Tag: St George

St George’s Day again and the High Street is festooned with flags. We must be proud of our local saint – though as Judith Maltby points out, he probably wasn’t local at all, at least not to England.

Perhaps this excitement is a sign of election fever? There’s certainly been some here; for the first time I can ever recall, a Parliamentary candidate has come to the door – the kind of good old-fashioned politics that makes you proud to be British. Actually, first to call was a canvasser who said ‘I’m looking for Tories: are you one?’ I vacillated but added that since it’s a very close race in High Peak, I’d love to talk about the issues. He responded: ‘I’m a messenger, not a missionary!’ However, he did then bring Andrew Bingham, the Conservative candidate, to the door – and I didn’t even inquire whether the non-dom Lord Ashcroft was funding their campaign.

I forgot to ask whether he agreed with Shelley that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ – that might have been an opening to ask his views of the current Poet Laureate too. (Should one select an MP on the basis of poetic preferences?) I did however have a question about inequality, prompted by my current reading of Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. I should have quoted William Blake:

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

There are sharp questions about this in a letter from Rev Dennis Nadin in today’s Guardian: ‘Where is the voice of the poor to be heard in this election?’

And now I see that the same Andrew Bingham can be spotted walking past the famous Café Royston (of League Of Gentlemen fame) in a short video about the constituency by John Harris called Hang Parliament! on the Guardian site. It seems from this that although the Conservatives want us to ‘vote for change’ that doesn’t mean any change to the voting system. Perhaps, as Lord Curzon found out, it will all end in tears?