Monday 4 February 2008

On Commission

The preposterous Lord Falconer, made Lord Chancellor for no reason whatever except that he had been Tony Blair's flat-mate, wants yet more powers for the Electoral Commission. In return for an annual fee (yes, a fee!), that Commission's approval is already required for any political party's name, logo, constitution (including aims and objectives), Leader, and sources of funding. If it just says no, then it just says no, you can't have a party because we, an arm of central government, do not approve of it. By all acounts, it says no routinely. What sort of country have we become?

11 comments:

  1. "By all accounts, it does so routinely"

    This is strange. The Electoral Commission makes no reference to the proportion of requests it turns down on its webpage. And I can't see any webpages / blogs of groups who have tried to become official parties but been turned down. You'd expect all of these politicaally active groups to make a fuss about this on the web - as I'm sure the BPA would if it were turned down.

    Could you please provide a link or citation for your assertion that the EC turns down parties? You see, otherwise it just sounds like a bit of an unsupported assertion.

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  2. You don't have your ear to the ground. I do.

    Of course I'm not going to name people on the Internet!

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  3. You are normally quite happy to make libellious comments about people - what is stopping you this time? A genuine question!!

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  4. I've never libelled anyone. If I have, then they are free to sue. I bet they won't. You seem to be taking the Neil Fleming (if you don't know then, trust, me, you don't want to) view that the slightest - purely factual - criticism is somehow defamatory.

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  5. How right you are. The Electoral Commission has completely ignored all the Labour, Tory and Lib Dem sleaze of recent years and concentrated on killing off Ukip on a technicality while rejecting outright applications to set up parties based on mainstream opinion in the country at large. Its sole purpose is to prevent the emergence of real alternatives.

    Fringe parties (BNP, assorted Communists, that sort of thing) are OK. So are joke parties. So are purely local parties, up to a point. But serious threats to the cartel are persecuted out of existence. Usually they are just strangled in the cradle.

    As for the suggestion that you libel people, that's because your targets are unused to being addressed by anyone they can't sack, evict, deport, imprison, take away the children of, or whatever. That's the background of all our present and future politicians these days. Literally since childhood they have had no other relationship with anyone outside their own caste, so they can't even conceive of anything else.

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  6. "unused to being addressed by anyone they can't sack, evict, deport, imprison, take away the children of, or whatever. That's the background of all our present and future politicians these days. Literally since childhood they have had no other relationship with anyone outside their own caste, so they can't even conceive of anything else."

    You have met Fleming, then?

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  7. Maybe he's met Jon?

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  8. They are never going to reject the BPA and prove your point now are they David. You have always been a sly old dog and never afraid to get your retaliation in first.

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  9. But you are not obsessed with the poor lad are you!

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  10. Who? No one named here is either "poor" or a "lad".

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