Celebrity Politics

Last night we voted for a pop star (well, technically a drummer) to be put forward as a candidate to be our local MP. Not sure what this actually says about the democratic process. But at least I am participating. 28 candidates, and 5 or 6 have gone through to the next phase. The rules say that we have to have one women and one BME candidate out of our 3 nominations - in practice the two best candidates (for entirely different reasons) were both white males who don't live in the area. Isn't democracy funny? Meanwhile our previous MP who lost his seat when I moved here, is about to stand as a candidate in my home constituency. Small world. Good news was there were was a reasonable number of people attending the selection meeting - about the same as the number of candidates. In such a way do we contribute to the global democracy - from village halls to number 10. It is a vanishingly small number of people who bestirr themselves to get involved. Imperfect though it is, if you don't get involved you really don't have much say.