Saying that…

Brian and I just had an excellent day with Ed Vaizey, MP for Wantage and Didcot. Conservative. Brian met him during the course of this whole STFC funding crisis thing (Newsnight piece here) and really liked him a lot. Ed came out to CERN to visit ATLAS and CMS, have a look at the tunnel, meet some of the VIPs as well as loads of the British scientists working at CERN. He asked tons of questions and was really into it all. In fact, by the time I got him, he’d already blogged about it! Yes, he has a blog.

He was such a nice, funny and NORMAL guy that I thought, ‘I’d vote for him.’ Now, I’ve not had a look at his voting record and I’d expect there are TONS of things we’d probably disagree on, so before anyone jumps on me saying, ‘But he voted for this/He didn’t vote for that’, I’m talking about him as a person rather than as a politician. He’s an interesting, down-to-earth, *intelligent* person who was just, well, normal. I genuinely liked him. I’d much rather have someone I can relate to, someone who I can imagine in my group of friends, in government than people who I don’t understand at all. I mean, I genuinely can’t imagine sitting down for lunch or dinner with Gordon Brown and actually being able to have a normal conversation about anything.

As for disagreeing with his politics, well, I think the only politician I seem to mainly agree with is Obama anyway- I tend to agree with the Democrats most often (I can’t think of when I’ve really disagreed with them), I agree with the Republicans almost never, I agree with Labour about half the time, Conservatives half the time, Lib Dems… I think the last I heard from them I thought, ‘WTF?!’ I don’t even agree with Brian on politics 100% of the time. So, I will reiterate, I’ve not looked at Ed Vaizey’s voting record, so there may certainly be things we disagree with… Though I expect if there was anything I particularly disagreed with (I’m socially very liberal, so, on the whole, meddling in people’s personal lives is something I disagree with, for example), then I expect I could spend an hour with him, arguing, and he’d have the proper understanding of the issue. ;)

Maybe it’s best that I can’t vote in the UK.

I was particularly keen on the fact that Ed is the Shadow Minister For Culture. I’m hoping that he starts to think like Brian and I and understand that Science should be an integral part of popular culture. Maybe then we’ll stop seeing people on tv joyously BRAGGING that they are clueless about science. Can you imagine a BBC Breakfast presenter being *proud* of the fact that they have never seen a Shakespeare play or ‘don’t get’ Beethoven or that Francis Bacon’s paintings are ‘way over their heads’? Of course not. Amongst the ‘educated classes’ being knowledgeable about the arts is a given. Being seen to scorn, dislike or, most worrryingly, be seen to be too stupid to understand science is almost a point of pride.

What the hell is that all about?!