Yet Another Political Panel Discussion

This week's City Circle was different from the usual one man show. This time, they decided to host a panel discussion regarding the "Muslim" vote and how we should use it. More info here.

Since this was my second political debate this week, I couldn't help but draw comparisons between the two. Although today's begun with a few standard fare (and pretty redundant in my opinion) points about how we should use our votes etc, things soon became more interesting than the one on Sonia's show.

It seemed that the main conclusions drawn was how democracy in this country is, well, crap. We're told how we shouldn't be apathetic and stuff but a few of the panellists made strong arguments of how it's pointless to discuss who we should vote for, since they're all the same anyway. Criticisms of our current process were made (especially by Javaid and Siddiqui), explaining how the executive is pretty redundant and how if you wanted to drive change the best way to do so would be to learn Tennis and become the PM's gaming buddy.

Other conclusions: That trends are showing less support for Labour this time around from the Muslims. Also Manzoor made a very good point about how we shouldn't be thinking about Muslim Bloc Voting in the first place. Shere Khan, the MCB representative, said that we should vote despite it being a mess - and that we shouldn't stop there. Oh and that audiences, on the whole, are a bit of a shambles!

The debate itself was way too short, but we covered so much more than we did in the two hours on Wednesday. I guess that the two things were aimed at different peoples, but I definitely found myself nodding and listening more in this one.

So, is this a new direction for me? Have I suddenly become politically active? Apart from these debates, I'm currently reading up on political theory and seeing democracy from an abstract perspective rather than just the news and events that I did before. So yes perhaps I am, but it may just be election fever and so phase out after the big day. I guess we'll see.