK political power in the form of Regional Government, it will be interesting to see how Boris balances his new role as leader of the only accountable tier of Regional governance within England, against his party’s avowed intention to demolish any semblance of Regional governance elsewhere in England, should they ever gain access to Downing Street.

London works precisely due to its economies of scale – it’s big enough to sustain itself as a stand alone entity – am I the only person to detect a growing sense of self confidence and mutual interdependence amongst Londoners, starkly contrasting with increasing levels of bitterness and recrimination across the rest of England?

I would like to see Greater London develop into a full blown Regional bloc, with its elected Assembly assuming competency over many more areas of meaningful policy; Healthcare, Education, Law & Order for starters to add to the still relatively weak current portfolio presented by Transport, Economic Development, Environmental Policy, Housing, Culture, Sport & Tourism.

Boris (and his successors) for First Minister of London?

“Local party members still have input” – but who are those local party members? What’s their background? As a broad generalisation, people from ethnic minorities, the working classes and women are less likely to join a party and become actively involved in politics than white male middle class types.

Both of these, I’d say, are systemic problems.

Plus, I could understand an argument based on entrenched interests if things were bad and not getting better or getting better but very slowly. The fact is, things are getting worse. The number of people in the Cabinet and its shadow from outside the upper and upper-middle classes is shrinking. I don’t think it’s necessary to be a class warrior to find this worrying.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding like a chauvinist, take a look at the leading female MPs (to take the easiest and most obvious example of an under-represented group) from the three major parties – Hazel Blears, Harriet Harman, Caroline Spellman, Sarah Teather, Ruth Kelly, Jacqui Smith, Theresa May, Tessa Jowell, etc. etc. etc. – not only are they also more or less middle class (even when originally from working class backgrounds), it’s also very hard to look at that bunch of more or less useless politicians and not think that they’ve got there by dint of their sex, not their talent or hard work.

That Barbara Castles and Maggie Thatchers remain the exception nearly ninety years after Nancy Astor first entered the House is pretty shocking and highly depressing, but what the fix is I have no idea. (The problem of getting parliament to more accurately reflect the makeup of the country as a whole is also likely to only get worse now the power of the unions has waned, giving fewer people of working class backgrounds the opportunity of their traditional route into politics.) But still, voting against the Tories when they’re the only party to have given us a female Prime Minister , a gay Prime Minister (albeit a publicly closeted one) and a non-Anglo-Saxon Prime Minister seems a tad odd.

It’s going to take a major cultural change – both top-down and bottom-up – to give alternate routes into politics, and would probably take a generation to have any effect even if those changes had already started to happen (which as far as I can see they haven’t – the parties all instead focussing on all-female shortlists and quotas, artificially rather than organically encouraging active participation).

But still – this is a vast, vast issue, and not one to go into here (I did make a start over a year ago, but forgot to go back to it). Perhaps something to which I should return another day.

(I also worry about the progressive tag, for reasons excellently set out (not by me) here.)

I am worried that the people who make up the government of my country seem to be in danger of becoming even less diverse as a result of Labour’s electoral demise (a demise which I think is well-deserved, by the way, despite being a Labour supporter).

It’s not prejudice to have concerns that our educational and political systems put disporportionate numbers of people from one cadre in charge again and again and again, and to want to change that. It’s progressive.