The Last Voter in England?

Thursday 15 November, and Election fever grips the Land. Three cheerful tellers sit behind a table in our village hall like the wise old monkeys they probably are, as the People Decide. The girls and boys in political rosettes have stayed away, I notice. Or maybe the Three Wise Ones are political, but hiding it in the interests of Police Impartiality.

The UK Police and Crime Commissioner race is on, and so’s the Kettle.

This is British democracy at its glorious best and awful worst.

I'm a congenital Voter, Me.

Like them or hate them, you can't complain about them if you didn't bother to elect them, say I.

There's enough mitteleuropean blood in my veins from my parents’ generation to appreciate a country where you can vote.

The more of this sort of thing we do, the more we may get a taste for it and build a more participative intelligent democracy. That’s my fantasy, anyway.

So why are some 80% of the voters likely to sit this one out?

Well, for a start, nobody really knows what the hell it’s supposed to be about. In the bad old days you elected a council, and they put people on a governance authority for your local police. It was a bit of British great and good stitch up, but by and large it worked. Jolly PC49’s gave kiddies the time of day, the beer stayed warm, England lost the Test Match, and old maids cycled safely to early communion through autumn mists.

Many suspect this whole thing ain’t broke, and this is just £75m going on another lame stunt by our leaders to convince us they believe in democracy and so should we. They could be right, but...

For seconds, there's little to argue about from a strictly party political point of view, until someone is crazy enough to start a political party dedicated to sacking police officers, penny pinching myopia, mind-numbind levels of bureaucracy, letting fraudsters get away with it, and rewarding Thieves with knighthoods.

No party believes in that prospectus. But they all implement it anyway. So where’s the choice? And why have a Party political beauty contest about it?

Finally, few of the candidates are known across the area they will represent. High deposits and the lack of a mailshot are said to have stacked the odds against independents before they got out of the starting gate. So perhaps this is a referendum on whether you want to vote for party candidates or independents. For all we know some of both are completely crazy, but what do we know? They are all going to reduce bureaucracy, put more officers on the beat, catch crooks, save money and generally make us feel good. They’ll get us Police who are Judge Dredd, George Dixon and Inspector Morse rolled into one.

So what’s not to like? Vote early, vote often, as they used to say in northern Ireland. I managed the first, and felt pretty damn smug about it for at least ten minutes. Next step in my democracy rollout — a directly elected General Synod.

Is it the Sun wot will win it?

Brown doomed. Official. The Sun has decided to support the Conservatives for the next election. For overseas readers, the Sun is a British end-of-the-pier newpaper that can be good fun and surprisingly cleverly written, the front page of which occasionally captures a national mood crudely but effectively. It has a capacity to annoy all sorts of people, but can be immensely entertaining, if rather right wing, sexist, and celebrity-obsessed.

Much wry comment could be made about the Sun. Some say it’s only what most other UK newspapers except the Financial Times really are, but they are far too snobbish to take responsibility for being as crude and vulgar. The Sun is generally good natured. It also seems to believe its readers are people who don’t think for themselves and will therefore follow its advice, sheeplike, about how to vote. As much as I’d like this not to be the case, it may be right.

Like the rest of Fleet Street, it probably overclaims its readership in order to prop up its dwindling advertising income, but they all do, and business is business. So come in, Gordon Brown, your time is up. A brave face was put on this yesterday by Labour politicians, of course, but according to conventional wisdom the writing is now on the wall.

I’m not sure, myself, that the Sun does win or lose elections. The Sun, historically speaking, trims its views pragmatically to match whoever it thinks will win. I suspect it follows as much as leads public opinion. And, of course, in these days of collapsing newsprint, it will be interesting to see exactly which part of fractured public opinion it follows. My hunch, for the little it’s worth, is that the age profile of people who actually vote could be weighted towards elderly. I rather doubt the Labour party has the will or the wherewithal to connect with voters under 30, so the election may well be decided by the kind of people who still read the Sun. I wouldn’t be so sure about the 2015 election. On the day the value of UK advertising on the internet overtook the value of TV advertising, it may be the writing is also on the wall for the Sun. Could Gordon Brown thus get the last laugh after all, but too late to save his government?

BNP MEP’s: bring on the clowns?

What about the BNP’s success in the Euro Elections? It’s a wakeup call for all “Hampstead Liberals” (pictured here on the BNP website). Christianity’s inherent Catholicity, an item in the Creed, flies in the face of the whole BNP deal. Their ideology contradicts a fundamental moral law — God hath made of one blood all nations upon earth. The Christian vision of heaven, all nations, kindreds and languages gathered together, is a good description of BNP hell — the last kind of place the BNP would want to wake up and find themselves.

In these terms perhaps the European Parliament could be one of the next most hellish experiences a BNP Man, like this young BNP organiser pictured to the Right, can have, this side of the grave. Our new model BNP MEP’s may just order in a crate of Watney’s Red Barrel and sit it out, or the interactions could be educatonal. We shall see.

They have much to learn. Take a statement of Nick Griffin’s:

From Northern Ireland to Bosnia to Rwanda, sooner or later the majority of multiracial, multicultural societies fall apart in bloodshed. There may be a few, like Singapore, where with an extremely authoritarian state it works for a while, but the lesson of history is that it tends not to.

One longs to shout out the obvious reply: “Nick, there is a nation of 300 million, the largest economy in the world, a global superpower that attributes its success to immigrants building a multiracial multicultural society. E Pluribus Unum. They think it works for them, and they haven’t done badly on it.”

But there’d be little point. BNP fascism only works on a gut level. Will Cuppy observed years ago, “Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood, and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.”

The excellent Channel 4/YouGov BNP Voting intentions analysis shows that, quoting Marx on Religion, BNP ideology is “the sighing of the oppressed creature” if not exactly the heart of a heartless world. People, mostly old style Labour voters, feel frustrated, disenfranchised, anxious and fearful. Fascist ideology, today as in the thirties, taps into anger and offers some kind of emotional release.

The disconnection of the Labour party from its own roots under Blair, Sun style pop Xenophobia, and disillusionment with parliamentarians, produced this result. Politicians must listen, not only pragmatically, but in a way that reconnects with this country’s historic Christian value base, or things can only get worse.

Finally, and this is cause for profound anxiety not complacency, we need to remember the BNP vote actually went down at this election. The BNP got in because Elections go on the proportion of votes cast. The Labour vote collapsed, and unprecedented numbers of voters stayed at home. The answer, as well perhaps as superficial solutions like Internet voting, is for our politicians to understand why, and address big issues about themselves, their values and their working practice. People look to their leaders to cast a vision, to enact compassion, to model Stability expressed in Christian values and so inspire trust and hope. If they’re not getting these things from the present lot, they will look elsewhere, even to clowns like the BNP.
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BNP:Back to the future?

As Britain burns up with European Election Fever, or not, Some Grey Bloke answers the door:

Pigs in lipstick — time for Chivalry

I’m having a slightly surreal time over here, trying to work out this pigs and lipstick thing. Apparently Barack Obama said:

John McCain says he’s about change, too — except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics. That’s just calling the same thing something different.

You can put lipstick on a pig; it’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change; it’s still going to stink after eight years.

John McCain said:

[Hillary Clinton’s plan for healthcare is] vaguely — not vaguely but eerily — reminiscent of what they tried back in 1993. I think they put some lipstick on the pig but it's still a pig.

Is this a cheap shot at Hillary’s femininity? And, Mr So-Called Obama, what about fish? Also, try and deny it, your comments are totally piggist.

For the past 600 years Brits have had their own Norman French slogan for these occasions — Honi soit qui mal y pense (“Evil be to any that think evil of it.”). Nice that it’s so relevant. It speaks truth into this situation, and takes us all back to the dear ol’ days before everything went to hell in handcart. Vote for Edward III! Up with the Treaty of Crétigny! Bicameral parliaments Now! Down with the Black Death! Free public bow and arrow shooting on the village green for the French wars! It’s time for a bit of true chivalry in politics...
PS: Anyone seen discarded lipsticks near any pigs they know?