Quizzes Tonight:

7pm – Argyle Bar (Cellar). Jackpot £60. Cheat answer: Duck  (pic round)

9pm – The Newsroom. Jackpot £100. Cheat answer: Thin Lizzy (music round).

First Thursday of the year and decent jackpots too. Hope to see you at the quiz tonight

Here’s the cheat clip for tonight’s music round at the Newsroom:

The youtube comments on the song argue over whether it was heroin or alcohol that killed singer Phil Lynott in 1985. Wikipedia says “he died of pneumonia and heart failure due to septicaemia… on 4 January 1986, at the age of 36.”

But the heroin obviously didn’t help.

POLITICS THURSDAY

Thursday is the day when I express my opinion on the crazy world of politics

This week’s point: ELECTIONS ARE NOT DEMOCRATIC. MPs ARE NOT REPRESENTATIVE.

We are told we have a “representative democracy“.

Members of the UK Parliament are currently paid over £77k a year. This is the basic salary, before expenses and any other income from writing books, chairing committees, property investments, after-dinner speaking and all that baloney.

The average UK salary is nearer £28k

So all MPs earn nearly three times as much as an average earner, and the multiples are intensified when you look at the people beneath that average.
An article on GQ gives these averages: retail assistants (£10,296), hairdressers and barbers (£10,019), cleaners (£7,919), waitresses (£7,554)

How can an MP have any clue at all what life is like for his or her constituents earning ten times less cash? How can they truly “represent” any class except their own?

I don’t think they do. I say they only represent their own class, the professional class, and that’s what parliament is: it’s a talking shop for the well-to-do.

The only thing that could change this is either if MPs were paid the national average, or if parliament was chosen in the same way that juries are chosen: by random selection.

If the last option sounds mad, it’s not without precedent. Elections are a new way of doing democracy, random selection stretches back to Ancient Greece and, in a limited fashion, Ireland is doing it now

Our current political systems are broken, they have created a professional political class that naturally gives first service to the wealthy and treat the rest of us as an afterthought.

Get rid of MPs. Get rid of elections.

Disagree? Come and argue with me at the quiz.

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See you tonight

Cheers,

Dr Paul

By the way: Dr Paul is on Twitter and Dr Paul also is on instagram. Enjoy.