They're not voting because...
- The latest example of Tony Blair's loathsome...
The latest example of Tony Blair's loathsome hypocrisy is his simultaneous advocacy of a spurious politics of 'choice' and his threat that the voters of Britain face a simple 'choice' on Thursday between a Labour government and a Conservative one. A system of proportional representation will go some way towards encouraging me to vote at the next General Election. Hopefully by then I won't have to choose between one party who woos me (to use Tony's metaphor) by insulting me and another party who woos me by insulting immigrants, refugees and their own intelligence.
Caring more about the death of 100,000 Iraqis than I do about education policy does not make me 'decadent': furthermore, a government that has coated Kosovo and Iraq with depleted uranium has absolutely no moral ground on which to stand when complaining about nuclear proliferation.
And even if this election were purely fought on home administrative issues, tell me which party I'm talking about when I describe the party led by a man who has made repeated attacks on public sector workers, who advocates increased private involvement in education and health provision, and who has advocated the abolition of habeas corpus? Who represents the greatest threat to the secularisation of a country badly in need of greater separation of church and state?
You know who. I live in a safe Labour seat occupied by an anti-war MP with a strong record of voting against the government. I don't have a problem with him, except inasfar as I cannot understand why he still belongs to the Labour party. But when the UK bombed a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan in 1998 to help Bill Clinton deflect attention from his impeachment trial, I swore I'd never vote for these corrupt murderers again. We need an electoral system that allows people to vote meaningfully for parties that wish to represent them, and we need parties with coherent constituencies with whom they are willing to work on developing plans for decent and principled government. We have neither. It is the collective responsibility of all self-respecting MPs in the next parliament to collaborate on delivering at least the first and ideally both of these requirements.
written 4th May 2005
Responses
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Jax replies: Try voting for a party that would consider proportional representation. Like the Lib Dems.
I think they'd be pretty keen on the idea.You seem very keen on the idea as well, so much that you wont even vote?
written 5th May 2005
So is that your plan on how we change it? I don't think that's going to work.... -
Anonymous replies: Hi Jax,
written 5th May 2005
in my last paragraph, I point out that I don't have a problem with my local MP except inasfar as he still belongs to the Labour party. The Lib Dems are deformed by the same multi-constituency incoherence as Labour, seeking to reconcile a similar mix of free market Gladstone / Thatcherites, social democrats and disaffected leftists. I have little respect for them as a party, and while they may have conveniently forgotten how long they sat on the fence before coming out against the war, I haven't - on the two million march, some Lib Dem supporters were so embarrassed by this that they tore the party logo off their banners.
You ask if I have a plan to change the electoral system. That's a fair question, but you're assuming that I have any _hope_ that politicians could ever be persuaded to take the issue seriously. Maybe if two million marched on London demanding it?
