Since time immemorial, ministers have travelled around the place in large cars (save only McDowell, who just turned into a bat and flew, which is Carbon Neutral); this is because ministers cannot in fact walk. As of a few days ago, the media has noticed this, and latched on to it with a fervour. They point to the wonderful example of David Cameron, who has forced his MPs into taking public transport (a horrifying concept; imagine sitting next to Alistair Darling on the bus!), which is absolutely the most wonderful thing any politician did ever.
Why, if we can only make our politicians take public transport, assuming we had such a thing, then we could be just as good as Cameron's Britain! It's at least got to be worth a couple of basis points on the bond market, right? It's certainly far more interesting to write angry letters to the paper about than NAMA, which is quite frankly getting rather old, and no-one really knows what it is, anyway.
Really, I suspect there's someone deep in the bowels of Fianna Fail headquarters whose job it is to think up really stupid stuff to get the media annoyed about, to distract it from less interesting matters like the economy.
Well, to be fair, taking public transit might make them do things to make it actually function in a sane way. I don't like Cameron, but I like that he did that. Bloomberg, the NYC mayor, also takes the subway and The Villagers (US journalists in DC) find this endlessly amazing.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I no longer blame politicians for taking advantage of stupid journalists and stupid voters. I blame the media for doing a crap job and I blame progressive politicians for not doing the same thing. Oh, and progressive voters who get the vapours when progressive politicians do play to the stupid media and the stupid journalists.