Freesteel Blog » Mr Glenrothes Democracy

Mr Glenrothes Democracy

Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 9:07 am Written by:

The Publicwhip Glenrothes intervention has been scaled back. It can’t be the same without Aidan’s irish outwardness and his capability of talking to random people in the street. I don’t do that. He impulsively drove up last night to the Edinburgh hostel Becka and I were staying at to drop off the leaflets he’d printed so far, and then drove back home to fly off to his family at 10 hours notice. So we’ve engaged plan B, which involves cycle touring between here and Glenrothes, and possibly some leaflet dropping at 5am in the morning when there’s no chance we’ll meet anyone.

So, here’s to the next by-election. May it be in a more convenient place with more activists who can get involved.

Two nights ago we visited a god-forsaken industrial estate in Liverpool where a young man had taken delivery of an entire shipping container of these astoundingly ugly plastic babies that — when the button was pressed — emitted an 8 minute tinny pre-recorded version of the British constitution (as it would be if anyone wrote it for us) in a chinese accent, written by a chinese political student in China. Having exported democracy to so many parts of the world (like steel, textiles, war, and machine tools), it is only fitting that in this century, we import it in such a tacky package containing the democracy we need, along with everything else.

I made Becka buy one for 25 whole english pounds because we had to.

That’s art for you. Maybe we should redesignate PublicWhip as a public work of art, some glass-tank puppet feature re-enacting MPs trolling through the division lobbies again and again in accurate rendition of the legislation passed over the last 50 years, and then get a grant for hundreds of thousands of pounds (the approx price of this super-bad new war memorial thrown up in Liverpool University recently) to acquire, clean-up and process the data. But then I thought if any party was deserving of an arts grant, it’s the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Maybe all the political parties ought to be paid for out of lottery arts money. How about if the leadership went on tour around the country and gave public lectures like Mark Thomas or Mark Steel where the public paid to attend, and all the profits went to the party. They do this lecture circuit after they retire from politics, why not while they’re in office.

Gotta go now.

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