Posterous theme by Cory Watilo as adapted by Jamie Graham

Personal attacks, the making and recording of

written on Sunday 3 April 2011 and filed under [alternative vote] [politics]

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Poor Margaret Beckett. Always the horse-faced bridesmaid, never the bride.

Mrs Beckett is a big supporter of the flawed X-voting system in the UK. Well, she would be, wouldn't she: she sits for Derby South where a tremendous minority of people (43.3%) want her as MP. Yep, she's another MP, like the terrifying Esther McVey for the Tories in Wirral West, who holds a safe seat despite a large majority of her voters wanting somebody - anybody - else as MP.

La Beckett, 68, has been vocally campaigning to retain X-voting and her minority safe seat. This means getting involved in NO2AV's long, long list of outright lies about AV. Mrs Beckett has happily spouted such stuff, although she must have known it wasn't true (the alternative being that she's actually dumb enough to believe the drivel she's saying, libel lawyers of the world please note).

Now she's popped up in that well-known defender of women's rights and progressive views, the Daily Mail [istyosty link] to complain that some unofficial pro-AV group or another in one of the darker recesses of Facebook have photoshopped her head on to a dinosaur. It was, she's quoted as saying, a "nasty personal attack". Because the official NO2AV campaign would never stoop so low, would it? It would also never publish who its funders are, Margaret. Perhaps you'd like to look into that? For the record, the Yes Campaign is funded by the Electoral Reform Society, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust and shaking buckets in city streets. NO2AV appears to be being funded by the same shady business people behind the so-called Taxpayers' Alliance. That should be more of a worry than a badly photoshopped dinobeckett, shouldn't it?

The problem with taking a stand on something is finding who you are standing next to. I was instantly and irrevocably against the immoral and illegal war against Iraq. That meant that I had to stand next to the prize foaming loon that is George Galloway. The ball-and-chain was pro-war, not believing that politicians would go to war on such an obvious, outright lie. That put him uncomfortably stood with the king of the thick, George W Bush.

So far, however, as a "Yes!" supporter, I'm not stood next to anybody demented or actively undermining the state. It's quite nice. What lefty and progressive "No" people think of standing next to the Beckosaurus, Billyboy Hague, the self-styled Taxpayers' Alliance, Nick Griffin(!!) and the Daily Express is, so far, unrecorded.

Cheese whizz

written on Saturday 2 April 2011 and filed under [broccoli] [cauliflower] [cheese] [cooking] [rationing] [recipe]

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Since I gave up living on World War II rations at Christmas of last year, I've been pleased to find how much of what I learned has stuck with me.

I'm now not so constricted as I was, meat, fat and sugar-wise, but I'm still using a minimum of fat and sugar at roughly WW2 levels. Also, no leftover is thrown away today if it can possibly become an ingredient tomorrow. I don't eat meat, but the ball-and-chain does, so he has had an increase in fresh and smoked meats and a 100% decrease in tinned Spam and other potted meats.

One thing we've both increased is our cheese intake. Previously restricted to a tiny 2oz a week each, we're now free to raid the fridges of Morrisons and the stalls at local food fayres in search of ever more exotic takes on cheddar. In particular, this has meant the return of fully-flavoured cheese sauces.

I'm a devotee of Nella Last, whose Mass Observation diaries have now reached a third gripping volume. She was a master at taking her tiny stipend from her manic-depressive husband and her small rations and turning in sumptuous meals that thrilled family and visitors throughout the 1940-1954 rationing period. Dotted through her diaries are little tips on how to eke out a small supply of something to make it seem far, far larger.

Cheese was something she seemed to stretch beyond imagination. Her and Will's 4 ounces could make a cheese salad in the midst of the Blitz, thanks to the very simple idea of buying a crumbly cheese (Cheshire, Lancashire) and finely crumbling it through an ordinary salad. The result is startling: 2oz of cheese crumbled into a salad does indeed produce a flavoursome cheese salad - you wouldn't know that it was such a micro amount.

Another trick was how to make cauliflower cheese without almost no cheese. This was done by buying a "sharp" (extra mature) hard cheese, making a white sauce and not putting the cheese in it. Instead, the cauli goes into the white sauce and the cheese gets added to two end slices of bread and turned into cheese breadcrumbs. The result is everything you could want in a cauliflower cheese... except virtually no cheese.

As I say, I'm no longer rationed cheese-wise. So for yesterday's Purple Sprouting Broccoli and Cauliflower Mornay (it's classier to call it that), I did put cheese in my white sauce. But I also made cheese breadcrumbs for the top. Best of all worlds.

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Here's the recipe:

  • 8oz of cheese
  • Diced onion
  • Chopped fresh garlic
  • Broccoli
  • Cauliflower (these two came from my Abel and Cole vegbox)
  • Milk
  • Plain flour
  • Glug of olive or a knob of butter

Start pre-heating your oven to 200°C. Melt the butter/heat the oil on the stove. Fry off the onion until it starts going soft, then add the garlic. When the onion is transparent, add the plain flour a tablespoon at a time, stirring it in, until all the fat is absorbed. Now add a splash of milk, stir until absorbed, add another splash and keep doing this until you've got a gluey mess. Then keep doing it more until you've got a white sauce.

Cut the cheese in two, about two thirds and one third. Grate or crumble the larger piece into the white sauce and keep stirring as it melts. Now take two end pieces of bread and the remaining block of cheese and whizz them in a food processor or blender until you've got medium breadcrumbs.

Add the broccoli and the cauliflower to the cheese sauce, remove from heat and decant into an oven-proof dish or casserole. Coat with all the breadcrumbs, then put it in the bottom of the oven for about 20 minutes or until the breadcrumbs brown.

Serve with your choice of meat (smoked gammon goes well) and, since this has bread in it and we must heed Lord Woolton, another vegetable of your choice that isn't potato.

Selfish reasons for voting "yes"

written on Friday 1 April 2011 and filed under [alternative vote] [elections] [politics]

Mcvey

In my Westminster constituency, Wirral West, we're stuck with a truly awful MP.

When the boundaries were redrawn before the last election, a seat that Labour had held quite well as a marginal became a Tory seat. It's not the safest seat in the world, but barring a 1945 or 1997-style landslide (and they don't come very often) it's almost impossible to remove the person the Tories chose to be our local MP.

Esther McVey is a horrible person. Well, maybe her family tolerate her, I don't know. But as an MP, she's a Gilbert and Sullivan character, Sir Joseph Porter: "I always voted at my party's call / And I never thought of thinking for myself at all". According to TheyWorkForYou, she has never once rebelled over anything. In fact, I'm pretty sure she's never once had a single original thought in her head.

I've twice written to her to voice my opinions (having previously lived in actual marginal constituencies, it was always a good thing to do, provoking honest, thoughtful replies and once actually changing my then-MP's mind). The first time, the letter I got back, eventually, was copied word-for-word from the Tory manifesto with the addition of a paragraph that told me, with good grace, to keep my Commie views to myself in future and fuck off out of it (I paraphrase, but I've never been so politely told to get lost before). The second time I wrote, on a different matter, she didn't even bother to reply.

I think I can safely say that Esther McVey is a party droid, elected to represent the Tories in Wirral West, not the people of Wirral West in Westminster. And she's permanent. Under the current voting system, she cannot be removed.

And yet, only 42% of the people voting in 2010 wanted her as our MP. 58% of people wanted someone - anyone - else. But our "winner takes all" X-voting isn't interested in what the majority want. It wants to pick an MP from the largest block, and with Wirral West drawn to contain some very posh areas of Meols and Heswall, the largest block is the Conservative party.

With the Alternative Vote, the 58% of people - the majority - who didn't vote for Esther McVey suddenly get a choice. People like me, for instance. No longer would this be a safe enough seat that she could fuck me off if I write to her. Oh no: she'd have to at least pretend to listen. She'd have to vote against the government now and again, lest she looked like a party stooge and found that people, handed the power in her seat at last, chose to turf her out.

On the face of it, she still might have won in 2010. She got 42.5%. Labour got 36.3%. The LibDems got 16.8%. The other three (UKIP, 'Common Sense' that wasn't and an independent) hoovered up the remaining 4.4%.

We can probably assume that the right-wing nutjobs who wasted their X-votes on the bottom three would have given their second (or later) preferences to la McVey rather than Labour or the LibDems. So lets be generous and do that transfer now: C:46.9%, L: 36.3%, LD: 16.8%.

Next to be knocked out would be the LibDems. Now, remember this is before the LibDems went all more-Tory-than-the-Tories Orange Book on us. Their transfers would be vital, and this is where it gets interesting. The local LibDems by and large loathe the Tories more than they dislike Labour. Most of their transfers would thus go to Labour... and we wouldn't have la McVey lording it over her Rotten Borough. If we did, it would be on a very thin majority from transfers and she'd need to be a lot more responsive because this seat would be a lot more valuable to her.

And this is why I'll be voting "Yes!" with a song in my heart on 5 May. It might not mean the end of having a Tory MP locally, but a yes vote means the end of having a remote, uncaring Tory MP here. I can settle for that.