Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

That old chestnut..

I was watching "The Daily Politics" on BBC2 today. One of the items was about various plans to attempt to make it easier for local people in rural areas, particularly areas with lots of holiday homes and second homes such as the Lake District, to be able to afford to buy houses in a climate where prices are ridiculously inflated owing to the second-home effect. This is a real problem - lots of people are being forced out of areas in which they grew up because they simply can't afford housing as it's being bought up by stockbrokers from Chelsea and Buckinghamshire. I was fairly depressed when I visited a village in rural Warwickshire a while ago to find that all the local services had been converted into expensive houses with names like "The Old Schoolhouse" and "The Old Post Office", and the place was like a ghost town until the BMWs started arriving back home in the evenings (shortly after the people carriers brought the children back from their private schools in Warwick, I presume). No facilities (other than a couple of pubs), no life, just the effect of people who want to have it all - they want to live in rural peace but work at highly paid jobs in the cities, and never mind the effect they have on local communities in the process. But I digress.

In the discussion that followed, Kirstie wossname who hosts "Relocation, Relocation" on Channel 4 - one of those irritating programmes in which yuppie types from London sell their one-bedroom flat in Knightsbridge and buy a house in the Lake District, a house in France and a small Pacific island with the proceeds - opined that locals really shouldn't be complaining about this as "We live in a capitalist country, and if you don't like it there are other places you can live." She then went on to say that she'd recently visited the Lakes for the first time, and as so many of the staff in the hotels were Polish and Russian anyway it was obvious that (I paraphrase) local people didn't really want to live there and were just lazy because they didn't want to do menial jobs in hotels.

You really have to wonder how someone can be quite so callous and unsympathetic. I'm constantly amazed at this kind of selfishness - who cares if we're contributing to the decline of rural communities? We've got our darling little artisan's cottage in Cumbria, darling! I've often thought myself that rural life would have its benefits, but I'd have to be able to find a way to work there as well and actually, like, live in the area rather than just treating it as a glorified dormitory with convenient railway connections to London. Given attitudes like Kirstie's, no wonder a lot of rural communities are suspicious of incomers. Still, I'm sure they'll all take heart from knowing that we live in a capitalist country and they're free to live elsewhere. In fact, the Kirsties of this world would probably love it if they did - no more of those troublesome locals blocking the lane with their sheep and demanding plebby things like local schooling and decent bus services that would only bring Undesirable Elements to the village. After all, darling, the country shouldn't be a place where people do work. Work's what we do in London, right?

I'm Mike Knell, and I approve this message.

When I opened up a window to type this, I looked in the "category" dropdown and found that I'd never used a "Politics" category before, so had to create it specially just for this article. Feel privileged yet?

The reason why I've never written about politics before is twofold. Firstly, this is just some obscure - and I know just how obscure, as I see my traffic stats - website run by some bloke who is far too short on delusions of grandeur to try tackling Mighty Big Issues. I promise to go back to writing about obscure bits of the London Underground and my attempts at running after this. Secondly, I'm not really very good at it. Lots of people on the web try and write about politics, but their efforts are usually along the lines of "Look at this article! Isn't it shocking! Aren't these people bad?", which doesn't really convey much useful information other than the righteous indignation of the writer. A bit like a Julie Burchill column, really.

But I wanted to write this, both to express the feelings I have on the matter and to help vent some of the suspense and frustration the world is feeling in the last days before - finally - we hopefully get the result of the US presidential election. All of a sudden, everyone I know in the States seems to have become an activist. People from the WELL are flying off to swing states (California is, well, not a Bush target state) to act as election observers and spending their evenings phoning around likely Democrat voters and undecideds encouraging them to vote on Tuesday.

There have been queues around the block for early voting. People have been willing to wait hours to cast their votes when polling day isn't even until tomorrow. It's reminding me of the first post-apartheid elections in South Africa. More people then ever before are aware of the value of their vote and their legal rights when voting (aren't certain? get the guide for your state from ourvote.com) and young people, old people, rich people and poor people seem, for once, equally revved up about the coming act of participatory democracy. Tomorrow, those who haven't done so already will be heading in their millions to the polling places in order to stand up and be counted.

Over here on the other side of the Atlantic, we don't get to vote. This is, of course, only fair as we get to vote in our own elections which, in turn, Americans don't get to vote in. But given the magnitude of some of the issues at stake tomorrow, Europeans and Asians and Australians and Africans are more interested in the outcome of the US election than they've ever been before. All we can do is obsessively follow opinion polls, cheer or wail when the theoretical electoral college at electoral-vote.com changes hands, and if it all gets too much take comfort in election trivia and Eminem's latest very angry video.

So while we can't decide the outcome ourselves - and any non-American who thinks they should be entitled to has one hell of a sense of entitlement - many people outside the USA are as involved with and concerned about this election - if not more so - as many Americans. The decision to be made, however, is that of the American people alone.

In an act of outright stupidity, the British newspaper The Guardian decided a while ago that they were going to encourage their readers to write to voters in Clark County, Ohio and encourage them to vote (for Kerry, was the implied message). The people of Clark County were unsurprisingly and completely validly offended at the idea that this bunch of foreigners felt entitled to write them patronising letters telling them how to vote. How, I thought, would we feel here in the UK if we started getting letters from random Americans telling us who to vote for?

Given that, I wouldn't dream of telling anyone how to vote. The right to choose the candidate for whom you vote yourself, and to cast that vote in secret, is one of the most fundamental rights of living in a democracy. So please vote for whoever you like, but I feel strongly enough about these issues to make my own recommendation.

And that's why - in probably the most important announcement to hit the mass media in the last year - uffish.net chooses to endorse John Kerry for President of the United States and John Edwards for Vice-President. Now come on, Americans - make the rest of the world proud of you tomorrow by showing that you're a country of people who care. Get out there and vote - despite the above, I don't really mind who for - and get out there and get others to vote too. It's time to make a difference and make the majority - whichever way it goes - big enough that the lawyers will be left empty-handed and the result won't have to be decided by the Supreme Court but by the will of the people. Good luck - we're all watching you.