Bella

A day of visits today. First Sam and Alex dropped Maddy off after her couple of days in Aryshire. Chloe decided she wanted to stay over tonight too. After that Joe, Layla and Bella popped in on their way down the road from up north. It was good to see them all.

Other than that I've been trying to avoid working myself up to a rant about the fiasco surrounding the rushing through of the Digital Economy Bill. Don't get me wrong I'd fully support protecting peoples copyright but this bill will most likely most affect ordinary members of the public in the form of increased internet charges so their ISPs can implement the required procedures which will prove utterly toothless against the real perpetrators who will doubtless be savvy enough to use SSLs, VPNs and tor.

Considering thousands of people country wide have contacted their MPs to registered their objections to the bill it still got forced through by MPs blindly following the orders of their party whips more interested in serving big business than the public who elected them. So much for democracy.

It's a problem with all parties too. Ok the bill may have been a stitch up between Labour and the Tories bit the opposition the Lib Dems claimed they would make seemed to comprise abstaining rather than voting against the bill.

Admittedly my MP was one of the 40 or so who did vote against the bill so I can't criticise him really, but the second reading shows parliament up for what it is. Only 40 MPs bothered to attend the debate, the bulk of them giving reasoned and eloquent arguments against a bill which has been described as draconian. However a couple of minutes before the voting another hundred or so MPs showed up to vote in favour of it.

Most of them had no real understanding of what they were voting for either and simply did so because they'd been instructed to. The fact that Stephen Timms the MP for digital Britain believes that an IP address is an "Intellectual Property address" just about sums up the level of comprehension most MPs have.

What is really frustrating about it is that to allow them to rush this through the proposed legislation to try and reform Parliamentary procedures - partly to reduce this sort of thing, and to make it more accountable for its actions - was completely dropped.

I guess it shouldn't surprise me that our MPs are little more than a self-serving shower of incompetents, but the fact that they now have so little regards for proper parliamentary democracy really doesn't bode well.

Is it really any surprise that voter apathy is so hight when your average MP would rather serve the interests of big business than the public who put them in power. I've never once considered not voting as I believe all that does is give extremists a bigger share of the vote, but I know there are many out there who believe not voting is a means of making a statement.

You have to wonder if turnout would be as low if there was a "none of the above" option on UK voting slips.

I guess I wasn't very succesful in avoiding a rant. Sorry!