Has to be said..
I, for one, welcome our new green overlord.
Perhaps the only party to emerge with a smile from last night’s ragbag of results was the Greens, whose leader, MEP Caroline Lucas, scored a first for them, gaining a parliamentary seat for Brighton Pavilion. The swing of 8.4 per cent from Labour to Green was just enough to leave Lucas with a majority of nearly 1,252 in what …
"Her victory means the arrival in parliament of a strong voice"
Have you ever heard the woman speak? A weedier, more pathetic voice it would be difficult to imagine. As for the Greens themselves, as a friend of mine put it (far better than I could) "If it weren't for their ridiculous Green policies, I could actually see myself voting for them".
After backing the Tories because he thinks they value civil liberties , Ozimek then wets his pants over a party that wants to take away more liberty than any other 'mainstream' party.
Punish drinkers (50 per cent extra duty on a pint of beer), punish car drivers, punish people who want to go abroad on holiday, punish industry and manufacturing, punish people with patio heaters.... freedom is strictly defined in the Greeny world. And it's all for your own good.
Sorry Ozimek but you can't have it both ways. Either your believe in personal freedom, or you don't. You seem only to support liberties of which you approve.
I don't support Tories. i don't support the Greens. I can just about see why my run through the Tory manifesto could be construed as support for them. But this? Its a straightforward report of an election result. It needs reporting because its a first. End of.
BTW. Titles and such like are courtesy stuff. You are free to call me what you wish – although most of my friends now tend to use “she” in polite conversation. Its an identity thing.
Jane Fae - you were gushing over this result like a schoolgirl. This is not a straightforward report, as you claim, it is very selective:
"Lucas will be pushing for a more equal society, with statutory maximum as well as minimum pay, positive action for women – for instance, requiring 40 per cent of board members of large companies to be female within the next five years – and a better deal for pensioners.
She will also be pushing for government to view drugs and drug addiction as health, not crime, issues."
Nothing about restrictions on travel, punitive taxes on alcohol (and other things the little Nazis think are bad), restricting science and technology investment to politically-correct goals. Encouraging children to snitch on their parents. An energy policy that can't keep the lights on.
All missing!
You are no friend of civil liberties. Please stop posing as someone in favour of freedom.
Hmm - there's a rabid outburst if ever I saw one. To pick just one example, you're quite happy to moan about "punishing" car drivers (presumably because you are one) and yet the flip side of the coin is that non-car drivers get "rewarded" with better public transport, cleaner air and safer and quieter streets. I could equally say that your non-Green party of choice is "punishing" non-car drivers.
I don't see what your examples have to do with civil liberties. You can remain being selfish if you want, but you will just have to account more for the way your selfishness pisses all over the rights of other people, which is only fair, after all. If you want to know about real civil liberties, take a look at http://www.votefordemocracy.org.uk/ and you will see that the Green Party and the Lib Dems are in almost equal first place with 80% and 80.5% respectively, with the next (SNP) at 57%, descending all the way to the BNP at 7.5%.
As you say - you can't have it both ways...
@handle: "but you will just have to account more for the way your selfishness pisses all over the rights of other people"
Let me explain it for you slowly.
I don't have to account to you for anything . Nobody has to account to you either. You're a bloke in his pyjamas. The Green Party has just polled fewer votes than the BNP. The people don't want your policies.
Your views on what is selfish and how you should punish selfish people carry no weight. You can advocate yogic flying and compulsory vegetarianism if you like, it doesn't matter.
When and if you ever get a DEMOCRATIC mandate, let us know. Until then, piss off back to the Guardian.
Because it'll force decisions to be made based on a pesons gender. That's sexist. Be it supposed positive sexism or whatever. Don't get me wrong, I suspect a lot of the decisions are made for the wrong reasons at this point anyway and I find it far worse that anyone should need to consider putting something like this forward in the first place.
I work in engineering, a traditionally male dominated industry (*), if such a regulation was brought in then female employees would be fast-tracked to board level for the only reason there are far less of them in the business. Quite how that can be considered fair and not sexist I do not know.
Secondly more men than women choose to take significant periods of away from the work place to bring up kids. Experience is often key to working in more senior positions and no way how you look at it, on average, you are going to have more men than women with a greater level of experience of the business. I expect this will change slowly with time as we get a bit more flexible as to how we manage child care and more men take up the role.
(*) I would love to see a 50./50 split in engineering but I don't see that happening any time soon!
> Sigh. What about gender *and* suitability for the task? It's only an aim, anyway, not a mandate.
From the article:
"positive action for women – for instance, requiring 40 per cent of board members of large companies to be female within the next five years"
That sounds like a mandate to me, suitability doesn't come into it.
What's wrong with making a decision based *solely* on suitability for a task? That's what true equality should look like, and if some men can't handle being overlooked because a woman really was better for the job, that's their problem and they've got no right to whine about it.
But offer the possibility that they were overlooked based on something besides merit and you can expect that shrieking to continue. If it's proven that's what happened, the complaints become justified and could even lead to situations where someone who genuinely got the job because of merit can have that merit called into doubt because of their gender, colour, whatever...hardly a bold step in the right direction for equality, that.
But I have to disagree with you.
I was nominated as my partys candidate for election to the local authority 2 years ago, beating off competition from the 3 other potential nominees (all male).
However, 2 weeks later, we got word from Party HQ that my nomination was to be nullified, as we had to nominate a minority instead (Woman, Ethnic or Disabled). I didn't agree with this at all, as it had been a fair contest, and no minorities had even put themselves forward for nomination. Of our 42 qualifying "minority" members in the area, no-one wanted to go forward for nomination, just as they hadn't in the original ballot. We had to parachute in 4 candidates from neighbouring areas. We eventually nominated a woman with no links to the area, and with no knowledge of the problems afflicting it. She was the best of a pretty bad bunch.
She managed to lose the 812 vote majority the retiring councillor had, and the electorate voted for another party (another female candidate) with a 245 majority.
This just seems to be what happens when someone get's to their position based purely on gender/race/disability and not ability. I'm not saying I would have won the election, but at least I knew the area, so would have stood a better chance.
Discrimination is discrimination no matter whether it is given the polite, politically correct, name of positive discrimination, or is discrimination against a minority. Mandating that 40% of board members should be female is discriminatory, and because that discrimination is based on gender it is sexist. Insisting that at least 40% of a board is of each gender is neither discriminatory or sexist. Of course, it is silly.
Why I have a big problem with that policy though is simple. In my line of work, I see about 10% female CVs and 90% male CVs. So with a completely non-discriminatory policy, I end up with about 10% women in the organisation. Are we then to have 40% board members from an organisation that only has 10% women, despite having no discrimination. However, there are plenty of female dominated businesses where board representation is woefully low, and I think this is something that is a travesty. Unfortunately, it is a travesty that would be least well fixed using positive discrimination.
Surely any reason I choose not to vote is a 'valid' one, as it's entirely my choice, whether or not I vote.
There's a multitude of reasons I didn't vote, most of them aren't political.
Laziness, Busyness, Genuinely not knowing who to vote for and why, and not being educated enough in exactly what I would be voting for ... a new prime minister? Not really. I'm voting to elect an MP for my constituency (which obviously in turn effects who is elected).
I have no idea who those people are (apart from what i've seen in the spam stuffed in the letter box every morning), the only people I've heard about is Brown, Cameron, Clegg and co.
I don't like to think of myself as apolitical because I'm pretty opinionated generally, but I really don't like the current system, or understand enough about it to feel confident in what I'm voting for.
Most people I know are just blindly voting based on their already set views and have been incredibly close minded about what it means for the local constituency as well as long term goals.. speaking of which, one of my short term goals is to not reside in the UK.. another reason I guess that added to the lack of enthusiasm to vote.
Hope this clears things up and the down votes weren't out of ignorance. Feel free to down vote me, but this is just how I currently feel and I'll welcome any responses that would be able to encourage me to vote next time (if I'm in the country).
Cheers
maybe not sexist, but it _is_ discriminatory .... surely the government has no business legislating the gender or ethnicity nor orientation of people in the board rooms .. any more than a PM who has not won an election has any business doing anything other than resigning (which direction is that particular moral compass pointing right now?)
By the way, anyone else enjoying Paxman v Dromey right now?
Dromey (Lab): the big loser in this election is the Conservatives.
Paxman: They got 2 million more votes than you.
Dromey: The country does not want a Conservative government.
Pax: They got 2 million more votes than you.
Dromey: The country has said clearly it does not want a Conservative govt.
Pax: They got 2 million more votes than you.
Note to Paxo: you can only conclude that the desire for each party to govern is proportional to the number of votes for those parties if there is a linear relationship between the number of votes and the power each party gets, i.e. proportional representation.
Consider for example that at the time of writing, the Lib Dems have had an increase in their vote of 1% compared with the last election, and yet have lost 5 seats! And consider the further distortion in the voting figures themselves due to tactical voting as a result of first-past-the-post: many Lib Dem supporters will not have voted Lib Dem because of the fear it would let in the candidate they really didn't want.
Not that I'm saying that 2M more votes for the Tories than Labour mean that Labour is more popular, but Paxo is sometimes his own worst enemy with his over-simplified repetitious confrontational sound-bites.
"Her victory means the arrival in parliament of a strong voice arguing for a Green alternative."
"Lucas will be pushing for a more equal society, with statutory maximum as well as minimum pay, positive action for women – for instance, requiring 40 per cent of board members of large companies to be female within the next five years – and a better deal for pensioners."
Completely apart from my opinions on the policies themselves, I love the way that not a single one of those listed in the article has a remotely "green" theme.
By the way, any policy which forces people to discriminate based on any factor is a discriminatory policy by it's own nature. The reality may be different but the best candidate for any job, including board ones, should be decided entirely by suitability for the role, regardless of gender.
Good work not decapitating the Daily-Mail-at-play that seems to increasingly be the readership of the reg. I was cringing reading some of that stuff- must be worse to actually be the one approving such unholy turdspurts.
For what it's worth, today was rubbish anyway. At least the fuckwittery didn't ruin a perfectly reasonable day.
Weekend now, woo. It's going to piss down, too.
That's what they are - watermelons: green on the outside and red on the inside. Couldn't make communism work or palatable so now it's socialism by stealth, dressed up in green pseudo-science. We have a whole bunch of them in parliament here in NZ and that means the government has to pretend to listen to them. Stick to first past the post if you have any sense, Brits