Saturday 28 November 2009

Daytripper

Beautiful weather in Bristol today, bit chilly but lovely and sunny. I, however, am on the train on the way to London, so the weather is a tad annoying because I'll miss the campaigning today and it's bound to pour down for our session on Sunday. (As an aside: one of the arguments that people put for PR is that in seats with 'healthy' majorities, voters get taken for granted. To those people I'd say look at the work being done by candidates such as Stella Creasy in Walthamstow, and by MPs such as Andrew Gwynne, who has what a colleague described as 'a stonking majority' in Denton and Reddish, but is still out on the campaign trail every chance he gets. As he and I were heading north and west on the trains back to our constituencies on Thursday, there was a telephone canvassing session going on at Gwynne Towers, with ample quantities of food supplied by Mrs Gwynne for the volunteers who judging from the tweets, thoroughly appreciated it. Next week it's her speciality, chilli.

I'm coming back to Bristol this evening. This is just a day trip to take part in the Visionaries: Youth in High Definition event at the BFI, for a discussion based on some short films based by young people with the help of TrueTube, on topics including gangs, knife crime, alcohol, drugs, sex, boredom, stereotyping and job opportunities. The films can be seen on www.truetube.co.uk, they're called "Turf War", "Who's 2 Blame", "Stereotyped" and "Hope for Change". I'm on a panel with Brooke Kinsella, Richard Taylor (father of Damilola), Michael Mansfield QC, Tim Loughton (Tory spokesperson on such matters) and Matt Sellwood, a Green Party bod.

I'm wondering if the election broadcast film is still showing at the BFI. A couple of colleagues went to see it Wednesday night. If so, I might pop in and see that while I'm there.

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