DON’T FORGET TO VOTE
How should you vote? Vote Match is a very straightforward brief quiz in The Daily Telegraph and helps you decide who to vote by matching your views on the issues most important to you with each party’s policies. Have a go and click here
You can also predict the result of the Election with a free £5 and win £10. The Times are offering a free £5 bet with Betfair if you think you can pick a winner from the closest election in decades. Place your bet by midnight on 5th May 2010 here
Look out for the following key seats on election night:
Orpington – Boris’s brother, Jo Johnson, is expecting the results at around 5.a.m.
Richmond Park - Zac Goldsmith
Brighton Pavilion
Torbay
Romsey and Southampton North
Briston North West
Hastings and Rye
Feltham and Heston
Harrow West
Eltham
Waveney
Northampton North
Dudley North
North Warwickshire
Erewash
Lancaster and Fleetwood
Bolton North East
Wakefield
Tynemouth
General Election Announcement 2010
The Prime Minister – has announced the General Election for May 6 with the rallying call to his party: ‘Let’s go to it’
The Budget Song 2010
To keep up with a small Dungeekin tradition here is a specially commissioned little Budget Song for you all. Enjoy.
Ronan Keating ‘When you say nothing at all’
You can keep up with Dungeekin via his inimitable tweets @dungeekin
It’s amazing how you can still try to be smart,
Thanks to you our economy’s fallen apart,
This Budget Day you have done it again,
Talked a lot but you don’t say a thing,
David Willetts MP responds to Boris and baby boomers
This is not an attack on the baby-boomer generation; it is instead an appeal to the better nature of the boomers – an appeal to Edmund Burke’s understanding that a nation is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”
One of the highlights of my political career was when Boris Johnson put me on his list of ideal dinner party companions (a great opportunity to meet Aristotle and Scarlett Johansson), so I recognise that behind his brilliantly effervescent articles there is often a deep wisdom too. I paid careful attention, therefore, when on Monday he challenged the argument in my new book, The Pinch. My book argues that the baby boomers have ended up doing very well for ourselves but that we are dumping too heavy a burden on the generations after us.
Boris is ideally positioned to make the case for the baby boomers, roughly those born between 1945 and 1965. Our baby boom had two peaks. The first came in 1947 – those were the teenagers who shrieked for the Beatles and promenaded up Carnaby Street in their bellbottoms. The second peak, when we had more than a million born in one year, came in 1964 – those are the boomers whose formative years were framed by punk rock and the poll tax protests. Somehow I do not quite see Boris participating in those social movements but demographically he is at their epicentre. He was born in summer 1964, the very quarter when we had more babies born than in any other three months in the past 60 years.
Boris celebrates the extraordinary technological advances of the baby boomers. I do not deny this achievement and indeed recognise in the book that human creativity and enterprise can continue to raise living standards. But that leaves open a host of questions. Take his example of perhaps the greatest single benefit of this advance: the improvement in life expectancy. That is marvellous. But it has very different effects on different generations because of, for example, contracts to pay people pensions after a fixed chronological age. It makes those promises far more valuable than expected for those people who already have them and makes employers very reluctant to be caught out making such promises again. I estimate therefore that over half the nation’s pensions wealth belongs to the baby boomers. They are doing much better than those generations coming before or after.
Boris on Question Time
Watch Question Time this Thursday 4th March on BBC 1 at 10.35pm
Question Time, the BBC’s premier political debate programme comes from Canary Wharf this week. David Dimbleby will be joined in London by Boris Johnson, Liberal Democrat peer Shirley Williams, broadcaster Carol Vorderman, the novelist Will Self and the Transport Secretary Lord Adonis.
Question Time will be available on BBC iPlayer after transmission.
It will also be repeated on BBC Parliament on Sunday evening at 6pm.
The Prime Minister’s Behaviour
With apologies to Tennessee Ernie Ford, let’s have another little song thanks to Dungeekin
New Labour’s legacy is money and blood,
Under them this country has been dragged through the mud,
The damage began with Grinning Tone,
Now the PM’s weak and it’s all gone wrong,
