Save the British Sausage

Something has been bugging me.

I've held off from this story for a few days, first because it wasn't really all that important, and second for the tumult it has created with some politicos recently.

Additionally it has been dealt with considerably better elsewhere; even a gay libertarian has pointed out this is a property rights issue (though getting a bit confused about where the upper line is drawn to who can chose as patrons- hint: there isn't one).

No what has been bugging me is the low whisper in the back of my head reminding me of what this is similar to. It coalesced finally into me almost subconsciously logging on to iTunes yesterday.

By the time I realised what I was doing I had just purchased Party Games, the Yes Minister special that bridged the transition to the Yes Prime Minister series.

It was between talks of emulsified, high-fat offal tubes and being elected to the highest office in the land that it dawned on me:

Am I cynical enough to believe that the timing of what under normal conditions would be a minor chattering points for idiots at dinner parties (on both sides of the line) was sexed up to frame the debate?

NuLabourious have tried to frame it as a class war with the Ashcroft thingy despite their clearly being no discernable class, other than the rich (the underclass) and the filthy to ultra rich (the middle to upper class), the only way to discern to which class people now belong being to see where they holiday (having long ago dropped the necessity of eating treebark because you couldn't afford to eat).

They Borys have indicated they will do things slightly different including not raping you as quickly or as fairly with further tax rises as Labourious would, while trying not to scare off the client state Labour have built up into grinding this country to a halt come any talks of cuts.

In truth the differences are so marginal that the veritable rizla paper could be squeezed between the 2 on policy grounds; with the EU having now subsumed control of most things in actuality and everything in practice they are essentially vestigial, like the human appendix, or nipples on a man.

No, the only thing they really have is the vitriol against each other based on decades-old hatred, a hatred an increasingly disaffected an uninterested public don't bother to entertain by voting for, and rightly too. As the old guard who's dads were put out of work down the mines or who's businesses were liquidated by nationalisation come to the battle in ever decreasing numbers so too will the popular vote decrease.

So this is why we must "save the British Sausage" as Jim Hacker would say, not because he is interested in retaining some modicum of British sovereignty in the hopes he can give us the taste for more, but because of what this achieves in gaining him power and getting the plebiscite riled up; likewise we can all get angry at the homophobes, the broccoli eaters or the gay-tel in Blackpool that doesn't allow straight people to stay or any other minor insignificance normally corrected by market forces - that is not the point; we are merely expected on standing on one side of the fence or the other.

May I suggest an alternative? That you neither sit on the fence nor stand either side of it? Ultimately you are in your own field playing their game, and they've somehow convinced you it's their field an you play by their rules - I suggest you take the field back and play your own game.