'begin, and cease, and then again begin...' (dover beach)

'... where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

listen! you hear the grating roar

of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

at their return, up the high strand,

begin, and cease, and then again begin...' 

- dover beach, matthew arnold.

on a more cheerful note a visit to a pub led to a near fracas for reform councilors in cornwall. one has resigned from the party. elsewhere a zoom call of a reform group council meeting has been leaked and party members have been thrown out for bringing the party into disrepute.

no one said it would be easy. 

the old parties are dead - nobody wants to vote for them anymore - but the insurgents (of all colours) have never been in office before, they don't know how to get things done. the things they have said they will do are fantasies. 

the result of the caerphilly by-election to the sennedd is interesting. faced with a poll predicting a reform victory the people of caerphilly mobilised round the candidate most likely to defeat them (plaid cymru). 

once again we are saved from  the democratic representation of views we disagree with by first passed the post. but next time the sennedd elections will be conducted under a variety of proportional representation. 

at some point (may probably) the reform wave will hit but at some point it will break also (as the difficulties of getting stuff done when in office become obvious). 

whether that break occurs before the next parliamentary election or not is a matter of luck. 

the next general election will almost certainly be conducted under first passed the post - there simply isn't the  time (or the political capital) to get proportional representation in (even if the major parties had calculated it was in their best interests). 

from here it would look like the fix it would be. 

of course frustration with the political machine that denies you representation can be the start of something positive or something negative. it all depends on your appetite for chaos or your appetite for being patronised unjustly by our rulers and betters. 

the retrofitting of proportional representation to the political machine has long been a goal/ a bete-noir of the smaller political parties. with it they can begin to attain political representation, without it they are sunk. but with it the parties they disapprove of will attain political representation as well. 

farage owes the start of his political career to cameron's making the european parliament elections proportional representation.  the whole of brexit would not have happened without the referendum. 

horsemouth has finished reading john gray's black mass (well that about wraps it up for neo-liberalism). gray is (tediously) right about everything that has happened already and has little positive to predict about what is to come (he predicts more failure). 

and the waves roll the rocks up the beach. 

dover beach makes it into black mass near the end (in a discussion on the death of religion and the need for myths). 

here a grey morning and a rainy day on the back of it. 

p.s. entirely written in the morning blogpost.