Shakespearen Theatres on the Frontline

So the weather clearly loves me and gave us the sunniest evening in ages just when I was planning to go to the Globe (or at least it was when we went it. It somehow gets less sunny late at night for some reason...).

The Frontline was excellent.

Clearly the thing to do if you want to do a modern play at the Globe is( ... cut for mild spoilers )

In short everyone in the whole world should go and see it, and if you haven't already you've got 3 days.

The Frontline is showing at the Globe until 23rd May.

Oh, and somehow this post wouldn't be complete without a photographic homeage to the true star of the show: ( behind cut )

Reform, but no change

So, the speaker of the house of commons resigned yesterday.

Not that surprising really as the whole world seem to have wanted his head on a plate for the past few days.

I still don't get what all the fuss is about really though, so MPs are bending the rules for their own gains. erm... yes... what surprising about that?

OK, we've named a shamed some of them and some of them have resigned, but if you really want to purge government of rule bending then you'd need to get rid of the whole lot of them and then we wouldn't have a government...

Actually, on second thoughts that isn't a bad idea.

However, more seriously, there are far bigger issues with the way that the British government operates (like the fact that it seems to revolve almost entirely around whips and spin doctors for example, which really have to be the pinacle of bending the system to your own ends) that it seems silly to get bogged down in such petty squabbling. I'd be curious to know how cost of the time spent debating this issue (in terms of MPs salaries, etc) and external regulation compares to the amounts that were falsely claimed?

Most of the benefits I can think of which the government fund are done through means testing rather than on an expenses system, why not just do the same with this? After all, that's pretty much what it's claiming to be and it would be a lot simpler than this.

So, if we're going to have reform can we actually have a reform that will actually make a difference to the way this country's run, so we aren't stuck with the situation of just having 2 major parties saying how bad each other are and a few other fringe people who don't like either of them and actually get to the situation where MPs are more concerned with running the country rather than making each other look bad?