Another election week, a few historic local pictures, well who knows I don't until I write it.

 Here in the bookshop I have finally finished modifying the craft book section and am mulling over which section to do next.

here is the link to new book acquisitions 

All priced and put out for sale.

Old picture wise I think they should mostly expand fairly well when clicked on, I hope you haven't seen them all before, I enjoyed them today.

A few notes on this week's election as I try to make my mind up who to vote for.

So much related to politics is pretty obvious and so much said about it fairly crazy.

For about the last hundred years in the UK we have had a fairly straightforward democracy.

It was The First World War that gave the vote to ordinary people, before WW1 the only people allowed to vote were essentially men who could prove they were well off. A major factor that was the catalyst for change was the huge contribution ordinary men and women made towards WW1. My grandfather fought in the trenched and my grandmother worked in a military aircraft factory making altimeters as an example.

The 1918 Representation of the People Act changed us to a conventional democracy. When the Act passed into law, on 6 February 1918, it wasn’t just about women’s suffrage. As well as eight million women, more than five million men suddenly became eligible to vote too.

Since that time UK politics has been a two horse race between Labour and the Conservatives, the first Labour government being 1924. Ramsay MacDonald: First Labour Prime Minister, 1924 and 1929-1931.

On the whole the business of switching between Labour and Conservative governments with coalition for WW2 seems to have served us fairly well, as countries go this is one of the better ones to live in.

At the moment the press seem to be saying some other arrangement would work although they seem a vague about what that would be. The leaders of both parties mostly being presented as both incompetent and radical. I think the idea here is to make us embarrassed about the running of our democracy.

Due to a sort of inexplicable mess, David Cameron allowed the BREXIT referendum without first coming up with some sort of BREXIT arrangement that was viable and deliverable. Neither the Labour Party nor the Conservative party have managed to come up with a plan for the UK leaving the EU which anyone much thinks would work. I guess the proper way forward here would be for UKIP to have organised this but I don't think they won any seats in the last general election so there weren't any UKIP MPs to develop a parliamentary plan. 

However you look at this we are in a bit of mess, and while our MPs argue about what to do we still have to hold European elections and this Thursday I will vote fore some candidate like I always do in elections.

At the moment I think that our main issue is the environmental one, recently I have become particularly interested in air pollution because of plans for an airfreight hub at Manston and Port Ramsgate.

To put this into proportion, at the moment 64,000 people are killed in the UK by air pollution every year, compared say with 700,000 UK soldiers killed in The First World War another and more difficult aspect with air pollution is that it also leads to the early onset of dementia, to my mind more difficult to be brave about than just dying.

My understanding is that there is an element of proportional representation in the EU elections, so at the moment I am still considering voting for The Green Party, in this election I think the main thing is to be clear about the message I send to the government. I don't want to come out under the PM's negotiated deal, which seems to offer the worst of both worlds, I don't want to come out under no deal, because I have a small business and wish it to remain solvent. I do however want to be clear about environmental issues, our government needs to wake up and take some action.

 Fake news and trying to influence the political direction of Europe is interesting, here is the link to the European debunking website