Category: Politics

It’s not democracy.

The UK somehow seems just to trundle along, with things mostly getting worse for everyone, all the time. There are occasional little bursts of progress, but they soon get eroded away. It’s odd, though, because we change our government from time to time. Yet things just head in the same inevitable downward spiral.

Way back, before the Industrial Revolution, we were ruled by Kings, Nobles, and the filthy rich. Kings were descendants of the guy who was best at intimidating or murdering his opponents, and the people knew it was best to do as they were told, if they didn’t want Mr Sword to meet them violently.

After the Industrial Revolution, the Kings and their chums were joined by the successful industrialists, who set themselves up as the landed gentry. There was a Parliament that made laws, and you could be in it if you had lots of money, or were a lord. Most people weren’t allowed to take part in the voting to select who was in this very wealthy clique.

Now these people felt certain that it was their place to rule over us, because they were rich and important. They made sure Parliament did what they wanted.

But there were these dreadful progressive types, who felt things ought to be more democratic, and the number of people allowed to vote for the government kept increasing. The ruling class didn’t like that. So they made sure they could influence whatever government got itself elected, using money, rather than Mr Sword, and Mr Gun.

And people were fooled into thinking this was a democracy. It’s not.

Whoever was in Parliament, the ruling class already had them under their thumbs in advance, and continued to run things for their own benefit.

Nowadays, this continues. The ruling class make donations to politicians of the major parties, in the certainty that the policies they like will be put in place by the politicians they own. And this is why Keir Starmer is continuing the policies of Rishi Sunak. It’s also why, no matter what policies the Labour Party Conference decides upon, the leadership just does what the ruling class wants done.

And this has been going on for hundreds of years, and it is going to be very difficult to change it, even though the people hugely outnumber the ruling class, because there will always be greedy people willing to sell us out for a bit of luxury for themselves.

How not to make a Twitter poll.

A Question of Saffron

Something or other reminded me recently that I can’t seem to detect the smell or taste of saffron. A lot of people love it, and write passionately about it. They’ve smelled it being brought to them even before the waiter came through the kitchen door. They say they’ve had it explode in their mouth. And I have missed out… 

I wondered whether it was just me, or a fairly common thing, to be unable to smell and taste saffron, so I made a Twitter poll.














It was worded very poorly. To be fair to myself, at the time, I didn’t think about it at all carefully. The result was that it didn’t work the way I had expected.

A lot of people thought this was a question about whether saffron is wonderful, whether it is over-priced, or any of several possible interpretations. What I should have actually asked was “Can you smell and taste saffron”. Like this…












Of course, this isn’t good enough, either, as it discriminates against people who want to say that they can’t afford saffron, or have never heard of it. But the worst thing is, all we can tell from the result of the original poll is that about half the people who saw the poll, and answered it,

  • like the smell of saffron

and about half of them 

  • think it is too expensive.
which actually tells us nothing at all about how many people can detect the taste and smell of saffron, and how many cannot.

Conclusion

Polls. We see lots of them quoted, and they are mostly about politics, and are supposed to let us know how people think about things that matter rather a lot more than whether one can detect saffron.

And a lot of those polls are even less well designed than mine. Some are even designed to make people draw the wrong conclusion, and it’s not easy to tell which ones those are, is it?