Th!nk About It: The Electoral Commission give us one reason not to vote in the European Election: pain

The Electoral Commission obviously felt the need to demonstrate what a painful experience voting in the European Election can be…

Still, at least it’s marginally more engaging than plugs.

Th!nk About It: The Jury Team – a paradoxical party with a good advert

This Th!nk About It post can also be viewed here.

A good advert by a bad party

So there I was, trawling through the job listings on w4mp when I came across a rather unusual advert.

For those who don’t know, w4mp is a website primarily for parliamentary interns that lists available jobs in Westminster. Most are unpaid; the rest are under £25k a year.

It was with surprise – and more than a hint of suspicion – then, when I came across a job with a salary of “€91,980 plus expenses”.

I thought it was some kind of joke.

The listing states:

Based in Brussels, with some time in Strasbourg, you will carry huge responsibility, acting as an Independent-minded MEP.

Yes. An advert for an MEP in the upcoming elections has been listed on a website for interns.

What party, I hear you cry, would try and recruit interns as members of the European Parliament?  And how on earth can someone be an independent-minded MEP? Surely an MEP votes in line with their party, right?

Wrong. If we continue reading…

Although advertised by the Jury Team (a political party), if elected you will be free to make your own decisions and vote as you wish on behalf of millions of people within your region.

Eh?

Unfortunately there’s no turning to the party’s founder, and former Tory HQ director general, Sir Paul Judge for clarification. Because in an interview with the BBC’s Daily Politics he described the Jury Team as a “not-party party”.

Clear as mud, Sir Judge, clear as mud.

So I resorted to the party website…

Are you unhappy with the way things are? Do you believe they can change? By joining the Jury Team, you are becoming part of a political party like no other.

The Jury Team is a political movement created with the goal of making politics more accessible, politicians more accountable and political institutions more transparent.

The Jury Team intends to put forward 70 candidates for the UK and we are offering everyone the chance to run as a candidate for the European Parliament.

How very revolutionary. And the revolution doesn’t stop there; because the Jury Team are a new political party, and in virtue of this – as with all new parties – they need a gimmick. UKIP had Kilroy-Silk – the Jury Team has “modern technology”…

The BBC dedicated a whole article to the gimmick: the party’s candidates will be selected by text.

I mentioned that I was suspicious when I saw the advert listed on an intern website; the oxymoronic “not-party party” did not quash these concerns, and neither did the texting gimmick. But what makes me most uncomfortable about the Jury Team is its paradoxical nature.

Bear with me.

Let us recall the ‘relativism paradox‘: relativism fails because the relativist says there are no absolutes, and yet has to claim that the relativistic principle is absolutely true. The principle is undermined by its very existence.

Now let us consider the Jury Team, or what I will entitle the ‘Jury Team paradox’: the Jury Team fails because the Jury Teamist says the party-political system is corrupt in virtue of having different parties with different aims. And yet the Jury Team is a party with its own aims (the 12 “proposals” can be found on the website) – the details of the aims are irrelevant.

The Jury Team is undermined by the principles for which it stands; it is undermined by its very existence.

I am still not entirely convinced the Jury Team is not a joke.

Either way, though, its advert is pretty damn good – see top of post. And for that I’ll forgive it a multitude – if not all (it’s hard to ignore inherent paradoxes) – sins.

Th!nk About It: more disappointment, with love from the BBC

Drum roll please… the BBC appear to have launched their ‘European Elections 2009’ efforts – with disappointing results. (This post can also be found here, on my Th!nk About It Page. Yet again – feel free to vote.)

More interesting than the EU?

I appreciate that this bemoaning of the BBC follows very much in the footsteps of my last Th!nk About It post, but when attempting to cover the EU from a British perspective your media options are bleak. To say the least. Most nationals avoid mentioning the EU at any cost for fear – I assume – of being tagged with the deadly label “pro-EU”, and even the BBC hides its ‘Inside Europe‘ page behind a confusing maze of links and graphics.

Once, however, one has managed to overcome the BBC’s attempts to keep you away, and reached Inside Europe, one might – if one looks hard enough – come across a piece entitled ‘Vote For Us’.

It was at this point that I got rather excited. And not just because when I see an EU name-drop in the British press a Th!nk About It light bulb lights up in my head – an energy efficient one, of course Etan. No, rather, I was excited to see how the BBC was going to kick off its election articles. I was disappointed. Even the first line:

Voters from across the European Union will be electing a new European Parliament in June – the first election since the EU enlarged in 2007, with the accession of Bulgaria and Romania.

inspired in me nothing but a sigh. A huge number of British citizens don’t even know they can vote – and I don’t think this introduction will have them running for the polling booths. The non-inclusive tone of “voters from across the European Union” (ie, “them, not us”) is only going to add to British EU ignorance. And although whether or not the BBC has an obligation to increase the UK public’s knowledge of the EU (what with being a public corporation) is another question (and one to be raised by someone with far more authority than me), I certainly don’t think it should be misleading. Yet, arguably, this is what the first sentence is.

I won’t even draw attention to the fact that it doesn’t give the date of the election.

Things appear to look up, however, when the BBC promises a couple of sentences later:

Here, leaders of the political groups in the outgoing parliament explain why, in their view, people should turn out to vote.

Great, I thought. Something really informative. Something that will not only give me something interesting to blog about, but will also (and maybe slightly more importantly) provide the European voter with compelling, balanced and helpful information enabling them to make an informed decision on 4th June.

Yet again, I was disappointed.

What followed seemed to be a series of SENTENCES (yes, just one sentence) pulled from press releases. A series of seven one-sentence adverts for political parties that appear to say little more than: “vote for me… please, vote for me!”

To illustrate my point:

“For us the European elections are very very important”

“We’ve got a chance here – where there’s no wasted vote – to try to actually say what we think”

“It is very important that electors and voters understand that they have to go to vote, because this is not peanuts…”

And with that, I found myself distracted by a picture below the article captioned: ‘Elephants kiss each other’ and along with (I’m sure) the rest of the British public, I clicked on it, leaving the BBC’s coverage of the Parliament elections far behind and not looking back.