Political Penguin

I thought that under the circumstances I should drop a little personal message into the site to pay tribute to Mrs Penguin. Although technically speaking she’s not as we’re not married.
Anyway, a big thank you for looking after Little Penguin during the evenings and giving me enough time in the last fortnight to build this site and get it up and running.

For those of you who might be passing through the centre of Willenhall, you might notice this on the main island.

For those who might be mistaken, there isn’t an election going on in the Willenhall South ward at the moment and the poster in question is purely a leftover of which there are a few dotted around the ward from this years local elections.
Now anyone who’s been involved in organising elections, particularly in Walsall, will know that the council tend to be a bit hot on getting parties to take their posters down within a fortnight after polling day – with the threat of fines if you don’t.
However, in reality do they really enforce these rules? It would seem not, and to give another example; following the by-election that was held in our ward in 2005, the BNP posters were still up in the Fibbersley area during this years campaign. I’ll admit to having not frequented that area for a fair few months, but they may even still be there.
Now I said in my first post that I wouldn’t get into outright Tory or LibDem bashing purely for the fun of it, so here’s the point.
Every year, political parties of all colours spend a disproportionate amount of time cutting boards, pasting boards, sticking them up on lampposts and taking them down again. I am yet to see of what value this is to the democratic process in our country. I know activists who like them, think it’s traditional or simply looks good during election time. I can only think of one valid argument in favour of posters on lampposts – that they make people aware there’s an election on. That’s a lot of time, money and planetary resources wasted to tell people what I would hope in a functioning democracy they should already know. Equally, they’ll be plenty of leaflets and other bits of literature pushed through peoples letterboxes informing them of the fact there’s an election on anyway.
After many years of being stuck up a ladder, I’ll admit that I tend not to do it anymore. Not because I’m lazy, but that I think my time is better spent actually talking to people on doorsteps. Something that seems to be a dying art, at least in Walsall anyway. I’m not per se against posters, there’s a real lift you get when you see them in people’s windows at election times, knowing that the residents of that household are backing you. I’ll sign-off on this comment that someone once said to me on the issue: ‘People vote, not lampposts’.

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As a committed user of our public transport system in the West Midlands, the other week I found myself waiting for the bus home at Wolverhampton bus station.
Now anyone who has frequented this facility in the past few months will know what I’m talking about. When they upgraded the station they introduced a public address system of sorts which intermittently blurts out public information informing us that we can’t smoke there, etc etc. What got me thinking was the one that starts: “Oi you, yes you, with the mobile phone” or words to that effect which politely informs us that we shouldn’t show or use our mobile phone in public because the bloke behind is eyeing it ready to mug us.
On the ocassion in question as I’ve heard this announcement a few times now, I decided to eye up my would be mugger behind me. There stood a young gentleman aged in his late teens to early twenties of afro-caribbean descent. He smiled at me (this may have been something to do with me holding Little Penguin at the time – small babies bring out displays of affection in complete strangers for some reason).
Now, should I believe this bloke behind me is tooled up ready to give me a good kicking for my Nokia 6250i? Perhaps there’s an array of switch-blades and knuckle dusters secretly hidden in those sociology books under his arm? Or could it be that he’s just a student from Wolverhampton College/University on his way home or to see his girlfriend after a long day of mind-numbing lectures on social anthropology. (Just to note, I neither have anything against or believe social anthropology is mind-numbing, actually I quite enjoyed studying it myself).
This however threw me and made me think about the mindset of a mugger. Now if I were a mugger/street robber, use whatever terminology you like, then I would probably make a few assumptions about potential victims based on a good set of averages. Presumably, as I have never been mugged, in the UK anyway, the proceeding would go something like this:
Mugger approaches victim tooled up with a weapon or unarmed but with a few mates. Either grabs, corners or threatens with a weapon the victim and demands items to be passed over. Now the obvious is the wallet/purse (note to any potential muggers, mine’s always empty as I’m skint, so don’t bother). If the victim were a female perhaps items of jewellery or in the case of either sex, maybe a watch (I don’t own one of those either BTW). But for me, after the wallet/purse, my second item to demand would be a mobile phone as given that the vast majority of the adult and even younger population of this country own one, there’s a fair bet any victim is going to possess one.
So that brings me back to the announcement at the bus station. If it’s trying to prevent crime by getting people not to show that they own a mobile phone then unless the potential mugger has half a brain, he/she’s going to demand one from you anyway and even if they don’t, they’ll still nick your wallet/purse which doesn’t do anything to prevent crime in the first instance. However, what it does do is reinforce the steady drip drip feed of information propagated by our media and the like, to us, that we can’t trust other people. Other people are out to do us over, beat the crap out of us, rob us at any opportunity they get. Yes, there are sadly those in our society that do undertake such deeds but they thankfully remain a very small minority and for anyone who leaves their front door in the morning, the odds are that you’re not going to get mugged, shot, beaten about the head at some point during the day. So for now I leave you with this message, have a safe day, but be careful, that bloke behind you might want to nick your mobile. (that was irony for any LibDems or Tories reading)

As the first post on my blog I thought I would start with a little introduction about who I am and what this blog is all about. I am a bloke from the Black Country coming up to my twentieth year of campaigning for the Labour Party and who after many months of having been a passive consumer of other peoples blogs decided to have a bash myself.
It’s quite apparent that this blog is not going to be about what I did with my friends the other night and that I actually have something to say about the world in which we live and the issues that affect our lives.
I hope to keep a lot of the focus of this site to the issues that affect the West Midlands although no doubt I will be commenting on national and international issues along the way. In addition to that I’m planning on doing a few research projects of my own for which I’ll be posting the results here. That is not to say content will be overly academic, there will of course be the usual musings, perceptive comments and irreverent stuff added into the mix. I’m also not adverse to a bit of LibDem and Tory bashing, although I’ll try to keep it in the context of there being a valid point to make and not do it just for the sake of it.
I will (at least to the best of my knowledge) be the only political blogger who resides in the Walsall Metropolitan Borough area following the sad demise of my old mate Paul Mac’s blog a few months back but hopefully a few more might be spurred into action.
Finally, a bit about this site. It was wholly built by myself using a few nifty tools (see credits section) with a lot of manual hacks to various scripting, a few fiddles and workarounds to various issues and is currently in its final Beta testing phase. This means there may still be a few glitches although the only one I can find is the slight layout issue with the calendar section for Internet Explorer users. This requires a bit of CSS work that I can’t be bothered to do at the moment and would rather get on with the blogging.
Terms of use are simple, you are free to post anything that you want as long as it is not offensive for the purpose of purely causing offence. I welcome well thought-through comments even if you fundamentally disagree with my views and I’m happy to discuss with you. Political point scoring designed to boost the ego of the comment’s author will be treated with the respect for which it deserves and be ignored.