Tag / politics

by Andrew Pilcher

Politics as unusual

We’re in the final stages of a truly wierd and utterly pointless general election at the moment, another one of those side-effects of the Brexit process that was made inevitable as soon as Theresa May announced she wasn’t going to be holding another election when she became prime minister.

These are all my local candidates. Amber Rudd, the home secretary, has become the Prime Ministers representative on earth since calling the election she can’t be bothered to turn up to any of the debates about it. I feel sort of sorry for her – her father died two days before the big TV debate, but she’s a slave to her ambition, so she dutifully turned up at the debate and got laughed at for asking to be judged by the Government’s record.  There’s a real chance she may be unseated, as the opposition forces have been making a coordinated campaign against her, and the latest polls show her losing. But we’ve been here before. I’ll believe it only when it actually happens.

Peter Chowney is the leader of the staunchly Labour-controlled Hastings Borough Council, and is her likely successor. He has his own questions to answer about dodgy planning decisions in the town.

I consider myself to be a natural Liberal Democrat, but I can’t bring myself to vote for Nick Perry, who has brought their share of the vote down from around 20% in 2010 to 3% in 2015. Neither can anyone else. They have become irrelevant.

UKIP are nutters. I may have made their candidate appear a little too sane.

The final lawn sign isn’t my own creation, but I’ve seen it around a lot plastered to walls and as a meme in my Facebook feed.

 

by Andrew Pilcher

Eurovision

smith-pilcher-954-160513Written and drawn in the run-up to both the referendum about whether we stay inside the EU or not, and the completely unrelated Eurovision Song contest.

That’s Boris Johnson on the telly in the last frame, figurehead of the Leave campaign at the time. OK, get your head round this if you can. I’m writing this from the perspective of early July – we’ve voted to leave the EU. Boris joined the Leave campaign, expecting to lose by a slim amount, calculating that he could take over the Prime Minister David Cameron’s job when he resigned, having lost his authority. However, Britain voted to leave, which he didn’t expect. Cue immediate backpedalling during his victory speech. Cameron resigned, Boris announced his candidacy, and then had to throw in the towel when he was stabbed in the back by his ally, Michael Gove, who announced his own candidacy as someone who actually believed in what he was saying. Gove himself is currently floundering, as he’s now established himself as someone who can’t be trusted, having insisted for all of his career that he didn’t want the Primeminister’s job. So now it looks like we’ve got a contest between a third Leave supporter, Andrea Leadsome, who noone had heard of outside of her constituency until a week ago, and Theresa May, a Home Secretary, despised of by the Police force she is supposedly in charge of. Anyway, that’s the story as of July 4th 2016. Expect everything to change again tomorrow.

As for Eurovision, the UK came 24th out of a field of 26 entries into the final. A few of the national juries voted for us, but none of the phone voters in the real world did. Bland doesn’t work, it turns out. Cocking a snook at your powerful neighbours does, though, as Ukraine won with a protest song about the treatment of the minory populations of the Crimea during the Second World War – something that they insited had no parallels with any more recent events between Ukraine and Russia. Russia came third, and Putin had an enormous (but very manly) huff the day afterwards.

by Andrew Pilcher

Putting the world to rights part 2

smith-pilcher-841-150824Ok, I did religion in the last strip, so let’s go for broke and do politics this time.

The people on telly are:

Frame 1:
Left: (but actually on the right) Boris Johnson, Conservative Mayor of London and MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Right: (but actually left) Ed Milliband, former leader of the Labour Party.

Frame 2:
Left: (and actually left) Jeremy Corbyn, the man currently likely to be the next Labour Party leader. Right (and actually right) Ian Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and complete and utter bell-end.

Frame 3:
General view of the House of Commons.

by Andrew Pilcher

Church and state

smith-pilcher-794-150506It’s the General Election tomorrow. After a long, slow, interminable buildup that has left the country in a strange mixture of feverish excitement and deep, deep coma we finally get to vote for the least worst candidate from the selection of chancers and nonentities put before us.

Hastings and Rye is pretty lucky in being a marginal constituency – in other words it’s one of the few in the country where a vote matters. Most constituencies are safe seats. For example, in Tunbridge Wells, an amoeba would be voted into parliament if it wore a Conservative rosette, whereas in somewhere like Gateshead a Labour-leaning ebola virus would win an easy majority. Hastings is one of the few seats in the South East where the balance is on a knife edge. The current Conservative incumbent, Amber Rudd, has a majority of 3%, and the groundswell in Hastings shown by council elections over the past few years has been definitely leftward as the austerity measures brought in by her party have bitten in this deprived seaside town. I can’t say how the final result in Westminster is going to pan out – no-one can, it’s that close, and no-one is really up to the job – but I’m reasonably certain that Hastings will be turning red on Thursday.

I’ve drawn my local polling station, the Christ Church and St Andrews Church Hall in the first frame. Polling stations can be anywhere. When I was a kid my primary school was closed for the day whenever an election took place so it could be used for voting. Several pubs and fish and chip shops are used as polling stations, in Hastings our local paper’s offices are being used. Before the Church Hall was made a polling station in my ward, I used to vote at the playing grounds of Hastings United Football Club.

Vote here