Monday, June 14, 2004
I don't know, maybe it's just British TV, but there seems to be nary a squeek out of the Democrats in America over recent developments in the Bush/Blair plan to replace Allied troops being killed by Iraqis, thereby turning an International War into a Civil one. Osama Bin Laden seems to have a busier social calender than John Kerry and makes more pronouncements. Is Kerry hoping the American people will forget him so he can change his name on the ballot paper to 'George X. Bush'? Never mind WMD, we need to send the UN into the United States to see if they can find any proof of official opposition to Dubya, rather than just at the level of the people in the country.
Anyway, there are two probabilities for what could happen between now and polling day. The CIA warned that another terrorist attack by Al Qaeda was likely, they'd like to stop it but Dick Cheney had told them to stand down as he and George W. Reagan wanted fresh corpses to ride to victory on.
The other is that Bush and his cronies will stage something spectacular to fool people into thinking that he has some control of what is going on. So, if you'd like to vote as to what exactly you think is going to happen between now and polling day, check out October Surprise and put your metaphorical cross in the box. My moeny is on WMD being 'discovered' in Iraq, or a possible capture of Bin Laden. Could well have happened already, we haven't heard anything from him recently and I would have expected at the very least his opinion to the new Kelis album.
Anyway, I'm on holiday. Plums came up on Friday night while I was still a little zonked from working on polling day. What can I say about that? The truth is that touching democracy at any point is essentially a very dull process. I woke up at 4:30 am after, thankfully, a pretty good night's sleep. 5:30 am I was up. At the polling station for 6:15. We had everything set up and ready to go for the start of the poll at 7:00. There was little more than a trickle of voters for most of the day, between the polls opening and about 4:00 pm we averaged twenty or thirty people per hour. But as we started to get the traditional boost of people voting on their way home from work it just took off. We had an average of about eighty to one hundred people per hour from about 5:00 pm to polls closing at 10:00 pm, and even a couple of people filling in their ballots at close of play. I've been working on each of the elections since the general election in 2001 and we've never had anything like this. We had queues of up to a dozen people waiting to collect their ballot papers, while all the voting booths were full of people filling theirs in. The main reason for this was that we had lots of families, mainly ethnic minority families coming in all together, granddad and grandma, mum and dad and the kids. We were ticking off everyone at one address off at once, which we've hardly ever done before.
The perception I got was that people at my station weren't coming to vote on Europe, but instead registering their strong disapproval of the War in Iraq. I did wonder whether Ken Livingstone's return to Labour earlier in the year would cost him the mayorship if there was blanket voting against anything with the Labour badge on it but thankfully this wasn't the case. I especially didn't want Tory Stephen Norris to win as he'd promised to scrap Congestion Charges, one of the few successes of Livingstone's first term. By the time we get to the next election they will hopefully be such a part of life that no candidate will be pledging to scrap them.
But the bizarrest result of the whole thing is the success of the UK Independence Party in the European elections, I know it's said that Guy Fawkes was the only man to enter the Houses of Parliament with honest intentions but it's depressing that a party with nothing but a negative agenda, with a figurehead who, in Kilroy-Silk seems to be quite unapologetically racist and xenophobic, should get the votes it did. However, seeing as the media has been pushing a steady diet of Europhobic rubbish for the last decade, is it surprising? Tony Blair has some responsibility for this mess, as the lack of a convincing fightback from the supposedly Europhillic Labour government is a sign of a capitulation to the Murdoch press. Tony is happy to fight his own backbenchers over tuition fees or the British public over the need for attacking Iraq, but he's not willing to fight the Murdoch press over the need for Britain to play a positive role in Europe.
Anyway, on Saturday Plums and I visited The Foundry for the Mark Thomas Coca-Cola Exhibition, when the surly barman could find the key for the door downstairs. It's only a small thing, probably fifty posters max, so you can work your way around in about ten minutes. But fun, if you happen to be in the area.
Sunday was a Barbelith picnic in Brockwell Park in South London. The weather was lovely and the company pleasant, special mention must go to POTUS for giving us t-shirts with the legend 'Say Bollocks to Flamingoes' (an in-joke based around another Barbeloids' supposed fear of the birds). It would have been even nicer if I hadn't drunk far too much wine and ended up being violently ill and having to be seen on to a train back to Victoria, with some unpleasantness along the way. I fell asleep on the Underground coming home and ended up several stops past my home station and having to turn round and come back. Was exhausted when I got home and tumbled straight in to bed, so had a raging hangover this morning and spent the day recovering. Put my cheque for doing the polls in to the bank and did the shopping but otherwise stayed in the shade.
My plans for the rest of the week are fairly fluid. I intend to do a couple of walks in town and will be meeting up with Laura for drinks, and probably going to the cinema to see the current Harry Potter film. Next Sunday is Fathers Day, so I'll be having the parentals up for a meal to celebrate and there's still the LINKED walk to finish.
Anyway, there are two probabilities for what could happen between now and polling day. The CIA warned that another terrorist attack by Al Qaeda was likely, they'd like to stop it but Dick Cheney had told them to stand down as he and George W. Reagan wanted fresh corpses to ride to victory on.
The other is that Bush and his cronies will stage something spectacular to fool people into thinking that he has some control of what is going on. So, if you'd like to vote as to what exactly you think is going to happen between now and polling day, check out October Surprise and put your metaphorical cross in the box. My moeny is on WMD being 'discovered' in Iraq, or a possible capture of Bin Laden. Could well have happened already, we haven't heard anything from him recently and I would have expected at the very least his opinion to the new Kelis album.
Anyway, I'm on holiday. Plums came up on Friday night while I was still a little zonked from working on polling day. What can I say about that? The truth is that touching democracy at any point is essentially a very dull process. I woke up at 4:30 am after, thankfully, a pretty good night's sleep. 5:30 am I was up. At the polling station for 6:15. We had everything set up and ready to go for the start of the poll at 7:00. There was little more than a trickle of voters for most of the day, between the polls opening and about 4:00 pm we averaged twenty or thirty people per hour. But as we started to get the traditional boost of people voting on their way home from work it just took off. We had an average of about eighty to one hundred people per hour from about 5:00 pm to polls closing at 10:00 pm, and even a couple of people filling in their ballots at close of play. I've been working on each of the elections since the general election in 2001 and we've never had anything like this. We had queues of up to a dozen people waiting to collect their ballot papers, while all the voting booths were full of people filling theirs in. The main reason for this was that we had lots of families, mainly ethnic minority families coming in all together, granddad and grandma, mum and dad and the kids. We were ticking off everyone at one address off at once, which we've hardly ever done before.
The perception I got was that people at my station weren't coming to vote on Europe, but instead registering their strong disapproval of the War in Iraq. I did wonder whether Ken Livingstone's return to Labour earlier in the year would cost him the mayorship if there was blanket voting against anything with the Labour badge on it but thankfully this wasn't the case. I especially didn't want Tory Stephen Norris to win as he'd promised to scrap Congestion Charges, one of the few successes of Livingstone's first term. By the time we get to the next election they will hopefully be such a part of life that no candidate will be pledging to scrap them.
But the bizarrest result of the whole thing is the success of the UK Independence Party in the European elections, I know it's said that Guy Fawkes was the only man to enter the Houses of Parliament with honest intentions but it's depressing that a party with nothing but a negative agenda, with a figurehead who, in Kilroy-Silk seems to be quite unapologetically racist and xenophobic, should get the votes it did. However, seeing as the media has been pushing a steady diet of Europhobic rubbish for the last decade, is it surprising? Tony Blair has some responsibility for this mess, as the lack of a convincing fightback from the supposedly Europhillic Labour government is a sign of a capitulation to the Murdoch press. Tony is happy to fight his own backbenchers over tuition fees or the British public over the need for attacking Iraq, but he's not willing to fight the Murdoch press over the need for Britain to play a positive role in Europe.
Anyway, on Saturday Plums and I visited The Foundry for the Mark Thomas Coca-Cola Exhibition, when the surly barman could find the key for the door downstairs. It's only a small thing, probably fifty posters max, so you can work your way around in about ten minutes. But fun, if you happen to be in the area.
Sunday was a Barbelith picnic in Brockwell Park in South London. The weather was lovely and the company pleasant, special mention must go to POTUS for giving us t-shirts with the legend 'Say Bollocks to Flamingoes' (an in-joke based around another Barbeloids' supposed fear of the birds). It would have been even nicer if I hadn't drunk far too much wine and ended up being violently ill and having to be seen on to a train back to Victoria, with some unpleasantness along the way. I fell asleep on the Underground coming home and ended up several stops past my home station and having to turn round and come back. Was exhausted when I got home and tumbled straight in to bed, so had a raging hangover this morning and spent the day recovering. Put my cheque for doing the polls in to the bank and did the shopping but otherwise stayed in the shade.
My plans for the rest of the week are fairly fluid. I intend to do a couple of walks in town and will be meeting up with Laura for drinks, and probably going to the cinema to see the current Harry Potter film. Next Sunday is Fathers Day, so I'll be having the parentals up for a meal to celebrate and there's still the LINKED walk to finish.
