Having failed to do so even this year, First Past The Post now manifestly cannot deliver a Conservative overall majority. So why do that party's backbenchers not want to change to a system which would make possible the emergence of patriotic, morally and socially conservative parties? There would be such a party with Tory roots, and another with Labour roots. At least one of them would be in office all the time, and the Government would frequently be made up of the two of them together.
Meanwhile, no referendum on Scottish independence after all. The SNP plans to go into the next Holyrood Election as the only party promising such a poll. It said that last time. This time, the SNP's slogan should be "You Have Nowhere Else To Go", which is its attitude to its voters, such as there will be by then. Why doesn't the SNP get rid of Lord Salmond KT, the biggest Unionist of the lot? Because, in its heart of hearts, it, too, is a Unionist party, but finds it convenient to pick up separatist votes in pursuit of its real, and really very right-wing, agenda? Because it has no one with whom to replace him? Both, apparently.
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I know I'm going to regret asking this - and that all I'll get back will be a flurry of non sequiturs, assertions, and rude insults - but what evidence - hard, psepelogical evidence - do you have for your assertion that "at least one of them would be in office all of the time, and the government would frequently be made up of the two of them together"
ReplyDeleteHave you ever been to Britain? Have you ever had a conversation with the people here? Not the Westminster Village. Nor its feeder universities, which could be anywhere but just happen to be in this country, though not really of it. I mean Britain.
ReplyDeleteThese parties have not been permitted to contest elections for decades, but they were utterly dominant when they did, between them taking more than ninety per cent of the votes cast. That was a while ago now, but it was within living memory. It only stopped happening because the option of voting for them was withdrawn without popular consultation or consent.
Glad to see that this frightens you so much. It should. Bring it on.
Note how Labour and the Tories were very different from each other when they both patriotic and socially conservative. Plus almost everyone voted in those days. They stopped because they stopped being given anyone to vote for. Given back real electoral choice, huge numbers of people would exercise it. No wonder Jim is so scared.
ReplyDeletePrecisely so.
ReplyDeleteThey have AV in Australia, where the hung Parliament is an opportunity for the provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business, pro-Commonwealth, and ardently monarchist National Party to step out of the shadow of the metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian, make-the-world-anew, pro-American, and at least fifty per cent anti-monarchist Liberal Party.
Among other good things, and aided and abetted by the Alternative Vote, that could, should and would reawaken the spirit of Bob Santamaria and the Democratic Labor Party, which, in John Madigan, appears to have returned a Senator from Victoria. His party is not exactly the DLP of old, but it is the nearest and the most successful attempt to keep the flame burning. Now burning in the Federal Parliament, in fact.
In the House of Representatives, the balance of power is now held by three Independents who were formerly National Party members, and of whom the most prominent is Bob Katter, a pro-life and pro-family Catholic of Lebanese extraction whose father, predecessor and namesake was part of the ALP secession to the DLP before joining the Nationals, which his son has since left in order to pursue with dazzling electoral success his combination of protectionist agrarian socialism, moral and social conservatism, and scepticism about climate change hysteria.
Let us learn in Britain the lessons of Australia in 2010, and, we must hope, in the years to come. As someone once said: Yes, We Can.
Go to the patriotic, morally and socially conservative former heartlands of Old Labour and of working-class Toryism. That is where turnout has collapsed.
ReplyDeleteTo one in three, in some places. Is that "hard" enough for Jim? Of course it is. That is his problem with it. He desperately does not want them to have anyone to vote for.
ReplyDeleteTo confirm his own prejudices, he would love them to vote for the BNP. But they don't. Such BNP support as there is, comes from elsewhere.
Instead, they just don't vote at all. They have been disenfranchised. Nothing terrifies the likes of Jim more than the prospect that they might be re-enfranchised. From his own point of view, that terror is correct.
Roll on electoral reform.