Newsweek Scotland: Going to the polls
Post categories: News, Newsweek Scotland, Politics
|12:52 UK time, Friday, 27 April 2012
We go to the polls next week. You WILL go to the polls, won't you? I always think of it as an obligation and yet so many of us just don't see it that way anymore and when you read the lurid and at times nauseating stuff emanating from the Leveson Inquiry you can understand why.
And have we in Scotland really constructed a different type of democracy with devolution? In some ways, probably the answer is yes. I mean we have proportional voting for a start and a petitions committee, but the linking of the First Minister to the Murdochs won't have helped the image, albeit that if your job is with BskyB you may cheer him to the rafters.
We will debate with Angus Macleod and Jim Cusick with a spicy dash of Peter Lynch from Stirling University on the council elections.
We investigate China and how the death of British businessman Neil Heywood is reverberating around the world. Was he a spy? Did he realise he was drinking poison and spit it out? Was he held down and fed cyanide? The evidence points that way but what's in it for the Politburo?
We hear about the fall of the Dutch government and the travails of the new state of South Sudan and anything else the producer can rake up in time. I think it's looking a bit light so she'll have to hit those phones and turn up with something interesting or I'll want to know why.
I'm off to gear up for voting next week. Is it the old cross in the box for this one or is it the new One, Two Three? You don't get that choice in your fortune cookie in China.
Comment number 1.
At 23:40 27th Apr 2012, John Thomson wrote:Already voted Derek.
That newfangled innovation of the postal vote has reduced your local election coverage to too little, too late! :-D
Still I will listen in to hear the perils of wisdom from your good-self and Angus.
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