Monday 4 May 2015

An election which never reached the electorate


The 2015 election has been  such a sad disappointment because it never actually reached the people. It was about them. It will have a crucial effect on their future. Yet it never excited their interest and certainly didn't grip them in any way. They just got on with their straightened lives while the politicians played a game for themselves, like a football match where the teams assault each other and play dirty against each other but the public turn away in distaste.

Britain's small political class has become a small isolated elite who spend their time abusing each other but find difficulty in communicating with the rest of the population who've never been particularly interested in politics and are now repelled by the abusive brawl that politics have become  

Leaders have been well protected from any contact with real people and their problems and have spent their time speaking to specially selected hordes of party supporters. Even when the BBC dragged the leaders before a question time audience praised by the Daily Mail as real people they weren't because the audience was specially selected partisans all intent on abusing someone else's leader

Electors received more pamphlets than ever before but they came through the post not personal delivery and fewer people were canvassed because party membership is much smaller. They were regularly polled but always gave the reply that they had no idea which party they wanted because they didn't really want any.Mass meetings and heckling were a thing of the past.

 The country's in a mess. It can't pay its way in the world,public revenues are inadequate to support the services and structures an advanced society needs and unless we spend to stimulate growth we face a ,long term future of debt decline and squeezed living standards but all this was ignored and no politician gave us any explanation of what we can do to escape from the trap either because they didn't know or because they had no opportunity. All the people got were claims that it was all the fault of the other lot who were certain to make the situation worse.

It was hardly stimulating or exciting. .No wonder the people tell the pollsters that they've decided not to decide


XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The parties are begining to worry about the prospect of a second election as in 1974 if no party wins a majority to govern. Which they won't. It will be expensive, after the ruinous costs of the present election .It will be boring because both television and the print media have gone overkill on coverage only to find that the electorate aren't particularly interested. 

I remember in 1974 we pulled out all the stops at Yorkshire TV to give an exciting coverage for the first election but covered the second in a much kore perfunctory fashion  because everyone was bored stiff then.

That will happen again but complicated  ow by the Five Year Term act which was passed to hold the coalition together but now creates an impossible situation .Then Parliament could be dissolved when the PM saw an opportunity as Harold Wilson did in October.Now it can only be dissolved by a two thirds majority which no government is likely to get. So a government can be defeated on a motion of confidence but then someone else has to form an alternative and that would have to be defeated too on the  same basis.


The only way out of this Tory created trap could be that the government has to defeat itself as Schroeder did in Germany by ordering its MPs to vote against it but after all thee money and effort they've put into getting elected in the first place it may be difficult to order turkeys to vote for Christmas.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Just a thought. If Cleggie is being so punctilious as to set out the conditions on which he'll support a government with his shrunken little army why doesn't he have the guts to do what he should have done last time and say "We will only give support to a major party if it agrees to a referendum on proportional representation as the only way of handling multi-party politics"




No comments:

Post a Comment