Monday 29 January 2018

Verification

If the technology exists for this, then it exists to block these sites altogether. For all its other achievements, the legalisation of this kind of material in the United Kingdom is the most abiding cultural legacy of the last Labour Government. And if, rightly, no one under 18 is allowed to appear in it, or to view it, then how can they be allowed to have sex at all? Never mind to vote?

I would love to see a redress in the balance of the political debate away from freebies for Baby Boomers. So I have tried and tried with votes at 16. But I just do not get it. And after the last General Election, I do not see the need for it, anyway. Of course there was no "youthquake". Who ever said that there had been? Those crowing today need to recognise what were, from their own point of view, the far more discombobulating, but the accurate, reasons why Labour took 40 per cent of the vote and came well within a million votes of winning.

Whereas I am moving away from my uncharacteristic agnosticism about Proportional Representation, even if I am still not convinced as to any specific alternative to First Past the Post, and even though I can still see the problems with all of them. I voted Yes to AV, but I could just as easily have voted No, although that system would pretty much have guaranteed my election for this seat in 2022. 

But if this country does not like coalitions, then it has a very funny way of manifesting that dislike. Two of the last three General Elections have resulted in hung Parliaments, and there would have been one in 2015 if the Conservatives had not broken the law on expenditure, a breach that they do not deny, but which the Crown Prosecution Service cannot see the "public interest" in prosecuting.

First Past the Post is giving us coalitions, anyway, and it is going to continue to do so. People who did not like the last one could punish the Lib Dems for it, and they did. (For some reason, they did not also punish the Conservatives for it. I cannot understand why not.) But the huge majority of the electorate has no means of punishing the DUP.

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