The Week in Bits: Adonis! NOLS! Farage!

Tube too mainstream for Lord Adonis

Labour peer Andrew Adonis spent his week trying to dispel rumours he’d be standing for mayor by getting buses around London to test the capital’s transport infrastructure. Keeping a diary of his exciting adventures in the Independent, Lord Adonis apparently spent four hours on Thursday night asking Shoreditch drinkers how they’d be getting home. Sadly, he did not delve into what kind of reception he got, but one can only imagine that east London’s bearded hipster community appreciated the most ironic name in British politics.

Getting rid of human rights

Home Secretary Theresa May took the opportunity this week to reaffirm the Tories commitment to scrap the Human Rights Act and remove the UK from the European Convention of Human Rights. It’s great to finally get a taste of what a Conservative Government would do for us without the full force of the Lib Dems holding them back.

Nick v Nigel – Clash of the moderately sized politicians

It’s the David versus David of UK politics, as Nick Clegg challenges Nigel Farage to a debate. With both their parties hovering around the 10% mark in the polls, concerns are being raised that we could all be crushed under the sheer weight of mediocrity on offer. Farage attempted to avert this disaster by extending the offer to Cameron, who declined, and Miliband, who ignored it, meaning that there definitely will be no one there who has any chance of becoming prime minister. To add to the sense of total inconsequence of it, the debate will centre around the merits and demerits of the UK’s membership of the EU, a subject on which no vote is currently planned. What we are left with, then, is a debate between two men who cannot change anything, on a topic where nothing can be changed: it’s the Samuel Beckett approach to politics.

Miliband will be hoping that the arrangement of a welterweight fight between the two sides battling it out for the prestigious title of Britain’s Third Party means that any debate between him and Cameron will not have to include representatives from any fringe parties.

No NOLS OMOV

Labour Students Conference has been awash with acrimony and acronyms over the refusal to debate a proposed motion on the introduction of OMOV (One Member One Vote) to their elections, leading to walkouts, protests and university Labour club disaffiliations.

NOLS (the National Organisation of Labour Students) cleverly abandoned most democratic structures back in the 1980s as a safeguard against Militant entryism; a completely understandable precaution to have taken to ensure that future generations would not have to spend any time with Trotskyists. While respect has to be paid to the modern day Labour Students for their constant vigilance against Trots, the time may have come to accept that it is not a particularly pressing issue anymore, and that allowing a more open approach to internal elections will probably not lead to anything like the grotesque chaos of a Labour council (a Labour council!) hiring taxis to scuttle around a city delivering redundancy notices to its own workers. Still, nothing harks back to the golden age of 1980s Labour politics more than a split. Things can only get better?