It’s almost December and today saw the first proper frost of the winter down in my neck of the woods, leaving a shimmer on the bamboo and Cobb nut trees in my garden (pictured), and despite everything today has been a good day. For the first time in ages I almost start to wonder , like Snowolf did a while back if maybe there may yet be change in the air.
Despite Mr Clegg showing once more why they should be called the illiberal democrats (and people may be noticing) by teaming up with Mr Milliband to clamor for state regulation of the press Mr Cameron seems to have had a few braincells fire and worked out that this is a bad thing[tm]. The Spectator very nicely stuck two fingers up at the idea of regulation as well.
UKIP came second in two by-elections (and just for poetry third in a third) and so are starting to be credible as a political party, but better than that have further given lie to the fallacy of there being such a thing as wasted votes (unless you count every vote against the winning party as wasted) and have shown that the “big three” are guaranteed to have it all go their way. Enough “upsets” like this and the other political parties might start remembering why it’s a good idea to listen to the electorate and actually try to represent them, not loot our pockets all the time whilst passing needless laws and nagging us to death.
Even there on the nagging front there’s hope. Whilst minimum pricing is till being pushed through and for now fake charities are getting our money to lobby government for what the government wants, they’ve been told to stop it. And closer to home as Leg Iron so kindly reports after just a week Drinkuary has almost twice as many people signed up on Facebook as the state funded properly organized “Dry January”. Of course it’d be nice to have people throwing a few more coppers into the beer mat fund over there as 1,000 mats won’t hit many pubs – but that’d just be icing.
Today is a good day and now I’m going to go get a pint and for now ignore the bad news they buried
