The political system currently in Britain is insanity. Anyone who claims that without a democratic system we would descend into anarchy (a misguided sense of what anarchy actually means) cannot be watching in comfort as each hour heralds more horse-trading and selling down the river of any political principles. The right-wing media have been baying in a way not seen since the Thatcher years and all the “business leaders” are coming out of the woodwork to tell us what is good for the country, as if they’d have the first fucking idea!

We have the Tories who are a party based on the rule of the minority over the majority, a party whose electoral coverage hinges on large constituencies with very few people in them. This is the party of “I’m all right Jack” a party whose very name signifies them as being the very antithesis of progression. They are the old order and will resist any attempts to undermine that. We have seen already the cracks in the facade, the leaks as to the prospective foreign policy which far from distancing itself from the more neo-fascist elements of their alliance in the European Parliament seems instead to be hell-bent on converging with them ideologically. This is a party who almost managed to get elected by telling you absolutely nothing of what it was they actually planned to do and how they planned to pay for it and clearly showed their loyalties when letting slip that tax would be cut for the super-rich -this in a country that has in the last 30 years seen a widening of the gap between rich and poor to almost 3rd World proportions not to mention at a time of economic crisis.

We have the Labour party who claim to be in favour of electoral reform but have failed to do anything about it in their 13 year tenure in government. A party who have so divorced themselves from their core support that when the conservatives decide to vote Conservative again they lost their majority. This is a party who have plunged the left into years of disenfranchisement which has led to the rise in dissolutioned traditional Labour voters voting for extreme parties like the BNP. It has fuelled that anger at the way things are and allowed the Nazis to walk into that ideological vacuum and offer people a scapegoat for it all. The parallels with 1930s Germany make grim reading.

We have the Liberals, a party who’s very raison d’etre seemed to hinge upon enacting electoral reform in order to actually be relevant again. A party that has gained much support from middle-class voters on the centre left who feel, rightly, that Labour has drifted too far right to represent them.

The facts are these the Conservatives received 36% of the vote and receive 47% of the seats in Parliament, Labour got 29% of the vote and receive 39.6% of the seats, the Lib-Dems got 23% of the vote and receive 8.7% of the seats. It does not take a genius to work out that there is a democratic deficit. Look at Northern Ireland where the DUP get 8 seats in Parliament with only 0.6% of the UK vote, you could say that this part of the vote has to be ring-fenced because it is effectively a separate country but Sinn Fein got nearly 4,000 more votes and end up with 3 fewer seats and the Scottish Nationalists polled almost half a million and they only get 6 seats. A total of 5% of the population voted for the BNP or UKIP and receive no representation at all, one cannot however merely cherry pick the good bits!

Another thing to take into consideration is that forget what all the idiot commentators and conservative correspondents say, Gordon Brown has to remain in No. 10 or the Queen would be forced to name his successor because the uncomfortable truth is that the government remains merely the representative of the sovereign – hence the use of the words “My Government…” in the Queen’s speech. So if you didn’t thus far feel there had been enough disenfranchisement of the population there’s a bit more for you.

To add to the whole fiasco we have the markets seeking to define what the people should and shouldn’t do and what they should and shouldn’t have voted for – a market system that has proven itself to have absolutely no regard for the people, which has proven itself utterly incompetent in dealing with its own affairs with either fiscal prudence or transparency. We are even told that George Osbourne will become chancellor because key figures in the market are already telephoning him to talk about financial matters. Of course they are, they would far rather him than anyone who might seek to put the breaks on their rampant consumerism, big salry and bonus culture, golden parachute pension provisions, all funded to a great extent by the tax payer. Of course it is public spending that’s the problem, that’s the bad spending.

I had thought some sanity had been restored when Alex Salmond called for a progressive alliance between Labour, Liberals, Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru, this would have given at least a hope of genuine electoral reform as most of those within such a coalition would have been in favour of such moves. The Liberals would have been able to ensure political change for they could have voted down any Queen’s speech that did not contain it. However this is where Labour then lost all credibility by issuing statements within the hour that no deal had been struck with the SNP and that this was merely Salmond electioneering to cover up a disappointing night for the SNP. Labour do not now deserve to be in a coalition government, Nick Brown the chief whip has gone one step further and said that any Lab-Lib deal would be difficult for Labour MPs to accept – would it really, more difficult to accept than the wilderness of opposition?

It is true Nick Clegg was in a difficult position to begin with, but one most other Liberal leaders would surely have given their right arms for. He was right to say the Tories had the mandate to initially try to form a government, I fully expected him then to negotiate with the Tories and break off negotiations when it was clear that they would never countenance any electoral system reform, for as already stated it would be electoral suicide for them to do so and the Tories are many things that elicit nasty adjectives but stupid is not one of them. At this point Clegg would have been fully entitled to go to Labour and form a coalition based on the proviso of electoral reform and he could easily have demanded that Gordon Brown resigned and that another general election be called with the new electoral system in place later this year. The calls that this would be a travesty as they came 2nd and 3rd place is barely worthy of rebuttal, the combined vote of the 2 parties was over 15 million and therefore 50% more than the Tories so far from being a democratic deficit it would in fact be more representative of the people. The Conservative supporters do not wish you to look that much into it.

As it is there was always the suspicion that Clegg was more one of the centre-right Liberals as opposed to the more centre-left stance of his immediate predecessors. How though does this square with the party’s representation of those who had actually voted for them? Traditionally the Liberals have had to fight the accusation that they split the Labour vote in marginals and allow the Tories in, whilst they have benefitted from many areas where the Labour vote is small and the Liberals represent the only method of keeping the Tories out such as in the South West. What now must these people feel to see the Liberals in fact facilitating a Tory government that not only will not deliver on its electoral reform pledges but will be as far removed as it could be from core Lib-Dem values? The Tories do not agree with higher tax for the rich, they do not agree with raising the personal allowance for the very poorest, they do not agree with any reduction on defence spending and they are rabidly intent on attacking public sector spending.

According to the bookies the most likely outcome is a Con-Lib pact of some description and this may be so but paradoxically I think this will plunge us far deeper into a 2 party system than before because it will split the Liberal voting support and polarise people to one side or the other, Metropolitan areas will be more likely to go back to Labour, however reluctantly, and the rural areas to the Conservatives. I cannot see how this could possibly be in the interests of either Nick Clegg or the electorate.

Song Of The Day ~ Collide – The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum