11 May, 2010

UK Elections 21: the end of democracy?

I go away for a few hours (unfortunately they’d found my stolen car, leaving me with more forms to fill in than if I had wanted to change my citizenship) and all hell breaks loose on the UK Politics front.

Clegg announces that he will start negotiations with Labour, and Brown announces he will resign.

Actually, what Brown in fact seems to have said is that he will oversee the negotiations and hope to have his successor in place by the Party Conference in September / October.

So, let’s see what is being proposed. Far from being a weakened or Lame Duck Prime Minster Brown’s position is greatly strengthened: his offer to resign confirms him in power for a few months while he steers the negotiations towards the policies of his favourite, Ed Balls, who will also make him Viscount Brown of Concorde, if they don’t give in to the LibDems on an elected second chamber. All this will have been explained to him by Peter Mandelson (‘Trusssst in me..’) as the knife went in between his shoulder blades.

As stated before, the parties in Britain are themselves coalitions, so there is a great difference between a set of policies drawn up by Brown / Balls and one drawn up by Harriet Harman or David Milliband. We vote for individual representatives in Britain but the Prime Minister will have a huge amount of patronage and influence. Think you’ll be asked who you want? Don’t make me laugh! It’s out of the hands of the little people now.

A deal will be done involving other parties, since the LibDems votes added to Labour’s are not enough. Their votes are for sale, and the new rulers will spend hundreds of millions of our taxes buying them. For the second time in a row Britain will have a Prime Minister who did not stand as Party Leader in the election, chosen by senior Labour Party people (‘Jussssst in me...’) and a few big smells in the unions.

Can you honestly say you are happy about this? Coupled with the stitch up will be the LibDems’ price, an alien voting system which nobody knows is what we want – less than a quarter of people voted for it. If we move to proportional representation we will have this sort of stitch-up every time.

Our democracy is being wrested from us by a few insiders. And where is the guardian of our constitution HM The Queen? Palace officials say she doesn’t want to get too close to the details of her people being shafted in case it embarrasses her.

We need another election, and we need it now.

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