Taking part on the BBC's election night coverage tomorrow. What time do you need me till? I asked, naively. We'll we go on till 6am. This on the day that new research shows folk who miss out on sleep die early....
Workload is quite heavy at the Sunday Times this week as you might imagine, Lassie may be quiet for a couple of days. May try twittering from behind the scenes at the BBC on election night, if my dodgy blackberry doesn't give up too early....
In the meantime, my eye was caught be this piece on which parties best understand devolution and how it works. Alan Trench at Devolution Matters has carried out a detailed analysis of the manifestos of every party for an Edinburgh University Working paper. Alan has tried to assess how well each party - including the SNP and Plaid - understands what devolution means, and how it translates into all policy proposals (rather than just the ones about constitutional matters). Interesting reading for true political junkies...and some of the scores might surprise.
Good luck with the show tonight. Whatever the outcome, the BBC have major questions to answer. And these questions are linked with the decisions on who leads the country. Apparently civil servants will decide what happens in the event of a hung parliament and their main stated aim is to avoid difficulties for the monarch. These good folks - and the monarch - are unelected. So an unelected broadcaster (paid out of public funds) provides coverage that is inadequate to Scotland's needs (according to most objective observers). This produces a result in which another bunch of publicly-funded unelected people determine what the voters have decided. You couldn't make it up.
Posted by: John | May 06, 2010 at 10:46 AM