At risk of submitting thoughts which fail to live up to
this;
PartTimePongo said:
Damn me Fas , that must be your most grown-up post to date , a fine contribution.
...
PTP
The conclusion which I reach is that the main parties simply don't care. This might well be a function of the fact that those who actually hold power are sitting in safe seats, one way or the other. A sub-Unit Commander from my regiment who stood for parliament at the last general election relates that the only feedback from party HQ on the day after results night was a CC1 text requesting the candidates to return their pagers. No PXR, no thanks for the hard work, little apparent concern whatsoever.
It's indicative of the nature of politics in a 'democracy' which allows universal suffrage and denies Proportional Representation on the basis that it is not in the interests of the main parties:
- Parliament is always going to have a sitting majority - and recent experience leads to the conclusion that a significant majority in the hands of the leadership is dangerous to democracy in that it tends to foster, at the very least, a Presidential-style dictatorship
- Some seats are bound to be safe one way or the other - leading to the disenfranchisement of a significant proportion of the electorate. In discussion with a well know Labour ex-MP, who lost her seat at the last election, about the boundary moves which have taken me from a marginal constituency into a safe Labour seat, I was recently told that it was not gerrymandering, and that in the final analysis I was
not disenfranchised on the basis that I had the option of selling my house and moving somewhere else.
- Those who are not citizens in the strict (and original) sense of the word tend, to the extent that they vote at all, to vote in favour of the party whom
âthey thinkâ offer them the best personal option in the short term, rather than the best option for the nation in the medium to long term. Politicians are inevitably going to offer policies which gain the favour of the electorate by 'buying' their vote in the short term;
who cares what becomes of the situation in four years' time, there'll have been another election by then... Sadly, on this basis, there is not an overwhelming difference between those who tell OAPs that the council is filling the ward with Asians and those who campaign on the basis of the good of the nation - when in fact they nothing of the sort in mind. I know that there's the difference between an outright lie and a subtle subversion of the truth - but they remain, nevertheless, points on the same continuum.