Thoughts of the day that I turn 23

Ladies and gentlemen, I turned 23 years of age today.

Two days ago, Serbia had an early Parliamentary election. This resulted in the Serbian Progressive Party, which is centre-right and pro-European, gaining a majority of seats in Serbia's legislative assembly (158 out of 250), with many of its newer voters coming from the former voters of the centrist Democratic Party of Serbia. The Socialist Party of Serbia, meanwhile, retained the 44 seats it had in 2012. One positive note about this early election was that the Serbian Greens entered the assembly with 18 seats, thanks to help from the New Democratic Party which it merged with and which commits to green politics. 

Also, it has recently been noted by Oxfam that just five extraordinarily wealthy families are alone worth more than the poorest 20% of Britain's population, in yet another revelation about the growing and shocking inequality in the UK-one of the top 10 wealthiest nations on Earth. I hope this and other news will inspire you to come out to Downing Street tomorrow evening (if you can) at 6 pm and march against George Osborne's latest, worst yet austerity budget.

Finally, a United Nations Climate Change report that is due to be published soon reveals that the global warming that could happen unless we act to halt artificial climate change could seriously damage food and water security, could cause serious economic damage (2% reduction in the global economy at least), and could end up destroying unique landscapes which will end up flooded by sea level rises- and the scales they predict are rather optimistic (a global temperature rise of 2.5 degrees Celsius or more will do more damage than the report expects). I worry that this in turn will lead to feared 'water wars' which could potentially claim the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. 

Alan.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The English local elections of 2023-Conservatives pay the penalty for failing to put a stop to sleaze and sewage in our rivers

The English local elections of 2023 (Northern Ireland's elections will finish next week and a separate blog post will be devoted to these) not only resulted in more than 1000 Conservative losses just as Rallings & Thrasher and Sir John Curtice predicted, they also resulted in sweeping Green and Liberal Democrat gains across the nation-sending a hard message to the Conservatives about the need to protect our environment and Labour for barely acting like an opposition at all. The Conservatives in total made a net loss of 1,061 seats, with the vast majority being in the shire districts where they once dominated-even councils such as Bracknell Forest and Surrey Heath, which they held in 1995 and 2019, fell, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively in those two cases. Who they lost to varied widely by the nature of the authority-their losses to Labour came mainly in (ex) industrial "Red Wall" areas where they had made against-the-trend gains in 2019 or fared better
Read more

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more