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Scooting under collapsed pillars, jumping over ash bleached debris, Doone speed as fast as he could to reach the Cornovian battle quarters. Cracks in the ground were appearing before him, but Doone was too fast to be sucked into the emerging gorges. In front of him he could see the beleaguered City, under siege for the past 56 years, smoke rising into the purple sky from towering spirals splintered from the bombardment of the earth from around it.

Doone was not from this place, he did not belong there; yet he felt a sense of duty, a need. Doone was just one part of a mercenary army bought in by the Cornovians to fight against the Deceased. His job was to run between the front line and the Cornovian battle quarters carrying messages – his appearance deemed him useless to fight by the Cornovians, just a mere quarter of the height of the humanoid Cornovians, with blue fur covering the whole of his body. Doone was no fighter, but Doone had a duty and a job to carry out at the Battle of Pervorod.

For over 163 years Planet Zero, home to the Cornovians, had been under attack from the Deceased. Not being a race familiar with war, the Cornovians bought in mercenary armies from surrounding planets to fight against the Disease of the Deceased. Yet it was the Cornovians’ superior technology that had kept the Deceased out of the capital Punga City for the past 56 years.

“Sir, sir” Doone stormed into the Cornovian battle quarters; white dome like tents that seemed to batter off flying rocks and mounds of earth flung towards it by the immobile Deceased army.

The Cornovians, tall and slim, fine in their appearance with a glimmer of intellectual snobbery in their eyes, but without a grain of dirt under their nails, turned synchronously towards Doone, fresh in from the outside, his blue fur splattered with mud, with dirt falling off his head every time he moved.

“How dare you come in here looking like that!” Doone’s appearance offended the pristine Cornovians, and as they spoke seemingly did so as one.

“But sir, sir” Doone’s eyes were dashing between each Cornovian, “you need to know, you need to know.”

“Tell us, and then be gone with you.”

“The Geoconduct is failing; they are breaking the ground around us.”

“But that’s impossible, the Geoconduct is impregnable, it hasn’t been breached in 56 years.”

“But sir, sir, it’s failing, it’s going to break.”

The Cornovians turned their backs to Doone, and seemingly without a word being said stared at each other for a matter of seconds before turning back to him.

“Messenger” The Cornovians once again addressed Doone simultaneously, “Take our blessings to Gruddund of the Stellar Light Phenomenon.”

“As you wish sir, sir, sir.” With that Doone spun back around and shot straight out of the white dome and back into the field of battle.

Whilst there were no Deceased near him, the evidence of their bombardment surrounded him: mounds of earth reaching into the sky, caverns in the ground that squirmed from one position to the next as soon as they had seemed to settle, stones smashed into fist size pieces. The Deceased were far in the distance, battling it out at the rim of the Geoconduct with the forces from the Cultured Corm and from the Planet Maks. The screams of the Deceased drained out the battle cries from the front line forces and the roaring flames from successful siege connections.

Yet Doone still rumbled on; ignoring the threats from above and making his way under and between the destruction around him as he pursued his mission to find Gruddund of the Stellar Light Phenomenon.

He ducked behind a fallen rock, a rock that had only minutes ago been kilometres away from its current resting place, and swept his hands up his face and over his head. As he started doing this a second time a silence flooded his ears. Pulling his fingers a part he could see that the landscape had been swamped in a bright light, and four faint black robes extending hundreds of metres into the air hovered over the city.

“Oh no, oh no.” Doone jumped to his feet and started running in no direction in particular, hearing a booming voice that seemed like it was coming from the heavens.

“Stop your fighting. Now go to your homes.”

And again.

“Stop your fighting. Now go to your homes.”

Over and over the words continued with the same blistering voice.

Doone crouched and huddled his knees in his arms. He put his head between his legs and started weeping. “But I don’t have a home” he mumbled.

Getting to his feet, Doone looked up towards what appeared to be hooded Gods, “The Deceased destroyed my home planet, I have no home.”

“Stop your fighting. Now go to your homes.”

“I can’t fight and I have no home.”

“Stop your fighting. Now go to your homes.”

“Pleasssss….”

With that Doone disappeared

These are pictures that you take on your phone so you can see things you can not normally see – such as the back of a dark cupboard, or on top of a wardrobe or behind the draws in a cupboard.

Below are my first attempts – all of which were genuinely taken in order to see what was hidden and to find things that had been lost. I made them low quality to save space on here.

My challenge to you is to follow in my footsteps! Take your own Out of Sight pictures and post them around the internet remembering to link them below by leaving a comment

One of the talks I watched recently was about ngrams. This is a program based on the books uploaded on Google. It uses a sample of around 5 million of these books and it allows you to search for words or phrases and it then creates a graph plotting their popularity between 1600 and now.

Now, as a man, a man with a rather teenage mind at times, after spending around 10 minutes searching mature things like ‘man’ and ‘woman’, I reverted back to a teenage mind and I typed in ‘penis’. Please do not judge me. As I said I believe it is the teenager inside of me and inside of every male on this planet who when presented with the opportunity to refer to their genitals in any forum without fear of embarrassment, then they will. (This might have now backfired on me as I post my confession and activity on this blog).

But I could not stop at ‘penis’. The next step was to compare the use of the word to ‘cock’. Then I carried on, ‘willy’, ‘knob’, ‘dick’. I could not help myself. I admit I giggled. I played around in my mind with other words I could use. The word ‘phallus’ also came to me, so I entered it. And here is the result:

There are a lot of interesting points in this graph; and as a disclaimer the claims I am going to make have no backing or additional research to support the conclusions I use; however I am going to go ahead and make some assumptions anyway for ‘comical’ and ‘interesting’ effect.

At the beginning, there was cock. Now I am not a complete fool, the use of the word cock refers in more than large parts to a cockerel, or the second name of a person; but my teenage mind-set does not care. Then after a few years of rest we get a simultaneous jump in cock, knob and dick. I would beg the question of why there was a gap of a couple of years without anything recorded, must have been a dry time, however I may also beg the question as to whether the first erotic novel was published around the same time?

Due to its connotation with a cockerel, the cock rammed forward to unbelievable heights, remaining well ahead of the competition for a long time. However, around the 1660s, the use of the word cock fell, with willy, penis, knob and dick gaining considerable growth.

For penis its’ early golden years were the 1720s when it jumped in popularity before suddenly losing the prestige it had gained, before starting an upwards trend that continues to this day.

What is interesting to note is that despite knob meaning several other things (door knob for example), the correlation between the use of the word knob and penis was similar until the latter half of the twentieth century. Unless there were a large number of incidents involving penises and door knobs, it could be a fair guess to suggest that knob was being used in the exact same way they use it on Jeremy Kyle.

It was around the 1850s, and the time that Oscar Wilde was born (1854),  that penis outgrew its contemporaries such as dick, willy and phallus.

From the 1900s onwards, the use of the word cock sharply fell, most likely because people had started using it to describe a penis, so writers were less wanting to call a cockerel a cock for fear that people would think that noisy penises were keeping people up in the mornings. At this same time the use of the words phallus, dick and willy grew, demonstrating the necessity of people to describe their bits in a variety of ways. This correlation is the same for the word knob as people started realising that to say that “they pulled the knob on the door” read differently to the more genital aware generation than it did to the previous generations.

This trend continued until the 1950s whereby the word willy was starting to sound rather immature, henceforth falling in popularity and increasing the use of the words phallus and dick.

Throughout the 1900s it is important to remember the role played in the creation of the publishing sensation Mills & Boon – their need to ensure that each romance novel they published was above par and more importantly not the same as the others meant that they needed to continuously use different words to describe erotic parts of gentlemen. This, arguably, is the biggest contribution Mills & Boon have bought to the English Language and the world of Literacy.

The last interesting point I have picked up is around the war years (1910s-1950s). If you were to think of the Second World War and Hitler, you would assume that the use of the word penis would grow: “oh that Hitler, he’s acting like a right penis in Czechoslovakia” (a term commonly used in the present day whilst describing British males in Prague (as a side note, I loved Prague when I visited)). However, these years saw the fall in the use of the term penis. There may be several reasons to this. The official reason is that the citizens of the world had other things on mind such as a war than thinking and writing about penises. However, the truth could be more prevalent in the fact that for a large number of the writers and women in the world there was not much penis around – they were all off fighting like cocks.

Once the war had come to an end penis returned home, and from that point onwards it has occupied the minds of writers to the extent where it has overtaken cock as the most common word used to describe what it describes. Turning back to the war, the use of the words phallus, dick and willy maintained its growth whilst penis was failing; this is most probably down to the fact that it is a lot easier to say “Hitler is a dick”; a term whose evolution has only altered the tense of the phrase, and which is still popular today.

As one last twist to this ‘research’, by entering into the mix the term ‘aliens’ we discover that there is not much of a correlation with any of the previous words, apart from the late 1600s when it appears writers thought a lot about alien cock, and the late 1700s when it appears writers wanted to knob aliens’ cocks. Naughty, naughty writers.

I’ll start off by saying that I thought what happened across the country was disgusting, and I in no way see myself as an apologist for those people who were involved in smashing up businesses and stealing from them, putting fear into innocent people’s lives, and those who attacked the police. I believe that the people involved should be punished within the remit of our current laws.

However, I am more disgusted by those people calling for the use of water cannons, rubber bullets, calling in the army and/or removing benefits and social housing from those involved.

I see no difference between using water cannons/rubber bullets and using real bullets. Whilst the later guarantees damage, the former does have a history of causing damage and death, not forgetting that the water cannon is indiscriminate and would be highly ineffective in the riots that were facilitated by quick dispersal.

Those who call for the removal of benefits or social housing are in my mind the most ignorant of all, and I believe if such a thing would happen it would lead to something much more serious happening.

The reason I think this is due to the simple fact that those involved in these riots, including looters, have next to nothing to lose – why else would they get involved in such criminality? By removing these vital benefits, you’ll give these people nothing to lose – much more dangerous.

So in this context, let me get my main thought out there – I believe every single criminal action we have seen in regards to these riots were political.

I don’t mean political in regards to protesting. I dare not suggest that these rioters wanted to bring down the Government or push through policy changes. Most of those involved would probably state if asked that they don’t care about politics or which party to vote for.

However, they are still political in regards to the deeper context of the riots.

The rioters have been called the poor, the underclass, chavs – there is certainly a certain social aspect to those alleged to have been involved – a social aspect that focuses on being put down by society (chav is used as a degrading term), with its assumptions (which are most likely true) that most of those involved live in council homes and claim benefits. It is a social class that is deprived of a range of working opportunities, who are considered to be uneducated, who are being hardest hit by cuts being made across the country, and who day to day have to see people with high level jobs, big houses, flashy cars, spending a disposable income on nearly whatever they want, and knowing that the chances of them having a life like that are slim because of where they’ve been born.

There are also those who got involved because of boredom, and unfortunately, I believe this leads back to basic politics. When I was younger me and my friends used to play football in the park, or used to sit and chat on the swings. Then the local council started closing the gates to the park in the evening and it moved me and my friends to hanging out on the street corners. Now, we never did anything criminal, and never deliberately intimidated people, but this basic story shows the possibility of how a lack of provision for younger people can lead to something much more serious happening.

Consider that it is the youth of the country who are getting involved in such acts, a youth who have the whole of their lives to live, yet who consider that they have nothing to lose so are tempted to get involved in these riots, and it makes the actual situation seem rather more complex.

A YouGov poll released this week showed that most people saw the cause of the riots being purely down to criminality, and downplayed the role that social inequality had in being the root cause. But surely criminality on most levels is a consequence of social inequality?

I don’t place the blame for this on just this Government – I believe it is a consequence derived from Governments going back decades. We seem to be more focused on how well the top 100 companies are performing rather than the poorer people of Britain being able to get their way out of poverty.

However, this Government are not blameless.

The last couple of days have seen what I consider to be the most worrying developments in destroying basic freedoms in this country. It started with rumours of water cannons being bought in from Northern Ireland, continued with Cameron stating that the police can use whatever tactics they feel necessary to fight disorder, and have recently been strengthened by rumours that this Government may start to use internet filtering with the capability to take social media offline. We even have a pathetic Tory MP calling for Wembley Stadium to be used as a temporary camp to hold these rioters.

Yet they can get away with this – most of the country is shocked by what has happened and are calling for tough action to be taken, and this looks like tough action.

But the reality is that it is going to damage our freedoms. Whether that be the freedom to use the internet as we choose within the boundaries of current law; or the freedom to march peacefully through the streets without being fired on with rubber bullets, or being subjected to something worse than kettling. We are slowly moving towards a Britain that will not stand for anti-authority at a time when challenging the authority of this Government is the only thing we can do to prevent it leading us to social and economic destruction.

And what of the rioters? With nothing being suggested to be done to challenge and change the causes of social inequality in this country, and everything being done to worsen it, increasing police and state power is only going to repress the feelings of those being most hit by social inequalities, and with the pressure on the poor rising I dread to think what will happen the moment the pressure valve bursts and a new wave of criminality sweeps across the country as I have a feeling it could be a lot worse than we have seen this past week.

Government are clueless on tuition fees
Posted by mattblackall in VP Societies and Community on February 18, 2011

Browsing Government reactions to University Tuition Fee proposals on the BBC website is always time well spent….

In recent weeks working groups at Oxford and Cambridge University have suggested that they should be charging £9,000 a year in tuition fees (shock horror). Also recently, Imperial College London have said they will charge £9,000 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12475227).

Don’t be surprised if in the next couple of months you see more and more Universities charging well over £6,000 in fees as pressure mounts on Universities from across the country to release figures in time for prospective 2012 students to decide where to go.

However, have some sympathy for Universities. This Government have been abismal in getting information out to them about what is expected of them if they charge over £6,000 (if Universities charge over this limit then they have to provide evidence to the Office for Fair Access as to how they are going to widen participation). Then to compound this, the Government are desimating the money they give to Universities. It is no surprise therefore that Universities will try and charge as much as they can in order to maintain their incomes and current service standards whilst being asked to do more.

But please don’t take this out of context. I oppose all cuts to higher education, and i oppose all fees students are charged in order to learn.

Then, to show how clueless this Government are about what they expected from introducing Tuition Fees, they slam Universities who are suggesting they are going to charge £9,000. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12409419)

They’ve even gone as far as saying they will cut funding to Universities even more if they do so (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12499265).

These bemuses me for four reasons. First, is this not just blackmail? Second, this Government wanted to open Universities up to the free market – so Universities are responding as they would – so why backtrack? Thirdly, some of the elite Universities were calling for unlimited tuition fees – did the Government not think why? Finally, to me this just shows that this Government had no idea what they were doing when they introduced fees.

When lobbying one of our local MP’s before the vote, we were told that they have looked into all the facts behind fees and know for sure why they are voting for fees. When we questioned them the most common response we got was ‘i’ll have to look into that and get back to you’, there was even a couple of ‘i don’t know about that/i didn’t know about that’. They duly went and cast their vote for higher fees.

The reason the Government are so concerned about £9,000 fees is because they will have to fork out more for student loans. The Government even say they don’t expect to get around a third of the loans they give out back. Higher fees will therefore cost the taxpayer more, regardless of funding cuts to Universities.

To make this situation even worse, the Government are planning to limit immigration into this country. Universities (including those who supported tutition fee rises) have all of a sudden jumped back as though they didn’t understand how this would effect them and have attacked the Government because they won’t be getting as much money form charging International Students the unregulated fees that they currently do. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12496610)

This situation is painful for those involved in the student movement against fees and cuts. We campaign and shout about the negatives of tuiton fees and funding cuts only to be told that we don’t understand the situation; that we are scaremongering; or to not worry as it has been thought through and there are safeguards – we’ve even been told not to worry because the proposals are progressive! Then, we see both Universities and Government both up in arms at each other for something we in the activisty student movement could see from the start. *clap* *clap* *clap*

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What I’ve been up to
Posted by mattblackall in VP Societies and Community on January 9, 2011

As at the next Student Council (14th January) we want to have as much time as possible to discuss the Sabb Review, we have agreed to submit ‘nil’ reports. However, since the last Student Council in December, i do have a lot of things i’d like to update students and members of Council on. So below, please find an update on things i have been getting up to over the past 3 weeks / month. Any queries, questions or comments, please either leave a comment below, or email me on matt.blackall@upsu.net

Community
Tripartite Committee
We’ve had our first meeting of the Tripartite committee. This is a committee made up of the heads of the Council, the heads of the University and members of the Union. We have decided to meet once per term, and discuss issues relating to student welfare, student housing and students living in the City amongst other things. I think this is a massive coup for students in the City because around the table we have those who can directly make and influence the decisions that effect students.

To follow this, i am going to be organising a round table Councillor meet-up which i shall invite students along to in order to discuss issues relating to students living in Portsmouth. My hope is that this can occur either once per month, or once every two months.

HMOs
I have submitted a response on behalf of UPSU concerning a proposed Council policy to limit the number of Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs) in Portsmouth. The Council essentially want to move students from the South of Portsmouth to the North. Obviously we completely disagree with this. You can view our response for this consultation on upsu.net under news (if not currently up, it will hopefully be up soon).

Community Website
Soon we are going to have a meaty Living in Portsmouth minisite. You might notice on upsu.net that clicking on Community at the top takes you to a holding page for this site, and we also have www.portsmouthstudents.com directing you to this page. Please have patience while this work is ongoing, as it is a big project; however, once completed it will provide a foundation for us to build campaigns concerning students living in Portsmouth.

UPSUPCC Partnership Agreement
I am working on a proposal i’d like to take to the Council in regards to a partnership agreement. This will be suggestions of mutually beneficial projects that we can be involved in, and how we can share some resources. One such example would be Councillors being able to book out pods in the Third Space as a drop in area for students to speak to their local Councillors. There are some exciting ideas surrounding this agreement, especially in regards to what we could get, but i don’t want to say too much yet, firstly just in case it doesn’t happen, and more because if it does happen i’d rather tell people what doors we’ve had opened to us when they’re opened.

Langstone
I have had some email correspondence with Halls managers concerning the possibility of getting desk space at Langstone Campus for UPSU to use for a few hours a week. I have a meeting soon to discuss requirements, but all is seeming positive so far. Once we have space at Langstone it means that we will be able to provide an Union advice service to Langstone students on their doorstep, and better understand issues that are effecting students on the other side of the City. I need to have internal discussions on manning the desk, but it does not seem like something that will overstretch our resources or staffing.

Societies

Societies Handbook
The first draft of the Handbook has been completed and sent round to all societies for comment. The consultation process is that societies should take their comments to their Societies Workshop meetings, the discussions from these meetings will be taken to Societies Executive where we’ll discuss changes that should be made. Once we have made some changes, we’ll repeat this process to ensure everyone is happy or we have come to the best solution; then at Societies Council towards the end of term i’ll take the final draft to be voted on. If passed it’ll need to come to Student Council for approval as well. This is because it outlines exactly how to run a society and what the role and powers of the Union are. My hope is that this will provide a sustainable base for societies from year to year as they know what is expected of them, what they should expect from the Union, and means that big wholesale changes in the way societies run has to be approved by societies and their members.

STARS
I think i mentioned in the last Student Council that STARS had been sent out to societies. I want to acknowledge the fantastic work Dec put into this project. We are pleased that other parts of the Union are looking at STARS and working out how they can apply it to their areas. The massive advantage of STARS is that not only does it reward those societies who are achieving and doing a lot, but it also provides a forum for feedback and suggestions on development of societies; providing ideas for societies as to how they could improve, and rewarding those who do put the work in. This principle can be applied to individuals as well, so hopefully we might soon see such as a system helping with the development of individuals at the Union – which means we will be effectively giving something tangible back to our volunteers.

Grant Proposal
As we had a small pot of money left for societies, we opened it put for grant requests. We have had a couple come in which will be going to Societies Executive to vote on soon. This ensures fairness in the granting of money, and also means those societies who need it can have access to it.

Misc

Blog posting – review of year
I have written a ‘review’ of the first half of the year based upon my manifesto and what progress i have made so far. I hope you get a chance to read through it because it was my manifesto that i was elected on, and people should remember what i promised and ensure that i work to achieve them. http://www.upsu.net/sabbs/?p=144

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2010 Review – Societies and Community
Posted by mattblackall in UPSU Sabbs, VP Societies and Community on December 22, 2010

So this is my last blog post of 2010; and it’s a bumper one!

Christmas holidays have come, and students have gone. It is unusually quiet around the Union.

So this is perhaps a chance for me to look back on my election manifesto, and update you all on what progress I have made.

• Establish a closer link between the Student Union and the local community; including a neighbourhood watch style scheme to ensure safer streets for all students.

I have been busy this past half year with getting myself ingrained into the local community via the decision making process. I have met up and spoken to many Councillors; I have gone along to Neighbourhood Forums and met local residents; and we are looking at creating a tripartite committee of the Council, UPSU and University. By establishing this link first, we can then build on getting UPSU to become a political voice for students in the community – something that we are including in our 3 year Community Strategy that should will be approved by the Board of Trustees in January.

As for the Neighbourhood Watch, I have to admit something. This has largely involved into a Community Reps scheme, where we have students in different areas of Portsmouth effectively representing the students in those areas and working on campaigns within those areas. Although the principle of a Neighbourhood Watch is not gone from this project, it has expanded to include possibilities in dealing with other issues such as litter, parking, recycling, student and local resident relations, and representation of students whilst living in Portsmouth. Community Reps will be open for application in January, so please consider becoming one.

• Stronger environmental and ethical practices at the Union

There is currently a review of all our Policies. So in the new year I am hoping to look over our Environmental Policy and see how we can link it in better with the Sound Impact Award/Greener Students’ Unions Award (that we have recently submitted) which then deals with those areas that we are falling behind on environmentally.

I am also hoping that we can create a kind of Recycling Hub in the Union where students and staff can recycle essentially anything. This is a project I will be starting on during Christmas and will be in place in the first few months of the new year.

Finally, along with a few others from UPSU, I am apart of the Carbon Management committee, that although looks at how the University can cut its carbon emissions, also applies to the Students’ Centre (Union). So having a say here will positively impact us as well. The Carbon Management plan will be out by March.

• Make sure that students are taken into consideration at a local level.

As I mentioned in my first point, I have been engaging a lot more with local Councillors, and we are looking at a Tripartite Committee that looks at and attempts to resolve student issues in the community, our first meeting is in January. Following this and our Community Strategy, I am going to continue my work this year (and hope the work will continue next year), at ensuring that UPSU can have some say over Council policies that effect students.

As a further from the Community Rep system I briefly discussed, I am also hoping that we can have more presence at Neighbourhood Forums, which are essentially community action and campaign groups in various areas of Portsmouth. A student presence on here will not only improve relations between students and local residents, but also help ensure that students are consulted on decisions being made within Portsmouth. I mentioned that I am personally going along to this meetings anyway, but in January when we have Community Reps, they should be going to these meetings.

• Empower students to be able to gain more from the societies they join.

This is an interesting point. My intention was to make sure students are aware that they not only have a democratic voice within the Union, but also within the societies they are apart of.

To help aid this, I am publicising to societies members the fact that if they feel their societies’ committee is not doing a good job, they can vote them out (Vote of No Confidence). This policy was approved (in line with UPSUs Mem+Arts) at the last Societies Council. Of course this is not a nice thing to do, but it is important that members know that they do have some say and power with the money they put into a society.

• Ensure a fairer distribution of resources to those students and societies who need it most.

This will be one of the most controversial points. This year societies funding has been reduced from £20,000 to £12,000. Couple this with an increase in societies and societies members; the money we are able to give to societies is limited.

So to combat this, to make it fairer, I have done two things.

Firstly, the finance system is now set at providing a society £1 per member they sign up, then giving slightly more money for each number of members a society signs up (so 30, 50, 75, 100 members…). This way the more members a society has, the more money we’d give them.

What is coupled with this is the Grant Proposal. Some societies do need more money than others, and now they have a chance to request more money from us. We have a small pot of money that includes £1,000 for community projects, that societies can apply for. They submit a request outlining what they need the additional funding for, then the Societies Executive (based on a recommendation from myself and Declan) will vote as to whether they receive it or not.

This hopefully means that it is fairer because there is a flat rate for all societies; and societies who need it most do have an avenue to receive extra funding.

Finally, one of the articles in the Societies Handbook (governance of societies, much like a constitution), has in it how finances will be given out. Therefore, if passed at the next Societies Council, next years Sabb for Societies cannot come along and change everything as has happened in previous years – the only way they can is to get members of societies to approve the change.

• Expand specialised training for new and existing societies.

I originally hoped during my election period that come the start of the year I would have some training in place to help societies out. Unfortunately, this has yet to happen.

We have started looking at various finance and media training models, but we have only provided one session of finance training.

However, this is lot a lost cause.

What myself and Declan will be working on in the new year are plans for different types of training, then a timeline for when the training needs to be delivered. This will encompass the following years as well as the remainder of this year. Therefore, each year, we know what training we’ll give and when we’ll give it – instead of haphazardly creating a training plan a few days before offering some.

We’ll also be offering training during the handover period at the end of the year for new committee members. This will be in regards to budget completions, hopefully how to run a society and manage people, and also how to promote your society and organise events. As I have said, the plan is that this sort of training can be given every year without much alteration in the content once it is up and running.

•Give all committee members guidance on how to manage their society by creating a new societies’ development web-page.

The societies development webpage had the original intention of being a ‘wiki’ which can be updated interactively by members of societies so they can share best practise. Although I haven’t thrown this idea out, what we are doing is creating the foundations of it first. This will be under ‘Running Your Society’ on upsu.net’s societies pages.

In this page we’ll have details of everything you need to know about running your society and meetings (Societies Booklets), how to govern your society within the Union (Societies Handbook), how finance works (Societies Booklets and Grant Proposal) and development of your society and awards (STARS). I’d like to add more to do with event management (some of it is within the Societies Booklets) and training for societies members.

• Improve lines of communication within societies.

This is a difficult one to do, and any suggestions are welcome. At the moment every society has a @upsu.net, and I regularly email presidents and secretaries to remind them to check this account.

As for members getting responses from their own committees (this was the reason for this point as it is a problem); hopefully the threat of a VNC will encourage committees to actively engage with their members. However, I don’t feel this is enough.

What I’d like to do is to publicise to societies members a lot more that if they are not getting information from the societies committee, or not getting a response to queries they sent to a committee, that they can come and speak to me and I can speak to the societies committee directly and find out why they are not answering their members query. That way I can find out why some societies are being a bit pants.

• Encourage the growth of academic societies.

We have produced and are distributing leaflets on Academic Societies. We have also naturally had more Academic Societies set up this year which is a good thing.

I am looking into how we can get increased faculty/school/course support for academic societies, especially the setting up of them. This will be an ongoing project which has already had some interesting ideas being thrown up – one of which is automatic membership (we also had a motion recently defeated at Societies Council about the option of free membership for some (academic) societies).

• Effectively publicise successes achieved by societies each year through a specialist website, PugwashNews and local media.

This is a difficult one. First of, not all societies tell me their successes! When we hear of some we try and put them on our website and facebook group. Furthermore, as we do not have direct control over things like local media and Pugwash News, we cannot always publicise the successes within societies. I fear this maybe a manifesto point I cannot fully deliver, but as with the lines of communication, any suggestions or support on this would be welcome.

**

Aside from my manifesto, there were a couple of things I have been mandated to do from last years Societies AGM. One of those was online memberships, and I am pleased that this year there is an option for people to sign up to societies online. Now, there are a couple of flaws in the system (not necessarily the fault of the system mind you) that need to be ironed out, but hopefully in a few years time this will prove to be the most effective and most used way for students to sign up to societies.

I also briefly mentioned about STARS (Societies Training And Reward Scheme). I have to give huge credit to Declan on helping and leading with the bulk of the work on this project, and I am extremely happy with the resulting workbook that we have come up with. Essentially, STARS is a workbook that helps societies ‘self-audit’ themselves. It suggests areas that societies could improve on so therefore helps with their development. It also means that those societies who are doing well and are well run will get rewarded at the end of the year, and then promoted next year with the award they got. I am also looking into a possible role of honour for those societies that have done well.

One final thing I’d like to mention is the Societies Handbook – a ‘constitution’ on how to run societies and their responsibilities within the Union. I have completed the first draft (14 pages) and this is now going through the consultation period which will result in it being presented at the next Societies Council.

These are only a couple of things I have done this year – everyday I either get a new idea, or progress on yet another project (that’s if I don’t have a mountain of emails to get through mind you), so by the end of the academic year, I hope I can look back on a huge portfolio of successes, not necessarily from a vain ego point of view, but on a helping our members and achieving something point of view.

That’s it from me for 2010. I hope everyone enjoys their Christmas break and has a fantastic 2011! There will be good times and bad, but let’s make 2011 the best year to date, not just at UPSU, not just in Portsmouth, but everywhere!

Matt

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Students ARE Customers
Posted by mattblackall in VP Societies and Community on December 13, 2010

The vote last Thursday has changed everything, even if you don’t notice it at first or don’t realise it.

What I mean by this is that the relationship between Universities and students is going to move away from what it is and what it should be.

What it is and should be is an agreement between student and University. That students come to University to acquire knowledge and the University will try it’s best to provide a platform to facilitate that transfer and discovery of knowledge; but it requires students to follow guidelines and help themselves and Universities in this process.

Now although this will still be the main focus Universities will and must continue to have, a new issue has been thrown into the equation; the shifting of the burden of cost moving onto the student.

With tuition fees being allowed to go up to £9,000, students will be paying more to ensure a course is still going than the Government will.

Therefore, the original agreement will be shattered.

This is because if a student is shouldering the burden of cost, more will be expected from the University and less from the student.

A good example to highlight this would be a restaurant. If you are paying nothing or very little for a meal, then you wouldn’t expect too much and if it was cold probably wouldn’t complain too much. However, if you were paying a lot for a meal and it came out cold, you would complain and ask for a replacement.

There are still stories of students in the present day being locked out of lectures if they turn up 10 minutes late, or being sent out of seminars if they haven’t read the text. However, if the student was paying the majority of the cost of this course, can this still be allowed to happen?

Students’ Unions will need to redraw what it considers to be the relationship between students and the University and actually start demanding much more from the University – as students paying a lot more money should be doing as well.

And in the age of higher education cuts, will Universities be able to improve the service it is offering to students? The National Student Survey will make for very interesting reading over the next 5/10 years as this challenge will be made to Universities across the whole country.

Another interesting side step is that when you pay a lot of money, you expect higher quality and your preferred outcome. Therefore, if you were paying £9,000 a year for your course and you spent the time required on it (did all the reading, got help from tutors when it came to essays), but ended up with say a 3rd or 2:2, would you then feel aggrieved and feel you have grounds to legally challenge this mark? You have done everything you could, but the University couldn’t hold its end of the deal. A case like this will be made in the courts in future years (forgetting the recent one with Queens Uni in Belfast that was focused more upon procedures rather than delivering a product), and it will be interesting to see what happens.

But ultimately, what the Government’s decision has done is regrettably ensured one thing; students ARE customers.

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Demo-day!
Posted by mattblackall in VP Societies and Community on November 11, 2010

So unless you have been hiding under a rock, you would had noticed yesterday that a largely peaceful protest took place in London with anywhere between 30,000-50,000 students depending on the source you read.

UPSU proudly took 5 coaches to the demo on what luckily proved to be a nice sunny day!

I have to admit, when i woke up the day before and saw lightning in the morning, i did panic and think that wednesday would be a wash out, but how wrong i was.

We left for the demo at around 8.30 on the wednesday with coaches of students from both University of Portsmouth and a local college. UCU generously had collected money from supporters and lecturers beforehand which meant that we had packed lunches for everyone who attended. So there is such a thing as a free lunch.

The trip up didn’t occur many hiccups. I had twice done my spiels about us going up to peacefully protest. I had done my name counts. We even had an improv stand-up comedy performance from the one and only Angryman, Grant Clarke. Although at first he was met with boos and jeers, as we got into London people where chanting his name for more and more!

The demo itself was fantastic. A lot of the students we had taken had never gone on a protest before, so this was a completely new experience for them.

Despite being split up by the crowd into groups, i heard our students chanting things like “when i say cut back you say fight back, cut back, fight back” and “no ifs, no buts, no education cuts.”

As a long time political campaigner, it was a pleasure to see.

One of the other positives from the day was that there was a proportion of those who came from Portsmouth who normally have no direct involvement in the Union, either politically, as a volunteer or from a sports club/society. It shows we can get our voice and message out there if we worked at it (and boy did we work, a couple of us spent hours for days on end talking to students out in the cold).

One of the things i was really panicing about on the coaches was making sure people got back safely and on time. I was picturing at 6:10pm, 10 minutes after we were supposed to leave, having to ring up a couple of people asking where they were and how long they were going to be. But luckily, everyone for my coach was back in plenty of time, and no-one got lost!

It was a fantastic day of peaceful protesting from the Portsmouth lot, so here’s to an increased engagement with future campaigning we are planning (you can view them here: http://www.upsu.net/news/union/fightfees)

Here are a couple of pictures i took during the day:

Oh and by the way, i am not ignorant of what happened on the day, so for those who thought the demo was all about what is being reported in the press, i direct you to: http://www.upsu.net/news/union/union-march-demo and http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/newshome/Students-dismayed-after-protest-over.6621664.jp

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Customers, Unions and Tuition Fees
Posted by mattblackall in VP Societies and Community on October 15, 2010

I hope I am not speaking out of turn here as a VP with the remit of Societies and Community, and if so, I hope our VP Academic Affairs Goose Sam Jones forgives me, but I would like to write a tiny bit about why students should fight against rising tuition fees.

University used to be about students going to University to broaden their knowledge of a particular subject. Of course, many students would use the opportunity to further their future careers. However, in this day and age we have moved away from the quest for knowledge into one based purely around economics and career prospects.

I was on the panel for a Politics and Debating Society debate the other week speaking against the motion that Universities should be for the best and brightest and not for all. I didn’t come out of it that well, primarily because I had little time to prepare due to the nature of my work, however, what I did draw from the debate is that so many people now consider University as a path to a career rather than personal development. This is not helped when a lot of the jobs on offer are ‘graduate jobs’ as though no-one else but someone who has gone to University can do it.

What this brings me to is that in this context, students and Students’ Unions need to review their relationship with the University. In this context, students are customers of the University. They should expect a certain level of service and support and when they do not get it they should argue and fight for it.

We have seen this recently in Portsmouth with the debate going on in some courses in regards to course handbooks. Some students felt that the refusal of their departments to not print them but demand students print them and bring them to lectures was wrong, so they lobbied and have achieved some victories.

Students’ Unions need to further their engagement with students in this context and make students aware that they are customers who should expect a certain level of service for the money they pay. I do believe this Union is making great strides at doing this, but it is something the Students’ Union movement as a whole needs to understand.

This should also been seen in the context of the Browne Review and rising tuition fees. Naturally, if you were to buy food or clothing, the more money you pay the better experience and quality you expect back. If you don’t get this level back, as a customer you would complain. This is exactly the same with tuition fees and your experience at University.

What the introduction of tuition fees should had done several years ago is to give Students’ Unions more lobbying power within their Universities, because the people they represent are paying for what they get.

However, I am not sure if this has been the case. According to the NUS, the National Student Survey responses actually show that with the introduction and then the trebling of tuition fees, what has happened is that the satisfaction of students’ University experience has fallen. Of course this could be argued that it is because students now expect more because of the fact they pay. But I don’t think this is so. The NUS suggest it highlights a broader problem with the redirection of tuition fees within the University, and that students are not seeing the rewards of the fees. (http://www.nus.org.uk/en/News/Aaron-Porters-Blog/Dates/2010/10/Higher-tuition-fees-a-generation-betrayed-and-a-case-not-made/)

What highlights this further is that those supporting a rise in tuition fees do not suggest that it would improve the quality of service students receive, but instead describe how it is needed in respect of the huge cuts Universities are going to face. It is still debatable as to the extent to which rising tuition fees will plug this gap, and this problem is heightened by finding the right balance for fees to still encourage students to come to this University.

Personally and as a member of an organisation that voted for it, I am going to fight any rises in fees and all cuts to education. It is not only the participation of students from different backgrounds that is going to be effected, it is not only the future of the country that is at risk, is it also the quality of the service that Universities are able to offer that is at severe risk. Students’ Unions as a whole will need to step up to these issues and make sure they are reflecting the views of the customer. Paying fees means there is a more legitimate right for students to complain and expect a lot back. This does not legitimise fees; it merely adds more pressure to the University sector to improve what it does (surely difficult with a proposed 70/80% cut in teaching budgets).

If you want to join me on the march through London to demonstrate cuts and fees, please sign up at www.upsu.net/demo

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Societies Calendar
Posted by mattblackall in VP Societies and Community on September 8, 2010

I have just created a calendar for all societies events. It will contain the key dates that societies should know and will also be updated with societies events.

To access the calendar click the link below:

http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/upsu.net/embed?src=upsu.net_2m90bhq9j408m6h1ldsde0acrk%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Europe/London

If you have a Google Calendar (all students should have access to one via either a @upsu.net address or their @myport.ac.uk address) then once you have clicked the above link, click the add logo in the bottom right hand corner.

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Societies online sign-up
Posted by mattblackall in VP Societies and Community on September 7, 2010

One of the things me and Aakash managed to get sorted before i took up office was that at the annual Societies AGM, societies and their members can either mandate me to do certain things or to put motions through as to what they’d like to see changed. One of those things voted through was online memberships for societies.

Well, we have now just recently launched our new online membership system at http://www.upsu.net/buy, or for societies in particular at http://www.upsu.net/buy?page=shop.browse&category_id=2.

I can’t take all the credit for this as i believe this may have been an idea in the pipeline anyway, but the fact that myself and Lauren (VP Sports) wanted such a system gave it higher priority. But to be honest the large chunk of credit should go to Tom Worman (our web guru in the Marketing Department) for creating and setting it up, and also for continously bugging me to make sure i give him the information he needed!

Anyway, this system means that you can now sign up to all the societies you want to join whilst in the comfort of your own home and in the space of minutes!

You can still sign up at Freshers Fayre, but this makes it so much easier.

Each club and society will still receive the membership fees from signing up online and they will all get details of the members who do sign up, so there is no need to worry about the loss of the paper aspect of signing up to a society.

There are two points to this system though. The first is that not all societies are currently listed. This is not because there are problems or they won’t be listed – they will just be included in the next wave of societies to be added. Secondly, there is an additional 40p to every membership (should be inlcuded already, so if membership to a society was £3, it’ll show as £3.40), this is just an online transaction cost and does not go to the society unfortunately.

So check it out and start signing up to all your favourite clubs and societies!

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Societies’ Finances
Posted by mattblackall in VP Societies and Community on August 27, 2010

Apologies for not posting my monday blog – i was bedstricken- so instead you get an end of the week treat.

Well, when i say treat, it depends on how the following will affect you… Societies Finances.

A topic of much controversy and confusion – the fact that we did not have much money was even a headline article in last years Pugwash News.

This year societies will see yet another method of funding distribution, but hopefully this method if successful can be implemented as a 3 year policy so societies will know how much money they will get each year – an issue of confusion between societies as it normally changes every year.

Two of the tricky things about juggling societies budgets is the sizes of the societies involved and the number of societies we have.

At the moment we have around 60 registered societies – this doesn’t include any new societies or those who have yet renewed. Last year we had around 4000+ members. So techincally, asdide from the Course Rep system, societies are the main way in which UPSU engages with its members.

Alongside this we have some societies who have hundreds of members and some who only have a couple (as from now, societies will need at least 15 members in order to be an official society). The reason this is an issue is that some societies also need more money than other societies – this doesn’t always correspond with how many members a society has, but a lot of the time it does. But a problem with this is that some societies (rightly so) need a huge chunk of our societies budget in order to function and provide services for its members.

This makes the distribution of the societies budget tricky, especially when we only have £9000 (with £1000 of this restricted to community related projects only) to split between all these different societies.

One of my manifesto pledges was to “ensure a fairer distribution of resources to those students and societies who need it most.”

Now, i am fairly confident that my grant allocation proposal does fit in with this pledge, but before i tell you how societies funding is to be allocated, i shall first address one of the problems the allocation will bring, and how it still fits in with my election pledge.

The biggest issue that will arise with societies funding this next year will be that some of the more cost intensive societies will find they have less than they were expecting or perhaps needed. This is because the grant allocation has to be the same across the board as it is in relation to our members and it is unfair for one societies member to be worth more than another societies member (it will become clear soon, i promise!).

In regards to my election pledge as being to those who need it most, the grant allocation does address this, as you’ll see, but then i accept an argument of ‘but we need XXX amount to run and you are only giving us X amount, so how is this in line with your election pledge?’ can and probably will be used.

Well, first off, it is difficult to ensure that our allocation grant (smaller than before) is fairly split between an ever growing number of societies and members. Secondly, if a society or club has a high running cost, then surely the members should be expected to contribute more when joining. This does cause an issue of pricing some students out of joining certain societies and clubs, but it is the same if a society or club receives less money than they wanted from UPSU in that some students will be pushed away because the society or club cannot work at its desired efficency for the number of members it wants to have.

There are however additional ways around this. Trying to explore rather creative sponsorship opportunities could be the ideal route to take to make sure a society has the money it needs. This is something we will help out with. Furthermore, there are things we will do at UPSU to help these societies out. We will look into additional ways to obtain funding for societies, whether this be internally or, more likely, externally. We will work throughout the year to make sure that societies spend the money they have, which with an increasing membership will hopefully strengthen our case for more money next year. We will also look at logisical changes to some societies that changes their role within the Union and which will ensure they get the money they need.

Anyway, i’ve rambled on a lot about the issues around societies funding, let me now explain how it is to be allocated.

Each society will receive £1 per member they sign up.

Then, additional grants will be allocated based on the number of members a society will get:

30-49 members = £30
50-74 members = £50
75-99 members = £75
100-149 members = £100
150-199 members = £150
200 + members = £200
So the more members a society has, the more money given to the society.

I should point out that not all societies will receive funding. Last year part of the Renewal Pack included a request for the amount of funding a society would like from UPSU – it was made clear that the society may not receive this amount. Essentially, if the grant we would of given a society is more than they have requested, then they only get what they requested – there is no point in giving a society more money than it needs when other societies are not getting all the money they want.

Additionally, there will be a small pot of money available after this grant has been allocated. This will be open for societies to submit a Grant Proposal. So basically, if a society wants to run an event and needs a certain amount of money to run it, they can apply for some of this pot. The Grant Proposal will be firstly considered by myself and Declan and we will provide a recommendation as to whether this money should be given to the society, it will then be passed over to Societies Executive who will then consider the request and our recommendation and vote on whether that society gets the additional grant or not.

Around £1000 of this has been ringfenced to cover projects societies would like to do within the local community.

I hope that makes sense!

Understandably some societies will have problems with this new system, but unfortunately at the moment we can only work with what we have; butI will work throughout the year to try and make sure societies do get a fair deal, and if a society needs a lot more money to function then I will help them. I’d just call for those members and societies who are negatively effected to understand the situation and for us to work together (not against each other) to come to a benefical conclusion.

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Societies’ Democracy
Posted by mattblackall in VP Societies and Community on August 16, 2010

I promised a monday update, and here it is! Hopefully something a bit more relevant that my past exploits

I’ve been working on a few bits concerning Societies’ Democracy, have a read through and let me know your thoughts:

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Democracy within societies is run on four levels.

Societies Workshops – each society is placed within a society category (political, academic, physical activities, common interest, faith and cultural) and has their own Societies Executive representative. These representatives will hold regular meetings to catch up with societies and discuss issues and to also vote whether a new society in that category should be allowed to be set up. Discussions within these categories are then fed back into the Societies Executive.

Societies Executive –members are elected onto the executive at the Societies AGM. This is the main forum to put forward issues and problems societies are facing. They vote on whether societies receive extra grants or not to run projects or events. They also hold Matt to account, ensure that societies are being effectively represented in the Union and its media, and ensure that joint society events are well run. To find out who is on the Societies Executive, then visit www.upsu.net/societies (not updated yet)

Societies Council – these are sporadic meetings where ideas and motions are voted through and are acted upon before ratification at the Societies AGM. Each society is required to send one representative.

Societies AGM – this is the annual societies’ members meeting that all members of societies are invited to. This is the main decision making forum that societies can be involved in and is where societies’ motions are ratified. This is also where the Societies Executive is elected. This is held in the May of each year.

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To make this more understandable, or perhaps more confusing, i have also made a little flow chart diagram:

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Motions and ideas

Societies and their members can submit motions and ideas they consider will help with running societies in the Union. These motions and ideas will be discussed in Societies Workshops. If approved here, they are presented to Societies Executive for discussion then forwarded onto Societies Council. This is where motions are voted through or rejected. If accepted, they will be effective immediately on a trail basis until Societies AGM where each motion shall be discussed and then voted through indefinitely or not.

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So, does this make sense? Any ideas on changes or improvements? Or is it just a load of rubbish and we should just run and make decisions by letting a chicken pick a bit of paper out of a boiler hat?

The Doctor’s question took Elisa by surprise.

“But, why, Doctor, not everything is terrible – there is so much beauty in the world, i mean, Universe. But i suppose those terrible things that happen are just a product of human, or alien, nature.”

“No, no, no, i don’t mean in general, i mean… what do i mean? Take Earth for example, i’m forever trying to save you humans from scary monsters from the sky: Cybermen, Daleks, Zygons, Weeping Angels, even Time Lords. Why is it that everything happens to Earth? Why can’t i be forever nipping back and forth saving inhabitants on say… Heptious?”

“Or Pluto?”

“Or Pluto – although if i were you, if we ever went there please make sure you wrap up warm. Brrr.”

The Doctor wrapped his arms around his body and shook his head.

“What i mean”, said the Doctor, “is that the TARDIS is taking us back to Earth now for reasons i currently don’t understand, and at a time when all i want to do is to stroll through the streets of 16^th Century Barcelona whilst eating fish fingers.”

“You mean, Doctor, that you aren’t flying the TARDIS to Earth right now?” Elisa was confused.

“I’m hardly ever flying the TARDIS – it seems to take me to wherever it wants me to go, never where i want to go. But anyway, we’ve landed now, let’s take a look at what Earth has in store for me this time.”

The Doctor took a quizzical look at the TARDIS controls before jumping down the stairs and to the door.

“You ready?” The Doctor asked Elisa.

“I’m never ready”

The Doctor burst through the doors of the TARDIS only to trip over the stretched out half decimated corpse of a man in his early forties. The force knocked the spectacles off of the corpse’s face.

“Oh my god, what’s happened, this is terrible.” Elisa’s face went white, and she looked towards the Doctor with eyes pleading for an answer – the answer didn’t come.

The scene on the outside of the TARDIS was one of destruction and despair. Buildings were on fire with whole fronts blown off. The debris from whole swards of office blocks were lying across the streets, and the fires filled the air with a dark grey mist. The TARDIS had landed in the middle of a roundabout in London, with the streets both to the left and right filled with scattered bits of buildings and burnt out cars. In the distant foreground London’s famous Ferris Wheel, the London Eye, could be seen breaking from its bonds and crashing down to Earth. The screech of scratching metal was only drowned out by the squeals coming from the blazing fires. Among the debris were human bodies. Arms stretched out from under walls; bodies with legs missing spread across the street; there was hardly a survivor in the vicinity.

Quietly the Doctor whispered under his breath, “this is not right.”

From the road to the left of the TARDIS could be seen a legion of Cybermen slowly making their way down the street. Red lasers were firing indiscriminately from their arms into destitute office blocks and shop windows; the last of the survivors were shot down on sight – this Cyber Unit was taking no prisoners and showing no mercy.

“This is not RIGHT!” The Doctor’s tone would normally shock Elisa, but the image around her of a City she once loved had replaced her fears with sadness and confusion.

The Doctor grabbed Elisa’s arm and pulled her back into the TARDIS just as a red bolt shot right across the space their heads had occupied just seconds before.

Inside the TARDIS Elisa collapsed, tears seemed to have escaped their inevitable fate and had lodged themselves in Elisa’s throat – for as no tears shed from Elisa, she seemed incapacitated and unable to speak.

The Doctor sternly walked to the TARDIS controls with anger in his eyes.

“Why? Why? Why? The Cybermen don’t indiscriminately kill those around them, they harvest them, THEY DON’T KILL THEM! Why did you take us here at this time? Why didn’t you take us here before the Cybermen came?”

Elisa looked at the Doctor, confused as to who he was directing his rant towards as it was only the two of them inside the TARDIS.

“This is not right.”

“Doctor…” The Doctor walked towards where Elisa had collapsed on the floor.

“Elisa, i’m sorry. I am normally here before things start to happen.”

“Can you put things right?”

“I’m so sorry. I can’t bring anyone back. I can’t take back what’s happened.”

“Can you get rid of what’s causing the devastation?”

Beforehand the Doctor’s voice seemed to carry with it regret, however, with Elisa’s last question the Doctor’s eyes seemed to had lit up and he clutched Elisa’s shoulders … “Of course i can, i’m the Doctor”… the hope seemed to flow from the Doctor’s eyes and flow straight into Elisa.

The Doctor jumped up and threw himself towards the TARDIS console. Elisa stood up and walked after him, seemingly forgetting the human wasteland she had seen outside.

“So, could we just go back in time before this has happened and stop it?”

“No – not a word i like using, and i would love if it i could say yes, but unfortunately what has happened has happened, i’ve seen it with my own eyes now, so to consciously go back and stop it happening would mean i’d cross my own timestream and that would blow a huge hole in the Universe and destroy everything that exists and would ever exist. Now, we wouldn’t want to see any further destruction now, would we?”

“So what do we do Doctor?” Elisa felt hopeless, but with the new optimism the Doctor seem to exhibit, she clung to any possibility that might present itself.

“Well, i noticed it before we left the TARDIS, but didn’t think too much about it – well, i did, but i wanted to go outside first, you never know where to find the most excitement. But after seeing outside, i would hazard a guess that this is our best bet.”

“What’s our best bet?”

The Doctor hunched over the TARDIS controls and looked straight up at Elisa with a smug grin on his face, whilst with his left hand pointed straight at a feint purple light that was flickering in the corner of the scanner. “This”

In a dark room with only a desk light for company, a rather plump man in a black t-shirt and jeans was arched over a laptop computer – his only company. To his right there were left over take away containers with their contents long since removed. To his left were opened notebooks haphazardly placed on top of one another.

The man scratched his head, confusingly exclaiming “what” under his breath. On his screen random symbols were quickly filling up the space underneath a splattering of text on a word processor.

“What’s that light, Doctor?”

“All i know is that it is a glimmer of a signal. A little sign of hope. Well, i hope.”

“So you have no idea what’s on the other end?”

“Nope, but here’s to hope…” The Doctor yanked down a lever and the TARIDS violently shook, sending Elisa to the ground before she climbed back up again with the aid of the TARDIS console.

The Doctor started shouting, “We’re going to need more power, she’s not liking this!” – or that’s at least what Elisa thought she heard, the TARDIS was groaning louder than she had ever heard it groan before.

Back in the dark room, the man leaned back in his chair rubbing his chin. At that moment an unusual but familiar noise forced him to spin quickly around and jump out of his chair. It was a noise that he often played in his mind every day; but not one that anything in his darkened office was known to make.

Before the man’s eyes the blue outline of a 1960s Police Box started appearing and disappearing before finally finding its full form and quietly laid to rest.

The man didn’t have time to be confused as out of the door the gleaming Doctor stormed out, with Elisa poking her head around the door.

“Well, this isn’t a Cyber control room, and you” pointing straight at the man “don’t look like a Cyber Commander!”

“But, what, this can’t be… how can you be here?” The man stumbled back into his chair.

“A feint signal of hope, well, i hope it’s hope, i don’t know anymore – who are you?”

“I’m, i’m, the Writer.”

“A writer, ohh, i like writers, such weird imaginations – never liked writing much, don’t suppose i ever needed too really, my TARDIS provides me with as much imagination as i need. Anyway, a writer of what?”

“Of you, Doctor.” The words stumbled from the man’s lips as though he couldn’t believe he was really saying them.

“What do you mean of me?” The Doctor’s voice had narrowed, and an element of fear seemed to come from the Doctor’s words.

“I, i, write you. I mean, i write what happens to you.”

“Why? For what purpose do you write about what happens to me?”

“For the audiences, your fans, the production company. I write Doctor Who stories – it’s my job.”

“Doctor Who?”

“That’s what the stories are known as.”

“But i’m called the Doctor.”

“Oh, we know that, everyone knows that – are you the Doctor? Am i not hallucinating?” The Writer seemed to grow more confidence in his manner; his searching for reasoning seems to had removed what appeared to be an impossible situation from the possibilities that would explain the conversation he was having with the very person whose conversations he was being paid to write.

“You’re certainly not hallucinating. Now show me, show me what you are writing.”

The Doctor walked over to the desk, and the Writer pointed towards an outline of a script on his laptop.

“I just had an idea for a story about you turning up on Earth only to find a Cyber army had taken it over and destroyed everything. It’s a work in progress.”

On hearing this a so far mute Elisa piped up, “but Doctor, that’s happening now.”

“I know… Let me see. Can i have a read?” The Doctor leaned closer to the laptop and read the unfinished script.

“What do you mean it’s happening now?” The Writer addressed himself towards Elisa, but as she was about to answer the Doctor butted in, “it only goes up to when we get out of the TARDIS; the very moment we see what is happening around us – it even has me pulling you back into the TARDIS just as a Cyberman shot at us. Then there are just rows upon rows of weird symbols… What are they?”

“I’ve no idea. They just started appearing randomly, and then you turned up.”

“Hmm.”

“Doctor, do you think they signal us appearing here?” Elisa had by this point walked over to the laptop with the Doctor and was looking at the unfinished script.

“Maybe, let me try something…” the Doctor typed something on the keyboard and ran toward the TARDIS. Elisa and the Writer followed his movement with their eyes until he disappeared into the TARDIS. Just as he had gone in, he came out again with a plate of warm fish fingers and a huge smile across his face.

“Oh yummy, fancied fish fingers – anyone else? You wouldn’t have any custard on you would you?”

“Doctor”, Elisa exclaimed, “what did you do?”

“I wrote after those symbols that i stormed into the TARDIS to find some fish fingers waiting for me… and now look – i have fish fingers and there are more symbols appearing underneath.”

The screen was filling up with more rows of random symbols.

“So, what happens if i delete the line you’ve just written?” Elisa directed to no-one in particular whilst highlighting and removing the words the Doctor had written.

“Just look” replied the Doctor.

The Writer and Elisa looked toward the hand that carried the fish fingers, only to see the plate and the fish fingers had gone.

“So, it seems that whatever you write, Writer, happens. And do you know what that also means?” The Doctor looked between Elisa and the Writer. “What?” replied the Writer. “We can save those people after all” the Doctor said, smiling.

With this the Doctor lunged towards the laptop removing the lines of description of the Earth they had witnessed. The weird symbols changed as if adapting to the new story line that the Doctor had inertly created for himself.

“Now, Writer, can you stop writing about destruction and death on Earth…”, “But, Doctor, that’s what the audiences crave!” The Writer protested.

“Rubbish, audiences also love a good old fashioned fairy tale, something where no-one dies and everyone is happy…. Hmm, i have an audience? I love someone seeing my genius – how are my ratings?”

“Doctor, is this really appropriate? Now you’ve saved the Earth, can we just go?” Elisa tugged at the Doctors arm and beaconed him towards the TARDIS.

“Yes, i suppose” then looking at the Writer the Doctor warned “but remember like i said, leave the people of Earth alone, i’m feeling like having a nice relaxing day today; oh, and one more thing – i know where you work.”

With this the Doctor and Elisa headed back into the TARDIS, leaving the Writer gobsmacked with what had just happened; his mouth cocked opened and his hand scratching his head.

Inside the TARDIS the Doctor and Elisa walked back to the main control.

“Doctor, could i ask you something?”

“Anything”

“Why didn’t you just take the laptop away from the Writer – surely that way we could prevent terrible things that happen across the Universe?”

“Too easy. If that laptop is controlling what is happening across the Universe, and the Writer is describing life itself, then tearing his laptop away from him would halt everything that is happening and is going to happen and would end life itself. And anyway – who says he’s not actually doing good. Hopefully him writing about nice fluffy things like poodles, washed towels and cotton buds will make some of the world’s inhabiting this Universe a much safer place to live.”

“So what you’re saying is that you can’t be bothered to replace him and write out the history of the Universe?”

“I live the Universe, i don’t shape it.”

“Yeah right” whispered Elisa below her breath.

“But you know Doctor, some girls kind of like that power streak in a man. You know, knowing that the person you’re with can shape what is happening around you” Elisa moved closer to the Doctor “it’s kind of… sexy.” Elisa moved her finger up the Doctor’s arm.

“Sexy! More like delusional. The Universe should be allowed to live, not rewritten or planned – and what makes me the most suitable person to decide how the Universe should be ordered, i’m not in charge of anyone’s destiny.”

“Oh, but you could be if you wanted”, and with that Elisa jumped at the Doctor, locking her lips with his.

Shocked by the sudden advance, the Doctor grabbed Elisa’s arms and pushed her off of him.

“What are you doing?” The Doctor pulled a face as though he took a big gulp of soured water.

“Oh come on Doctor, i know you feel it too; just, hold me!” Elisa made another lunge at the Doctor but missed him as he stepped to the side to flee her advance.

“What has gotten into you?” The Doctor ran off of the console platform. “This is not you – you’re one of the normal ones, you know, one of the ones who don’t fall for every man or alien they see.” Elisa was standing at the top of the console platform holding onto the tops of the bannisters with the stairs below her pointing straight to the Doctor.

The Doctor slapped himself. “Oh of course” and ran straight out of the TARDIS door.

“Doctor, where are you going? Come back here to me.”

Outside the TARDIS was the Writers’ room, with the Writer busy at work on the laptop.

“Oh not you again” said the Writer exasperatedly, “i promise you, i’m not writing anymore about death on Earth, i’m writing something else that might appeal to the audiences.”

“What are you writing now?” asked the Doctor.

“Exactly what you told me, something fluffy. It’s a different direction i know, but perhaps we can hit a different demographic.”

“Let me see.” The Doctor leaned over the laptop. “No, no, no, no, no, you can’t write that. Me and Elisa are not supposed to fall in love with each other, i mean, i’m the Doctor, i do all the running, no time to settle down, and especially not with her, firstly, she’s human!”

“Oh, thanks!” It was at this moment Elisa had stepped out of the TARIDS and into the Writer’s room. “What’s wrong with being human?”

“Nothing’s wrong with you being human, just, me with a human, me with anyone for that matter – it’s not who i am; it’s not who i’ve been for a very long time. And secondly, i’m too old for you!”

Elisa grimaced, “you sound like my dad.”

The Doctor turned back to the writer, “now, delete that last paragraph. There will be no kissy kissy in my TARDIS!”

“Fine, as you please.” The Writer deleted the paragraph, and as he done so Elisa fell to the floor but not before the Doctor could catch her.

“Oooow, Doctor, what happened to me…”

The Doctor whipped out his sonic screwdriver and flashed it twice up and down her body. Looking at the end of the sonic he replied, “nothing long lasting, just a bit of an emotion wipe, should ware off anytime… now.” With that Elisa jumped to her feet, as good as new.

“What happened, Doctor?” Elisa questioned.

“The Writer wrote in his story about us two falling in love.”

“Ewww, what!” Elisa looked disgusted. “Me fall in love with you?” Elisa mocked.

“What! I’m not that bad!”

“Yeah but you’re not human like me!”

“Exactly!” The Doctor barked towards the Writer.

“And you’re way too old for me!”

“See, again, exactly!” He said whilst looking at the Writer. “What did i tell you?!”

“And also you’re…”, “Yes, yes, you can stop right there”, the Doctor cut her short.

Turning back to the Writer the Doctor stated, “Look you, none of this human killing, and none of this humans falling in love with me – howabout we all stay away from the humans, and death, and love; remember what i told you, a nice relaxing stroll through 16^th Century Barcelona. That’ll do me fine!”

The Doctor and Elisa headed back inside the TARDIS leaving the Writer to grumble indistinguishable words under his breath.

By the time the door closed on the TARDIS, the Doctor was already at the controls.

“So you think everything is sorted now Doctor?”

“Nothing’s ever sorted, but no point dwelling on things past – howabout we take a trip?”

Before the Doctor could play with the controls, the TARDIS had kicked into gear and was flying back through its haven of space.

Looking towards Elisa, the Doctor pondered aloud – “I wonder where she’s taking us now?”

They were only travelling for mere seconds, but they had in fact travelled millions of light years across the Universe and 34,067 years into the future. Into the depths of the Universe, in a place yet explored by the TARDIS, the Doctor and Elisa stepped through the door.

Elisa was draped in an orange suit; a helmet covering her head. The suit was more baggy than fitting, as if it had been made for someone much larger than herself.

The Doctor also had an orange suit on, but this one hugged him much more comfortably than the one Elisa was in.

“See, we can breathe, and here was you saying how you’d never been seen out in it.”

“I can breathe” replied Elisa, “but it makes my legs look half the size! I look like an alien!”

“Oi, there’s nothing wrong with aliens; and besides, in some parts of the galaxy there are whole civilisations of people who worship women with small legs! How do you know we’re not in one of them?”

“Are we, Doctor?”

“Umm, no – they’re the other side of the Mebua Nebula. I don’t really know where we are.”

“Oh great, so i’m in a place you don’t know looking like a fool in an unfitting orange suit. So what is this place then, it looks rather, sparse.”

Around them was rock, just rock. There was no sunlight, just a low glow that was being emitted from the ground around them. The terrain was flat, only disturbed by scatterings of rock. In the distance there were remnants of what were god-like mountains – smashed away to just their rocky bases.

The air around Elisa and the Doctor was full of particles, which made it difficult for them to see far ahead of them – making the mountain bases in the far distance seem reachable with outstretched arms.

“Well, this is a bit depressing. I suppose this is a place they don’t tell you about when you agree to go travelling through time and space. What are we doing here anyway?”

The Doctor looked around him observing the landscape which appeared as devoid of life as London had been just minutes before, “I don’t know, the TARDIS took us here.”

“Do you think it’s the Writer again?” Elisa quizzed.

“Doubt it, I didn’t notice any signal on the TARDIS scanner.”

“Do you think that he really does write about everything that happens to us?”

“Probably not, we control our own destinies; and besides, what if he did control everything that happened to us? It would mean that we have no free will.”

“And wouldn’t that make him like a God?”

“A God? Hmm. No. He wasn’t all God-y for a start, you know big long white beard, words of wisdom when you meet him – when we met him he didn’t know what to say, he was stumbling; what kind of God is that?”

Elisa was confused, she was struggling to understand just who this Writer was and how he could be so controlling over whatever happened. “So who is he then?” She masked the question she wanted to ask about why the Doctor had not tried to stop him or understand more about him.

“Just somebody who had been given a huge amount of power, but didn’t know how to use it; he seemed harmless enough, just needs a bit of guidance.”

Growing in her own self-confidence from the Doctor’s lack of knowledge, Elisa finally bought herself round to ask, “why did we just leave him them?”

The Doctor just looked at her with eyebrows lowered and a look of diligence on his face. He started walking forwards into the dusty air. Bending over he took a rock from the ground and crushed it between his fingers.

“Quite fragile with a darkened centre – looks like carbon. A lack of light must mean either the nearest star is on the other side of this planet, or it is too far away from us to have much of a gravitational impact –meaning that whatever we’re on is very small, probably smaller than your average planet. The glow coming from the ground and the dust in the air means we are moving pretty fast and gravity is weak.” Jumping up with a burst of energy the Doctor addressed Elisa, “that means we must be on an asteroid.”

“What’s that over there?” The dust had started to settle and Elisa had noticed a light in the near distance.

“No idea, shall we go and have a look.”

It took the Doctor and Elisa only 20 minutes to walk towards the light. When they got there was only a castle with towers that heightened into points, at least 30 of them, with the ones towards the middle much larger than those at the sides. There did not appear to be any structure other than the towers, with them all converging together to create a thick girth with just one door that rose high above the Doctor and Elisa. The towers were dark, but were emitting a glow that allowed Elisa to spot the castle from where the TARIDS was parked.

“Shall we go in then?” The Doctor asked Elisa.

“Shouldn’t we knock first?”

The Doctor walked towards the door and put his ear to it. His eyes opened up as he listened inside, “I don’t think they’d hear us if we knocked.” With that the Doctor pushed the door open to be greeted by a screeching warning siren, a flashing purple light, and hundreds upon hundreds of creatures Elisa would describe as a mix between crabs and humans running around.

“Never say I don’t take you anywhere exciting!”

“What’s going on, Doctor?”

“Let’s go and find out.”

The Doctor ran up to the first creature he could stop and grabbed their arm – “what’s going on around here?”

“Run, run, it’s no use, no use! Nothing worked” With that the creature ran off in hysterics.

“What did it mean, Doctor?”

“It means we have to find whoevers in charge around here.”

The Doctor and Elisa ran through corridors grabbing anyone who would stop to speak to them for more than a few seconds to find directions toward whoever was in charge before they ran away again in hysterics. As they ran down corridors the flashing purple continued, flooding the room with light. The sirens also continued with no hint of slowing down.

They had finally found the door to what they believed was the Empirical Room, the base for the lead command for the castle. Smashing through the door they were greeted by a group of creatures bundled around a table with their heads in their hands.

Looking up, the one creature in the most elaborate dress took one look at the Doctor and Elisa and shouted, “who the hell are you!”

“Ah, hello, my name’s the Doctor, and this here is Elisa. We were just popping by for a quick visit when we noticed that there was a lot of commotion. Is it something I could help with?”

The elaborately dressed creature looked between his colleagues before standing upon his legs, clasping his hands together and addressed the Doctor, “please forgive me for my rude outburst, this is a time of crisis for the Manadrac people. My name is Ochnid, and please make yourself feel comfortable in the short time you have left here, Doctor.”

The Doctor looked confused, “why short time, what’s happening?”

“Doctor, you do not appear to be from our dominion, may I ask, how did you get here?”

“Oh that’s easy, within my TARDIS.”

“TARDIS? What may I ask is this TARDIS?”

“It’s like a space ship, but it travels both through space and time.”

Ochnid’s face lit up, and he exchanged some whispers with his colleagues. Turning back to the Doctor he spoke with more forcefulness and optimism, “Doctor, how many passengers can your TARDIS take?”

“Hundreds, thousands, the TARDIS is based across the whole of space and time, and as such there is hardly any limit to the numbers of people who can fit inside it – why are you so interested? What is happening?”

“Doctor, we are on a collision course, a collision with another world. We do not have any transportation to take us away from our damned dominion, and all the techniques our scientists have developed over the past millennia have proved fruitless in pursuit of salvation from our fate. Doctor, would you do the most kindly of exploits in saving the Manadrac people from this unfortunate fate and take us far away from this place, and possibly to a new home we can live peacefully in and without fear of damnation?”

“It would be the most greatest of pleasures to help you and your people out. All I need to know is how long we’ve got and how many of you are there?” The Doctor’s face spoke in itself of a pleasure in being able to help out a race of people without the fear of the destruction of another.

“There are 10,345 of us here; it would take around 5 minutes to get us all prepared, and around 10 minutes to get us all safely inside your ship. Impact is anticipated to be in 25 minutes, that would give us…”

“Ahh, might have a bit of a problem there… the TARDIS is 20 minutes away from this compound; we wouldn’t have enough time to get to it, get it here and save the whole of the population.”

“Doctor, I hope you are not asking us to pick who we save and who we leave.”

“Never, I would never ask that, I can tell that you are a proud people who look after each other. I would never ask you to pick and choose who is most worthy.”

“Well, Doctor,” Ochnid’s eye’s had lost the light it had previously gained, “it appears we are damned to our fate, and unless you leave soon you will be as well.”

“I’m not going to leave a whole race of people to certain death, especially when there is something like that over there.” The Doctor pointed to a wall of computer like controls behind Ochnid.

“What’s over there, Doctor?” Asked Elisa.

“Something I’ve seen a lot of today; oh, I should had seen the sign as soon as I walked into this place! Come on!” With that the Doctor ran straight from the room with Elisa following right behind. Ochnid sat back down with his colleagues, putting his head back into his hands. Their fate had appeared sealed, and their only chance of salvation has apparently just run from the room leaving the Manadrac species to face death alone.

Behind Ochnid was the wall the Doctor was pointing at, with a small, feint, purple light flashing indiscriminately amongst row upon row of forever changing numbers.

The Doctor and Elisa were running as fast as they could towards where they had left the TARDIS.

“Where are we going… we can’t leave them to die.” Elisa was breathlessly shouting towards the Doctor as she galloped alongside him.

“No-one’s going to die today!” The Doctor replied, seemingly unaffected by running across the asteroid with the weight of the orange suit and helmet upon him.

In the darkened room the Writer observed a whole new host of symbols appearing on the script in front of him.

“ARGHHH!!” he screamed, all alone in his darkened room.

Back in the TARDIS Elisa stopped for a moment to catch her breath. The Doctor was already at the TARDIS controls setting coordinates to the next destination.

“So… Doctor… where… going.” Elisa was still struggling with her words. She started taking off her orange suit, aware that she no longer needs it.

“The Writer! The purple light – the first signal I had to the Writer back on Earth. It was staring us in the face back there, the warning light – it was also on the computers behind Ochnid. It’s the Writer. Time to find out who he really is!”

The TARDIS flew through the time vortex and started appearing in the darkened room that was becoming all too familiar to the Doctor.

The Writer stood up and started looking at the reappearing TARDIS. Arm in arm, he stood there with a resilience across his face – unshocked by the emergence of the TARDIS, and determined to settle the score once and for all.

The Doctor and Elisa stepped out of the TARDIS, but this time it was the Writer who spoke first, “I done exactly as you asked me, Earth is safe, the asteroid was not heading towards it.”

“But there is a whole alien species on there.” The Doctor stepped up to the Writer, his face only centimetres away from the Writer’s, “there is a whole race of alien species heading to their doom with no way of saving them. How could you do that, it’s, inhuman, it’s disgusting.”

“There is always a way of saving them!” The Writer furiously replied, “you just didn’t look hard enough!”

“But why do I even need to look – why make my life so hard and endanger thousands of innocents, just to win audience ratings? It’s sick, and whoever is watching or reading this is sick as well.” The Doctor was angry, more angry than Elisa had seen him before – it kind of excited her, not sexually, but excited that the Doctor had the drive to wrap up this whole mystery once and for all – this whole time she wondered how one person could hold so many others’ fates in their own hands, and now the Doctor was going to unravel it once and for all – forgetting the irony of her thoughts.

“Delete it.” The Doctor turned away from the Writer and repeated himself, “delete it.”

“What, again?”

“Just delete it”

“Fine, it’s going.” The Writer turned around to his laptop and removed the section he had spent tireless hours on involving the asteroid. “Okay, Doctor, it’s been done.” The Writer walked back towards the Doctor.

“Thank you. Now, who are you?” The Doctor’s voice had a streak of ruthlessness within it, he wasn’t going to give up without an answer.

“I’ve told you before, I’m the Writer…”

“Yes, yes, I know, you write my stories, blah-de-blah; but what I want to know is, who are you?”

“I’m your writer, that’s all there is to it. Without me nothing happens.”

“So what are all those symbols on that script – the TARDIS isn’t translating it, what language is it? That has to be a pretty old language for the TARDIS not to translate it.” The Doctor stepped up to the Writer again, “an ancient language, and you don’t look a day over 40.”

Stepping away from the Doctor and walking back towards the desk “Those symbols are you Doctor. I don’t write them, I don’t write you.”

“You don’t write me? You’re my writer, how do you not write me?”

“Just as I said, I don’t write you, you write yourself. I just write about your companions, the people you encounter, where your TARDIS goes, what situations you come across. You have your own free will, Doctor, I just control what happens around you for you to work yourself around. And when you make your own decisions that don’t fit into the story, these symbols appear.”

“You write about the people I encounter? But that means…” The Doctor turned around, grabbed Elisa and headed towards the TARDIS.

“Where are you taking me now?” Elisa asked.

“Back to the asteroid, I just need to check.” The Doctor had an air of urgency about him; he bashed away at the controls, doing several loops of the console in the process.

Within seconds they were back on the asteroid, just this time 20 minutes away from where they landed last time, and according to the Doctor’s calculations right where the castle they were in previously was.

The Doctor stepped out of the door – nothing. He hung his head. “They’ve gone.” The Doctor whispered. “They never existed because we just asked the Writer to delete the section, and that deleted them. What have I done?”

He ran over to the scanner to double check. “Nothing, the only lifeforms registering on this asteroid are the two of us.” On the scanner there was an outline of the asteroid with two blinking red dots where the TARDIS had landed. “Oh, and look, the asteroid is about to crash.” The Doctor looked at the scanner again. One of the dots stopped blinking.

Turning around to where Elisa was standing all he saw was the wall of the TARDIS.

“No, no, no.” The Doctor hammered away at the TARDIS, sending it back into the time vortex. The moment he had done so the asteroid slammed into the side of planet – death toll unknown.

For what the Doctor was hoping to be the last time, the TARDIS was sent spiralling away, following the coordinates for the Writer’s room. The feint purple signal had disappeared from the TARDIS scanner, but the Doctor had memorised the location due to its importance.

Stepping outside the TARDIS once it had landed the Doctor looked towards the desk where the Writer had made his home; however, all he saw was emptiness – the Writer, his laptop and therefore Elisa, were gone.

That one half reasonable argument I heard to validate a No2AV vote was that it would make politicians within the main parties rather bland – they wouldn’t speak out as much because they could guarentte at least a 2nd preference vote if not the first, so they wouldn’t want to offend anyone in order to lose it. This also centralises the main parties a lot more, and removes radical and progressive politics from the mix.

But of course, this argument was never made by the No2AV campaign; firstly for a good reason – the argument would disengage a lot of people; and secondly for a bad reason – their campaign was based around the idea of the stupidity of voters, so thought this argument would just fly over their heads.

Perhaps the No2AV campaign did get something right then, the stupidity of voters.

I know that sounds purely like bitterness, and perhaps it is, but if a campaign that includes arguing that £250million of imaginary money could be spend on more amour for a solider than an AV vote; a campaign that says AV is confusing and most people wouldn’t understand it (and then deliberately made it confusing); a campaign that originally stated AV would let the extreme parties in; if a campaign like this can win over around 70% of those voting, then there must be an element of stupidity and ignorance.

I know there are some other reasons for people voting No2AV – a lot of people took it as a vote against Nick Clegg, a lot of other people voted No because they wanted PR instead of AV; but the biggest reason I believe a lot of people voted No is due to the campaign led by Yes2AV.

First off, most of those in the Yes2AV camp didn’t want AV, they wanted PR, it truly was a “miserable little compromise” for them. There wasn’t the passion for AV, the only thing uniting people was the desire to move away from FPTP, a system truly archaic in a democratic society.

This led to the campaign focusing away from why AV was the best system, to why the No2AV campaign were as vile as they were.

What a way to lose the referendum! Instead of convincing people why AV was much better than FPTP, their campaign got lost in petty political spats – take the leaflet that was put through doors saying that the BNP were campaigning for No2AV – it hardly had much else on why to vote for AV.

Nigel Farage from UKIP – a person and party I despise – actually said something I agreed with about the Yes2AV campaign. That was it was focused on the centre-left and dismissed being linked with any political grouping that was not. UKIP wanted to campaign for Yes2AV, and according to a YouGov poll, around 1 in 10 Conservative voters were considering voting for AV. So there was a small movement within the Right who wanted to support AV, but were seemingly denied doing so at the official press conferences or broadcasts.

Instead, the actual campaigning for the Yes vote was left to grassroots campaigners, and whilst I met some really good campaigners and there were some interesting videos posted in support of AV, there was a large number of ‘grassroots’ campaigners who helped facilitate the defeat of AV. These are the campaigners who were canvasing for Liberal Democrat votes in Portsmouth, campaigners (and in some cases Councillors) who refused to post Yes2AV leaflets alongside their own in the fear that the two campaigns being linked together would damage their (re-)election chances. If this attitude was multiplied across the country, then the Yes2AV campaign was failed by the very people who long for it’s introduction.

With the results coming through, there is one positive to come out of the Yes2AV/No2AV campaigns – that is the increased unified desire of people for a certain type of electoral change (and of course I don’t mean to AV), a change to a fairer more proportional representative system. Often in debates I attended the first thing I would hear is ‘of course we really would like to see a more PR system, but that’s not what is on the table’ (oh I wonder how AV lost…). If we could mobilise those people who want a PR system (and this desire seems to be across the political spectrum), then perhaps the next debate/vote/move to change the electoral system would not be lost until the next generation.

Most of the answers are focused on the idea that Lib Dems have never been in power, so people are not used to it or don’t think they have the relevant experience; and even that people voted Lib Dem as a protest vote!

Well, I think they are missing the point – there’s a bigger reason why the Lib Dems and not the Tories are suffering… It’s because people know what to expect from the Tories.

Traditionally the Tory vote is around 36%, they vote for them knowing that they are the ‘nasty party’, that they will cut cut cut and don’t really give a toss about the public sector and long for the dominance of the private sector.

However, Lib Dem voters are more centralised voters – even soft left voters. They don’t like what the Tories stand for and what they are doing but were appealed by what the Lib Dems were offering. So when the Lib Dems join the Tories in the coalition and appear to lose all their principles and everything they stand for then it’s obvious those voters are going to go elsewhere because it appears the Lib Dems do not have a backbone. And it’s more obvious these voters are going to go to Labour who are more closely aligned to the beliefs of Lib Dem voters than the Tories ever could.

But I suppose you won’t get many Lib Dems admitting this on TV as their party line is that the coalition is better with them in and that they are getting their way on some issues.

Of course, in military operations (and indeed shoot-outs as Bin Laden’s death has been reported as being caused by) there will be deaths – and there is sometimes little way to avoid killing the target in question.

However, in Bin Laden’s death there has been a mass ejaculation of celebration – spurred on by the illusion of justice.

I want to put this straight as it is in my head – death is not justice; not for anyone. Although this case is nothing of the sort, the death penalty has no place in this world.

If facing a court, Bin Laden would naturally be convicted of all crimes put against him, and then he’d be served a sentence. To me this is a fairer course of justice than death. Death is an escape route. Death is the ability to bypass conviction and sentencing. Death provides the criminal the chance to flee real punishment from their captors. And in more localised cases, death denies the opportunity for those convicted of crimes to repent, to rehabilitate, and to repay back a debt to a community or society it has done wrong to (and is often done wrong by).

Vengeance and the death penalty is action spurred by emotion; and when you are talking of someone’s life or the politics of a situation or country (or world), emotion should be nowhere near the table. Emotion can skew judgement calls, and is dangerous as it often derives from a situation where something is/has personally effected you. Emotion can sway a decision in a case close to your heart, then lead you to make a paradoxical decision in a identical case that you are not connected to. So the combination of emotion and someones life or national politics is often vicious, ill-thought and dangerous, and needs to be avoided at all costs.

Obama has said that the world is a safer place now Bin Laden has been killed. I beg to differ. To me the celebration of this morbid fact only goes to show that this world is just as dangerous as it was yesterday; and there will be some patriotic Americans (who with their belief of God on their side as they stamp their version of justice upon the world) who will be even more dangerous now that Bin Laden’s body is floating to the bottom of the sea.

1. We can hold our MPs to account, and they know it!
Fewer risks of save seats and of MPs having to work harder for our vote is going to increase the accountability of our MPs. AV will be an effective retort to those MPs who abuse the expenses system to claim back for Duck Ponds or porn.

2. Parties pushing their appeal to just floating voters will diminish.
At the moment, political parties know they are going to get a certain percentage of votes – their core voters. So they appeal for the floating voters – those who will vote, but don’t know who for. The problem this creates is that policies are created and directed purely at these floaters. Under AV, parties will have to remember their core voters, and ensure that policies not only appeal to them, but to the wider electorate.

3.  Parties will get to know what the mood of the country really is.
Personally, i’m sick of generalisations made in the media and by MPs about how i am feeling, and how society as a whole feels. AV will ensure that the real feelings of the electorate are known. A lot of people i know want to vote Green, but tactically it doesn’t make sense for them – perhaps there is more support for environmental issues then the voting turn out suggests. AV will ensure that even if the Greens (or other ‘fringe’ parties) don’t get elected, at least those in power/media know that the electorate care more about certain issues than is made clear under FPTP. (This argument is not one that can be applied to the BNP as those who would vote for them come from a different political dynamic to those who might vote for the Green Party.)

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Ultimately, a change to AV represents a massive change in the mindset of voting in this country. No longer will we be voting just for the winner we want or anticipate; but we will move to a democratic process that takes into account how we feel and what we’d like. I might even be as fickle enough to suggest that AV is like a marketisation of our democratic processes – but at least not a capital based one.

(Side note; i’m sick of No2AV’s lies and their brushing of the British public as thick. Conservatives (the biggest opponent to AV) are hypocrits for using it as the system to vote their own leaders, yet object to it because it will damage their support (this country isn’t Conservative!!). I also do not think AV is the best system to elect our MPs (i’ll write more about how i think it should be done some other time), but when given the choice between FPTP and AV, i know which one i choose for the reasons listed above.)

Oh, and one final thing – check out this blog post about AV from my housemate - http://aakashnaik.tumblr.com/post/4901875920/so-the-big-referendum-wait-come-back-it