Paxman v Brand. The Newsnight Interview.

I have huge respect for both but I’ve rarely seen Paxman reduced to fallacious arguments to berate an opponent. Then again Brand needs flesh on the bones of his own. Here’s some. Back in the seventies I painstakingly counted constituencies won by the non-voters. They would have had a healthy majority in parliament, a fact that went totally unnoticed. We’d had a successful bi-polar democratic election and A out of A and B won. Or maybe it was B I can’t remember. So then as now non-voters, as Paxman suggests, made themselves irrelevant. But there must come a point where non-voting become relevant, where the remaining few percent of voters look like the paltry unrepresentative efforts of a bunch of family and friends. Only then will it be seen as an undeniable landslide for change. Brand scores an equaliser. He runs up-field attacking the failures of the existing system to address all our major problems and delivers a weak socialist cross into the box. Like voting, Brand continues to maintain the positivity of zero action, which for every good protestant seems an anathematic contradiction. 2:1 to Paxman. We know far more about human reactions than in socialisms day. We are a cooperative species where each individual, for purely personal reasons wishes to be the best they can be. Behind every individual who apparently disproves this axiom you’ll find an externally inflicted frustration that they can’t be so. It’s the system’s failure to provide its population with the facilities necessary to overcome these personal frustrations that will reduce socialism and capitalism to history’s failed attempts. Crime, finance, domestic violence, obscene wealth, power and wars all stem from some form of personal frustration. Brand failed to score this vital goal by not forming the substance of this new paradigm; that his positivity of zero action is not laziness nor dreamery but the positive actions required to allow things to happen, to allow, stimulate and support each individual to become what they want to be, the best they can be as an individual and a member of our cooperative species, irrespective of wealth, position, power and influence. Today I facilitated a mixed ability team of adults with social difficulties. Should have been there, they scored the second equaliser.