My mate Luke Sorba is brilliant. Brain the size of a planet, knows all the things, great improviser (and fine teacher thereof), and also really hot on politics. Engaged, involved, and doing rather than just talking.
He posted this on facebook this afternoon and I am sharing it here because now I can tweet it WIDELY. Because he is right.

Caught Russell Brand on BBC radio again being given air time to denounce voting because it makes no difference which party is in power. True, it doesn’t if you are a jet-setting multi-millionaire who marries American pop stars. If your kids go to a state school, you are on the waiting list for a house, you rely on state-funded social care for your elderly parent or don’t want your local A & E shut down, need a bank loan to start a business, care about investment in renewable energy or where our forces are sent to fight, need legal aid to fight deportation, don’t want the BBC license fee scrapped, want to regulate the finance sector, are experiencing fuel poverty, your local street is used as a rat run so you don’t let the kids out, you fancy the libraries, parks and leisure centre staying open, you are interested in the age of consent or same sex marriage, immigration, staying or leaving the EU, benefit caps, pensions reform for an ageing population, the number of police in the street, data privacy, dangerous dogs and countless other issues from the mundane such as the frequency of rubbish collection to the big picture stuff such as bank bailouts, HS2 and interest rates… then it does matter. Of course there is one issue that Brand does want to engage politicians with – decriminalising recreational drugs. I guess its the one thing money can’t buy… legally. Brand has a big brain but lives in a tiny, tiny world. He is not a national treasure, he is a wanker. (And reminds me of that other ignorant, completely out-of-touch celebrity whose lazy consonants give the false impression he is salt of the earth – Michael Caine – who is utterly apolitical until the higher rate of taxation threatens to affect his personal life style.)