The Election Blog, Getting Local

eaststrikewest drop an Election 2010 update on their politics blog.

Posted Tuesday, 27 April 2010 by eaststrikewest in

Blog

It’s been a busy few days for team eaststrikewest – we’ve had a video shoot for a forthcoming episode of the incredibly popular Red Bull Bedroom Jam site. It was at Kanaloa, a Tahitian themed bar in swinging London, part owned by a Girls Aloud. How’d those pineapples taste?

In between takes we started talking about what ramifications this blog might have on our future endeavours – are we truly representing the whole political cannon impartially? So far we’ve concentrated on national policies, and completely neglected our local concerns.

As mentioned previously, locally it’s a straight shoot out between Margaret Hodge MBE from Labour and Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP. Barking & Dagenham is historically a safe Labour seat, Hodge herself has represented the borough in Parliament for 16 years. She is the daughter of a German steel billionaire. She is currently the minister for Culture and Tourism. Griffin has a conviction from the late nineties for distributing material likely to incite racial hatred, his day job is in Brussels as an MEP, and he currently resides in Wales. He is a former member of the National Front, and is now the leader of the British National Party. Kicking off their election campaign in a pub in Elm Park (which is quite close to Barking & Dagenham, but isn’t a part of the constituency), the BNP announced that due to some silly law, they have to allow non-white British citizens become members of the party if they want. Form an orderly queue! By presenting facts, we remain impartial see?

If you’ve only just caught the election bug, and only had a minor interest in politics previously, you may have missed Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time late last year. It was a real treat! Thankfully the mercurial internet video blogger Cassetteboy has kindly summarised the whole hour long programme into a handy minute long bite-size chunk.

So, bit of a late pass on this one – it’s Tuesday morning, not Thursday night. What went wrong? Well, as mentioned above, it’s been a busy few days, the sun has been out, and that meat won’t burn itself on the BBQ. As a result we’ve only just been able to get together and watch Leader’s Debate 2: EUROPE. So what can we tell you?

Well, the Sky News presenter Adam Boulton is a lot more hardline than Alastair Stewart. And the ticker tape running across the bottom of the screen is very very distracting.

This time around, there were no unknown quantities, no real surprises, in fact it was all rather dull. Three well dressed middle aged men tearing strips off each other. That’s basically all it was. Nick Clegg was bawled out over claiming £10 on expenses for a cake tin. David Cameron was branded a “threat to the nation’s economy” by Gordon Brown. Gordon Brown was called a “one-eyed Scottish idiot” by David Cameron. Oh sorry, that was Jeremy Clarkson. But you get the idea. It was down, it was dirty, it was a bit embarrassing.

So what does the coming week hold – it’s the big one, the week before the election, what can we expect? Well, now we’ve got past that touchy feely stage where they’ve slagged each other off on a personal level, we can only hope that the final televised debate is a coherent measure of each party’s future plans, so we can make a rational decision on what policies are important to us, rather than populist posturing political pugilism. That reads a bit like George Galloway as it goes.

Finally, this is quite pithy: