Not a happy voter

Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, finds the AV+ PR voting system “elegant”. Well, elegance has nothing to do with it. How about “intelligible” or “transparent”, as a Single Transferable Vote system would be? The AV+ has you voting in part for a party list. I will not start on the patronage issue. It’s too bleeding obvious. Then I look at the voting forms for the MEP’s on June 4th. Here you are clearly voting for the party rather than the individual and that is just as screwed up.

Resilient Nation

The Demos Resilient Nation paper is a good read, majoring on anecdotes and examples around emergencies. It tells you how different communities respond and what organisations are out there dealing with emergencies. You have to be impressed by the ingenuity and resourcefulness of those involved either professionally or as volunteers. I would have liked to see some more concrete recommendations. The authors shy away from fingering Central Government with the responsibility on the basis that a government programme would be too costly and look what a fine job some organisations are doing. So in the end Demos’ recommendations are no more joined up than the nation’s disaster recovery plans.

Resilience

Lindsey Colbourne has written a paper on "Resilience" for the Sustainable Development Commission. I have been dubious about the usefulness of this organisation for some time. Mr Porritt seems to be making a fine career around being a good egg ecologically but he is clearly an establishment insider. Ms Colbourne’s work is an academic paper offering a definition of the term “Resilience” in relation to environmental issues. It offered no new insights regarding the problems we are facing, beyond suggesting a new label for what used to be called “sustainable development” before the term stopped attracting government funding.

A tad more independence

Roy Hattersley was the most impressive presenter at Hay. It was exciting to see an old Labour hand supporting proportional representation. It jarred a bit that his support was based on pragmatism rather than a desire for fairness. The other odd statement was that he felt that the real Gordon Brown had yet to stand up. He still supported Gordon as leader. This did not make sense. Gordon Brown is a grown man. If he is frightened to express himself honestly and clearly, how long do we have to wait? Roy was brilliant but he has to show just a tad more independence.