Matt's Gubbins

Desperately seeking George

I've just signed up at hearfromyourmp.com - apparently, they'll hassle my MP for me and not only encourage him to inform me of how he is representing my interests, but also promote debate via an online forum.

This sounds like a great idea - the various mySociety projects and sites like theyworkforyou.com are making it easier for us to hold our political representatives accountable and allowing us to easily see what they are up to.

Personally, I have the dubious pleasure of being represented by George Galloway. Now I felt pretty let down by the government over Iraq, but I really didn't agree with fighting a general election based on one issue. Surely representing a constituency of over 80,000 people is more complicated than taking a firm stance on the Iraq war? Deciding to fight that one issue in the most overwhelmingly Muslim constituency in the country didn't strike me as a particularly honourable thing to be doing either (and remarkably patronising too?). Even then, he only just pipped the incumbent "Blair Babe", Oona King, by less than a thousand votes. At the time, he had only attended 6% of parliamentary votes (according to theyworkforyou.com). To be fair to him, he's upped his average a bit since then, but has been majoring on connected issues to Iraq, such as ID cards and the prevention of terrorism bill. He's pretty good at not going against party whips, but I guess that's pretty easy when you're the only MP in your party.

So I'm not a big fan of George, but I really hope he responds to the emails that hearfromyourmp.com send him and involve his constituents with his work in the commons. Hey - its all on the web - with a laptop and a wireless connection, he can be responding even when he's showing off his vocabulary in the US Senate.

I'm pretty excited by the possibilities of using the web to broaden the reach of democratic processes, and really hope plenty of people sign up for these kind of services. With such high levels of voter apathy, and the government ignoring protests when they do happen, let's hope these kind of projects make a difference. I had a very loud, drunken argument with a friend the other night, who was saying that there really is nothing we can do any more, so we shouldn't even try. No matter how much I respect him, I really hope he's wrong...

Just eat it, shut up and be grateful

I'm getting increasingly uncomfortable with the way our culture is fetishising food. Both Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, both charming and intelligent men, are currently on our televisions lionising "back to basics" cooking - either Italian "peasant" food or smallholder's lifestyle as an experiment. Yet the media coverage and tie-in merchandising is essentially taking working-class rural values and packaging them for consumption by the urban middle-classes as a lifestyle choice.

Our local Tescos has a long aisle of meat, with loads of chickens on sale for about three quid. All the legs of those chickens either have evidence of nasty burns, or have had really offensive marks snipped off them before they are packaged. Cartons of chicken stock take pride of place next to these sorry carcasses.

Not only are we subjecting these poor animals to miserable, tortured lives in our efforts to get cheaper produce, but we're not even respecting them enough to use every bit of them when we cook. How many households take the meat off a three-quid chicken, chuck the bones away without boiling them up because they've already got a carton of stock in the fridge, and then settle down to watch Jamie and Hugh pandering to their aspirational leanings?

At what point did eating a decent-tasting chicken become comparable with buying a BMW or going on holiday to the Dominican Republic as a sign of affluence and suburban one-upmanship?

New Beginnings

Having made a number of abortive attempts before, I have finally decided to bite the bullet and try blogging in earnest. I have always had trouble with it before - maybe its the discipline of having to sit down and post stuff (I was never a good diarist as a teenager) or lack of confidence that anyone would be interested in what I have to say.

However, running your own business is a pretty interesting thing to be doing anyway, so I thought it was time to give it a go. Not sure how it will end up - I'd like to think that I'll use the blog for more than just recording business experiences, but we'll just have to see. The key thing is, this time I'm doing it for myself, and not some kind of approval-seeking exercise from the fickle blogerati. Here goes...