Vote

Noticed people getting bored of the MP expenses thing and saying "can't we talk about something else?" Adam and Joe on R6 for example. It almost doesn't matter what a story is though, it almost always goes on too long for some people. I heard the other day that Madeline McCann's parents were releasing an artists impression of what she looks like now. And for a terrible second I thought to myself "who cares, we're never going to see her again". I do still have a small corner of my heart reserved for that little girl because I have two of my own and it would kill me if anything happened to them. But there was such a media overload on that story that if I never saw or heard about the McCanns again it would absolutely suit me fine.

So when does a story go? When a bigger or better story comes along (The Sun thinks Katie and Peter trounces MP's expenses; analogous to looking through the wrong end of a telescope, from their perspective maybe it is bigger). Or when people indicate they're bored (when the paper sales peak starts to drop off again). The interesting thing about many of the highest profile news stories, as the brilliant Charlie Brooker pointed out, is that they are often campaigns, or become campaigns quite early on. Representative Democracy has probably already failed and we didn't even notice it's demise. I remeber reading In Defence of Anarchism by Robert Paul Wolff as a teenager and thinking it would be great if technology could make it possible for us all to vote on each issue for ourselves (I had no problem with tyranising a minority in those days becasue I didn't think I was in one). And now that technology exists but our system of government cannot integrate it in any radical way. It can only cope with technology on it's own terms. 

Representative democracy as it was explained to me, never required your MP to vote for what you wanted. They would always vote for what they wanted and it was you voting for them that gave them that mandate. That would be fine if it hadn't become so complicated. As The Thick of It expertly dissects it, it is now necessary for your representative to be told how to vote by a combination of civil servants and party officials who take account of a variety of media sources but primarily tabloids, opinion polls, the manoevurings of other MP's, other civil servants and officials of all parties, advisors and lobbyists, friends and relatives, the great and the good, and Europe of course, and his or her own conscience if they can squeeze that in. And almost all the technology that can be brought to bear is employed in obtaining this information for the member of parliament to digest. All these things act as filters, so that actually almost no consistent thread of policy will run all the way through. And much of the time they are not even voting. they are just talking. So all this opinion is provided merely to tell the politician what opinion HE should have. And that would suggest that - if our representatives don't have their own minds any longer - the majority viewpoint of the elected representatives consituency must be the MOST important opinion forming component of this system and not the least. And it also brings us back to the possibility that all the electronically garnered opinion polls, twitters and texts and pagers and laptops and political blogs and online RSS newsfeeds, chat forums and videoconferences are a misuse of technology. Because we could all just use this stuff ourselves to get the information we need and then to vote directly for what we want, right? After all, Eurovision - which lets face it is one of the most nakedly political demonstration sports you will ever witness - managed it last night. Despite a few obvious mutual 12 point masturbations within various balkan, former soviet, scandinavian and mediterranean alliances, the public vote allowed Norway to soar past all previous voting records. That's because the public had a say and they overwhelming liked a violin playing waist coated laboratory hybridisation of Zac Efron and Graeme Le Saux who smiled like he had just been treated with Lithium. Ahh, sweet.

Well done Norway. I thought Iceland should have won myself but I didn't vote so I only have myself to blame. I abdicated from the political process and have no right to criticise. Also thanks to a few glasses of Wolf Blass Yellow Label I ended up hysterically twittering the entire event to no-one whatsoevers benefit. I now have the Azerbaijani entry stuck with me as an ear worm. I think they were singing about hobbits.