Political implosions

It's been a pretty extraordinary week on the political front. I don't know if there have ever been so many cabinet resignations in such as short period of time, followed by pretty distrastrous local elections for the ruling party, I almost feel sorry for Gordon Brown...almost.

I do feel sorry for Ian Gibson who I and many people regard as a very good politician who puts the interests of his constituents first, and has a very common sense and intelligent approach to matters. He appears to have had pretty harsh treatment compared to some other politicians who have got away with worse, but there again he was a bit of a labour rebel so maybe this was just the excuse they needed to make him step down as MP for Norwich North. Hopefully he might come back as an independent, at which point he'd have a very good chance of winning, however maybe he'll just call it a day now. I can't see why anyone would particularly want to be an MP at present.

Over the past 3 weeks I think we've really seen how the media control this country. I agree that the issue of MP's abusing their expenses had to come out and be dealt with; some of them are just blatantly crooks, but I don't agree with the fashion in which it's been done, which seems to have caused more harm than good and left our political system reeling. I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to carry on with the serious job of governing the country and dealing with the economic crisis when they're constantly being hounded by the media, who's main interest (and I'm primarily referring to the Telegraph here) seems to be to draw this out for as long as possible to sell more papers. They'd argue it takes a long time to do the research so they can't release everything at once, however they could have just waited until they'd finished delving through all the receipts etc.

It's symptom of modern society, 24 hours news channels, and the Internet that everything has to be rushed out in a pretty chaotic and damaging fashion, and stories that perhaps shouldn't have as much gravitas as they do come to the forefront.

So it looks like he Labour party is going to implode on itself, in much the same way as John Major's conservative party did at the end of the last Conservative reign. It is definitely time for a change, and if Gordon Brown goes which I would have said was unlikely a week ago but now am not so sure, the only sensible course of action would seem to be to call a general election, as the current ruling party seem to be proving themselves completely incompetent at present. Although it is interesting that many other countries seem to admire what Gordon Brown is doing to rescue the British economy so again maybe our judgement is being clouded by the current media hype.

But then again we have the problem of who to vote for. In Norwich apparently Labour went from having 22 seats to having 3 yesterday, so they'll definitely go. The Lib Dem policies seem pretty good but they just don't have the support, and I'm not sure their leadership is strong enough, which leaves the Conservatives who I'd probably be better off under but I can't help feeling it might be at the expense of other people. The Green Party have a lot of sway in Norwich but I don't think they're a serious contender for leading the country - would they really know what to do if they came to power?

Unfortunately alot of the minor parties such as the BNP and UKIP seem to be gaining influence, which is a symptom of how angry people are at the moment - again the media sometimes don't help here. 'Extremist' parties always benefit from instability in a country, along with bad economic and social climates. Things could get quite scary if they start to gain more power (look to history for warnings). Hopefully people are clever and wise enough to see how dangerous they could be in causing suspicion, division, violence etc.

So in short it could be a very interesting week next week, god knows what this will do to the value of my shares however so far the stock market seems to be ignoring the political mess.

And finally on a more serious note how on earth did we lose the 20-20 cricket to the Netherlands?