ONE man’s petition demanding a general election has garnered more than 2.5m signatures. What a batshit stupid thing that is.
The petition is on the government website, where motions receiving more than 100,000 votes are ‘considered’ for debate in parliament.
Well, debate this. What this petition illustrates is how tirelessly sections of the right and far-right squirrel away on social media to grub up attention and create a distracting barney.
And yet again it shows how that bonkers billionaire and Trump fanboy Elon Musk uses his platform Twitter/X to support politicians he favours, and to attack those he dislikes.
Debate this, too. Our democracy takes place in Parliament. It’s slow, grinding and often disappoints. But we all take part. Sorry, Elon, we’re not having an election anytime soon because we had one months ago, when Labour won a massive majority.
All governments end up being unpopular, even if this one has been in a hurry to hit the disappointment spot. Keir Starmer seemed to be dusted in disillusion from the off. He should lighten up and go for an inspiring jog or something.
But never mind who is prime minister right now. If we did have democracy by petition, most governments would last only for a few weeks. As soon as we tired of one lot, we’d ask for another.
What’s brought this about? I’ve been thinking about this for a while and believe the answer lies simply in opportunity. This isn’t a surprising or smart observation, but sometimes we forget how the internet and social media have, to use a technical term, kicked politics in the bollocks.
For the right nowadays, a degree of truthfulness or playing by the old rules is mostly gone. Welcome instead to a social media free-for-all fuelled by lies. A cynical game that suits them more than it does the left.
That must surely be one reason Donald Trump won the US election. He took all the anger and refracted it back at his audience. They were angry, he was angry, all angry together. And anger won.
It’s not healthy if anger wins all the time. Those who benefit, like Trump and, to a lesser extent, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, grow strong through other people’s anger. To them fury is like blood to a vampire.
Farage is an old hand at splashing in this shallow, mean pool. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he blabbered about the petition. At which point everyone chucked out reminders of the petition signed by 6.2 million people calling for for the revocation of Article 50 and for the UK to remain in the EU.
This election petition won’t lead to a general election, but it has been debated seriously on television, sometimes without any cautionary words explaining how Musk jumped in to stir this up, sending in battalions of bots.
How Musk loves to hate our government. He tolerated the last lot as they were right wing, and Rishi Sunak even ‘interviewed’ him about AI. What a squirmer that was.
It’s all so unhealthy and weird. Having inserted himself into American politics, Elon Musk now fancies himself a visiting expert on British politics. He laid into Starmer over the summer riots and chucks out eccentric opinions on contempt of court and hate speech. Now he has nudged along this specious election petition.
How many of those who signed are real, you know, flesh and blood people. How many live in this country? And how many of us think a numpty billionaire who knows nothing about British politics should just pipe down.
Perhaps there should be a petition about that.
JOB centres are “not fit for purpose”, according to the work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall.
I’ll tell you what else is not fit for purpose. Politicians saying things are not fit for purpose.
If something is fit for purpose, it does the job required, I guess. But what a deathly phrase, sucking the oxygen from any sentence in which it lands with a thud.
An old BBC page aimed at keeping your English up to date (from November 2010) had this to say about “fit for purpose”.
“This rather prim phrase began life in the field of consumer protection law, characterizing a manufactured product that does what it was designed to do. The implication for the consumer is that if something isn’t fit for purpose, you can take it back and get a refund or a replacement.”
If you managed to read that without nodding off, well done.
Job centres may well not be good at what they are supposed to do. But hearing that leaden phrase didn’t fill me with confidence that things would change.
It’s not always helpful to pull in personal experiences from a while ago, but here goes anyway.
My only experience of job centres was a month on Job Seekers’ Allowance in 2016, post redundancy. That did nothing for what was left of my self-esteem.
But one day I dashed from a meeting at the job centre to interview Jesus, so that was something. To elaborate, it was the actor Philip McGinley rather than the man himself. He was cast in the York Mystery Plays, a purpose he fitted very well.