Way back last week, I recommended that the British Blogosphere organise around a particular candidate and seek to have them elevated to the House of Lords.
Why? Well, what kicked me into action was this column in the Times on 16th of February. England Expects quoted another section from it, but didn't post link. (As an aside, yeah, you're right, you aren't supposed to wait 10 days before write a blog post. So sue me )
Daniels writes the following:
We also live in a propaganda state. No one believes what a government official says any longer because he is assumed to be a liar, ex officio as it were, even when he is telling the truth. We assume that all official information is self-exculpating, self-congratulating or self-glorifying in intent, that all official speech is therefore spin or political advertising. Those of us who work in the NHS — not a small number — receive expensively produced glossy publications from our employers, full of photographs of happy, smiling workers meeting happy, smiling customers, at the very same time as drastic cuts must be implemented to meet burgeoning debts and there are patients in casualty who have been waiting for hours for admission. One is reminded of the Stalinist images of flaxen-haired peasant maidens serving at banquet tables groaning with food of every description that were disseminated to the world in the midst of one of the most severe famines in history.
For this insight alone, we need to give this man a national platform.