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Oliver Cross: X hits the spot
MY heart skipped with joy on Sunday morning when my local Labour candidate knocked on my door...and why does that sound like I'm being sarky?
I really was pleased; just because so many people have given up on liberal representative democracy doesn't mean you can't enjoy a council by-election. Doesn't mean, indeed, that you haven't got a responsibility to enjoy a council by-election.
I even enjoy receiving my official polling card in the post, although this card, for the Leeds City Council by-election in Hyde Park and Woodhouse ward on February 18, was frankly rather flimsy.
I know public money has to be husbanded but voting is very important; it deserves solid polling cards, robust pencils on string and engaged-looking polling clerks... the paraphernalia may seem dusty and quaint but it's been paid for in blood, so better respect it.
Whose blood? Well, all the uncountable casualties of the English Civil War, the Second World War, the Peterloo massacre, the Chartist riots, the suffragette movement... really, if all these things had happened at once, instead of dripping out slowly so that we take them for granted, we would be queuing round several blocks to reach a polling station, as black South Africans did in 1994. (And, as Tony Hancock so relevantly asked: "Did Magna Carta die in vain?").
And I think, ignoring all those bad-tempered moaners who say they won't vote because politicians are all in it for themselves (which they certainly aren't), that we should mark our ballot papers with pride.
I enjoy the physical process of making the X; two bold strokes and I've made my contribution to the future of the nation, or, come February 18, Hyde Park and Woodhouse. It is, to use a word that usually makes me want to strangle someone, empowerment.
Although I wouldn't go as far as the Chartists, who, in the mid 19th century, were so keen on democratically-organised general elections that they wanted them to be held annually, which, given modern electioneering techniques, would drive everybody crazy.
Their point was that making their representatives face an annual test would keep them on their toes and stop them becoming corrupt and self-serving.
As the People's Charter of 1838 says, MPs "when elected for a year only would not be able to defy and betray their constituents as now." Ring any bells?
Cheese spread
The Chemic Tavern in Woodhouse, Leeds, is breaking into so many sub-groups that before long it will start to look very much like post-Tito Yugoslavia (says I, chairman of the Chemic's inappropriate similes working party, which would probably work better if it I had any other members to collaborate with, instead of being as isolated as a Martian snowball in a leper colony).
Anyway, there is now a Chemic cheese group which has very simple rules; you bring along some cheese of your own, eat bits of everybody else's cheese and try to say something enlightening about the experience.
It tends to fall down on part three because, unlike wine or (particularly at the Chemic) beer, people don't have a very big vocabulary when it comes to cheese (um, strong...um, less strong...a bit cheesy...er, yellowish...did you take the cellophane off?).
This is wrong because cheese (so long as the health authorities allow it, which may not be for much longer) is a glorious food; local, crafted, endlessly varied, full of complex flavours, regrettably salty and fatty and, in the case of my contribution to the Chemic cheese symposium, available from Asda.
This was a mild Cheddar Marmite cheese, tasting, as was agreed after a lively, sometimes rather heated debate, a bit cheesy and a bit Marmite-y.
The consensus was that, although Marmite and cheese can be combined in a cheese factory, they are best combined in a sandwich or (highly recommended) as Marmite and cheese on toast.
This I've known for most of my life because my mother used to shove Marmite into more or less everything except trifles and my favourite meal was always Marmite on toast made soggy with Heinz spaghetti juice.
Mind you, I did try, in a Chinese restaurant on a recent trip to London, squid cooked in Marmite. It tasted a bit like squid and a bit like Marmite.
Edlington was no case for Cameron to use to push his agenda
LAST week I said that if I knew how to bet, I would bet on Labour not losing the general election badly, and even possibly winning it.
Now I'm going (although I wouldn't particularly welcome it) for a Labour win on the news that the recession is, allegedly, over and David Cameron, far from being a sure-footed, all-conquering smoothie is, in fact, rather inept.
This is in view of his response to the awful Edlington case. Mr Cameron seemed to think it would be a good time to push his 'broken society' agenda, even though everybody who knows – including the police, the NSPCC and my partner Lynne, who could write a textbook on child protection if she wasn't too busy protecting children – recognises that Edlington was an extremely rare event and nothing to draw conclusions from or make politics of.
Ah, but isn't that exactly what Tony Blair, when he was shadow Home Secretary, did in respone to the James Bulger case? Of course it was, but the lesson for Mr Cameron is that you can't pull the same stunt twice.
Incidentally, cases of children who murder or near-murder occur so seldom that they are separated by decades rather than years; in Britain, in living memory it comes down to Mary Bell, the Bulger killers and the Edlington boys.
Each of these involved children from chaotic or traumatic backgrounds and of about the same, supposedly innocent, age doing unspeakable things to smaller children.
But I wonder how many people remember that, like Venables and Thompson and the Edlington boys, Mary Bell was brought to trial with another child. She (Norma Bell, no relation) was acquitted but had become, on the evidence, involved in Mary's messy, unhappy life. It seems that it takes two.
This is of great interest to child psychologists and psychiatrists, although politicians (and for that matter columnists) should keep away.
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Weather for Leeds
Sunday 12 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 0 C to 5 C
Wind Speed: 7 mph
Wind direction: North west
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Sunny spells
Temperature: 4 C to 8 C
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