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To: maceng2 who wrote (770)	5/9/2005 11:15:17 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1417

We held our noses ... politics.guardian.co.uk Last month Polly Toynbee offered readers a novel way to register their anger against Tony Blair without risking boosting Tory fortunes. Hundreds of you took up her offer of free nose pegs. All we asked was that you send us a picture of them in action ... Monday May 9, 2005 The Guardian Hannah and Nina May join the Guardian's Operation Nose Peg This magnificent platoon of nose peg voters tells the story more eloquently than a thousand words. This was a stinking rotten election fought under shameful rules. Polls now find that as many as one in five voters such as these were forced to vote tactically for a party not of their choice, to keep out the party they hated most. What kind of voting system is that? Answering hundreds of angry emails from Labour voters saying "Never again", I found myself trying to persuade them not to throw away their votes to small parties and risk awakening the Tories from their grave. "Hold your nose and vote Labour," I urged them, "then organise for a fairer voting system." But many emailers wanted to protest at the injustice of having to vote for Tony Blair, so making some public demonstration seemed a necessary gesture. I went round to my local pound shop and bought a pack of 100 wooden clothes pegs and inked them in red with "Vote Labour". They flew off the bowl on my desk as soon as I offered them to readers. Whenever I urged a nose peg vote in my column, a hundred or so more requests came in until the shop ran out (plastic was just not the same). So G2 took up the campaign and had hundreds of pegs professionally printed on an industrial scale. Under our first-past-the-post system, sophisticated tactical thinking is essential - and this the nose peg - voters well understood. But the more Labour warned that Lib Dem protest votes would let the Tories in, the more Labour voters ignored this blindingly obvious truth, so gripped with anti-Blair fury they no longer cared if it delivered Michael Howard's racist campaign an apparent boost on the road back to power. Here's what happened. The Conservatives flatlined, dead on arrival with no increase in their national share of the vote - and yet the headline story is about all the seats they won and all the seats Labour lost. How did it happen? Three per cent of Labour voters switched to Lib Dem, and they did it in places where it could only help the Tories win. St Albans is the perfect example: Labour lost the seat when it dropped 11% of the vote. The Tories won it with a rise of just 2%. How? Because the Lib Dem vote in a seat they couldn't win rose by 7.5%. If only those voters had just worn the nose-peg ... Across the country it looks as if the only seats where the Tories genuinely won votes from Labour were those such as Ilford North, where race was the winning issue. How toxic is that for the future? Those who refused to nose-peg their way to the polls let this happen. This is the most unjust result in living memory, exposing this travesty of an electoral system at its most extreme for 80 years. The Tories have been cheated for years, just as Labour were before. The Lib Dems have been robbed the worst of all. So Labour's still huge majority rests on a shameful 36% of the vote, a mere 3% ahead of the Tories. That's why old tribalists such as John Prescott have blocked reform that Blair intended to deliver to Paddy Ashdown. Why should Labour care? Because one day - maybe sooner than later - what this roulette wheel does to the Tories now, it will do again to Labour. The true politics of this country have been hidden from view for too long. The fact is that the Tories represent 30% of the country while Labour and Lib Dem together represent some 60%. Without reform, that Tory 30% will come to rule as unjustly and with as little right or mandate as Labour can claim today. So join the fight for PR, sign up with www.makemyvotecount.org.uk and none of these people ever need wear a nose-peg again.

To: maceng2 who wrote (770)	6/12/2005 5:32:51 AM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1417

Time to throw some of these A/H's jail I think. Safety regulators claim the discharge could result in criminal charges. There have been so many cases where radioactive material has just been blatantly thrown away. It's a disgrace.. news.bbc.co.uk Nuclear plant to close for months The leak is thought to have began last August Part of the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield in Cumbria may be closed for months following a leak of highly radioactive material. The Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (Thorp) stopped production in April when the leak, which went undetected for up to eight months, was discovered. Sellafield's managing director, Barry Snelson, admitted to the BBC that the plant may remain closed for months. Safety regulators claim the discharge could result in criminal charges. Mr Snelson described the incident as "a stumble, not a fall". The accident happened when a narrow pipe fractured, spewing nitric acid onto the floor of a concrete-lined cell in the Thorp reprocessing complex. The acid contained 20 tonnes of uranium and 160kg of plutonium. It is thought the pipe may have fractured in August, but the leak was not discovered until eight months later due to a combination of a faulty gauge and human error. No staff were contaminated. Last week, Sellafield was told to improve the way it discharged low level radioactive waste water into the Irish Sea. Environment Agency inspectors issued an enforcement notice after finding its filtering system needed to be improved. Operators British Nuclear Group said no discharge limits had been breached and it was "committed" to improvements.