and more - Viva Lewes

4
EDITORIAL
As you will have gathered, the general election will be
fought on May 6th, with Lib Dem Norman Baker defending
the seat he has held since May 1997 against
an across-the-board array of other candidates.
Baker, of course, has been a columnist for this magazine
since its first issue, though in the spirit of democracy
he has opted not to contribute a piece this
month.
Instead he is one of six parliamentary
candidates who
have answered our call to respond
to eight questions we
have posed to them. In the
same spirit of democracy, after
much discussion, we also
asked a seventh candidate,
the BNP’s David Lloyd, if he
THIS MONTH’S COVER
wanted to take part in the debate. Either the BNP’s
South East press department failed to inform him of
our request, or he decided not to return our call.
Everybody at Viva Lewes has an opinion on who
they want to win the seat, though we wouldn’t presume
to try to persuade our readers, which way they
should vote. But we do urge them to vote. It was on
the field of battle at Lewes that Simon de Montfort
forced upon King Henry III the first ‘elected’ Parliament
(though it was a very different beast to today’s
House); since then much blood has been shed to
ensure that we live in a fair and democratic system,
whereby we are allowed to choose who governs us.
However much some might resent the recent corrupt
financial excesses of a large number of MPs, we feel
that not exercising the right to vote is tantamount to
wishing in a totalitarian system. Those who feel that
For this ‘election special’ issue’s cover, we decided
to do away with the frippery of images, to illustrate
the huge importance of the forthcoming poll. The
resulting façade pays homage to Time Magazine’s
famous 1966 ‘Is God Dead?’ cover, illustrating an
article inside raising concerns about the role of
God in an increasingly secularised society. Our
question ‘x marks the spot?’ is designed to raise a
number of possible issues about the election process.
Read what you will from it, whether it’s the
simple ‘who should I vote for?’ to a more complex
‘is the country’s voting system strictly democratic?’
via an anarchic ‘should I abstain, since they’re all
just agents of the global capitalist machine?’ Our
designer Katie Moorman put the image together,
choosing a ‘Trajan Pro’ font for the masthead, and
‘ARB 187 Moderne’ for the message. The ‘x’ is her
own: a number of us auditioned for the part, but
her lines were by far the most elegant. After some
discussion, Katie stuck to the original colour format
of Time’s classic. The red, we wish to point out,
should not be seen to be partisan in any way, shape
or form to the party which favours that colour for
its rosettes and leaders’ television-debate ties.