I hope we can all agree that it is hard to change someone’s mind using arguments if their understanding of history is very different from yours.
Over the past week, I’ve spoken to people I know who have far more sympathy than I have with the rioters currently disfiguring Britain’s streets.#
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Southport_riot.jpg
A new year thought for you.
The Conservative Home website tells us that nearly 60% of their panel of Conservative Party members now watch the cranktastic hyper-partisan GB News channel — the BBC only just shades the poll for first place.
60.7% watch the BBC regularly compared to 57.21% who tune into GBN in the same way. Sky (31.38%) and ITN (18.54%) both pale by comparison.
As ConHome puts it…
“GB News, in political terms, has settled somewhere to the left of Reform UK (Richard Tice is a presenter) but well to the right of, say, the Conservative Parliamentary Party’s centre of gravity.”
This was published in openDemocracy recently. The only thing I’d change to the idea is that I’d change this from “it could be 100% tax-deductible, or claimable from welfare payments” to “it could be 100% tax-deductible from VAT, because everyone pays at least £50 a year in VAT, right?”
(The average household generates around £4,700 in VAT income to the treasury).
https://twitter.com/Paul0Evans1/status/1435265149468876811
I was recently interviewed by Mark Thompson for ‘The House of Comments’ podcast about my book ‘Save Democracy – Abolish Voting’.
I hope you find time to listen to it, but if you’re looking for a very short verbal summary of what it’s about (85 secs!), it can be found starting at 16min:20secs in (finishing at 17min:45secs).
Yesterday, in what was a big milestone for me, I handed in the final copy of the text of my book, which is provisionally titled ‘Save Democracy – Abolish Voting’.
It will be published at some point over the next month or so (date tbc) by The Democratic Society. It’s their first publication in a series entitled “Ideas of Democracy”, and I hope, the first of many.
In advance of the launch (you will be able to buy it in print or as an e-book), I’ll be posting a few samples here, but in the meantime, here’s the draft blurb from the back cover to give you a flavour of what to expect:
This is a short post that is intended to introduce a theme. I won’t develop it too much here (though I’ve filled it with links to posts that I, and others, have written that flesh out specific parts of the argument). I will be publishing something a lot more substantial on this shortly.
We are going through a period of political polarisation at the moment. The organised left may think that this is a good thing, but I have argued previously that this is a game that we are always going to lose at.
If I could make a pitch to the whole of the centre-left on what I believe its future direction should be, this would be it.
We must rebuild democracy for the 21st century. Here's how we do it. https://t.co/hGIoUJ31KF pic.twitter.com/BtBIDfTFYu
— littleatoms (@littleatoms) July 7, 2016
I published this on Medium earlier today.
https://twitter.com/Paul0Evans1/status/750831965289508864
The fact that we are using a referendum to decide this in the first place tells you all you need to know about how important ‘democracy’ is to the people who are asking us to decide the UK’s future in Europe.
I’ve written a piece for Left Foot Forward saying more-or-less this in more detail. You can read it here
