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Good evening all,

This week has been quite something! With a closely-fought Country President (CP) elections a few days ago between Magic Hereos and Ayame Crocodile dividing brothers across our nation, the former claiming victory in a month that will surely test any CP, there's been a lot of happenings that have directly affected our Congress, our system and possibly our future.

The New "Boss"
With BigAnt controversially surviving his whole term, Magic Hereos was originally going to be running somewhat unopposed in this month's elections being heavily supported by a band of TUP's most experienced players who would keep him from making mistakes. However, a few days before the elections Ayame Crocodile (with a consortium of players from various other parties supporting him) began running in the race for the position as a coalition, but failing to get the key support of eUK's second largest party ESO seems to have cut those dreams marginally short of success for this month.

Magic Hereos has since been very busy setting about the changes which he aimed at in his manifestos pre-election.

Changes of Practice
In my previous article I detailed what each Ministry's function is and how to get involved. Since then, the job of Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA), as part of our new CP's manifesto and intent, has been changed slightly to be a function of Congress. In order to lead up the new-model Ministry nominations for a leader of Congress and therefore the MoHA were taken and voted on and so the new leader of Congress from about an hour ago until the next Congress elections (I think, it could be until the next CP elections as details have been a little scarce) will be Scott Parsons who I'm sure will be grand at the job.

With this new model MoHA, you can expect our active Congress members, mostly those whom I pointed out in my last article, to be more vocal amongst our own population with their new task of ensuring we get the best out of our people, more easily accessible methods to teach new players the basics of the game and why they should stick around, and also innovating new ways to increase player retention in our nation. Surely there will be nobody better for this job than those elected by the very people who appreciate their input! Expect greatness!


The NHS
Another big change being discussed this week is the possibility that we could privatise the in-game NHS system in order to cut down on national expenditure and increase it's efficiency. What does that mean?

The NHS is a scheme setup by previous administrations in order to give support to new players who have yet to establish their own businesses and means to support theirselves, by funding them with food to fill their energy bars freely on a daily basis. The NHS Military Unit is an innovation on the original "Sign up" version of the NHS (which has still been functional recently). Other Military Units (MU's) generally offer communal jobs whereby somebody takes a job and works for minimum wage but is paid instead with weapons (with varying amounts and schemes per MU) and therefore need less subsidies than the NHS which is paid for entirely from the treasury accounts.

The intention to privatise it comes around from the lack of returns (effectively, the lack of new players blossoming from donations) brought about by the system as it stands and the fluctuations in the in-game economy brought about by a number of reasons, making our national income generally decrease bringing reasons to cut down on expenditure schemes. Giving the NHS to someone who will fund and run it will remove the expenditure from the government and onto someone else who will then take on the responsibility of running the scheme and funding it.

There has been support to do so, since the scheme itself is not as competitive as party-level MU's and schemes in some respects, but also has some objections brought about by both the desire for the government to keep the responsibility of looking after new players and the unwillingness to leave our future citizens in the hand of someone non-elected and without real responsibility in our country. The debate continues!

Let us in Congress know if you have opinions on the NHS, we're approachable!


Allies
As you can see, we've renewed our pact with New Zealand who will continue to be our fortuitous allies for a while longer! We're happy to have such a reliable and friendly ally on our list!

And finally, for this week!
As usual I want to praise someone, so this week I am praising one individual who I feel is a genuine good guy, congressman and all-round star! Everyone's friend (and I owe him):

DaJoXTer!

Don't forget, if you want to talk to any of your Congress or fellow eUKers at any time you can pop onto our national IRC channels, which can be accessed by following our forums (click me!)! It's easy to get in touch, you could even just mail concerns or queries in-game, too. Each and every one of us has a part to play in making our national team better.

Homework for this week: Send me suggestions for Congress' anthem!

Be cool, stay cool!

LLC