I have now had some time to reflect on the outcome of last week’s General Election.
In many respects it was something of a non-event. Nobody seriously expected any result other than another Labour victory and the only matter which gave rise to any material speculation was the size of the Labour majority.
As it transpired, that majority was considerably reduced, providing some electoral benefit to both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats but nonetheless leaving the re-elected government with a perfectly playable hand.
On the face of it, last week’s elections appears to have changed nothing. Tony Blair is still the PM and his brand of ‘modernised’ social democracy appears to be what the public have again decided they want. Yet, a closer analysis of the voting figures reveals what I believe to be a significant development, albeit one that may take a while yet to manifest itself.
I will expand on this but, before I do, I want to make a few observations about the other two main parties. I like to think of myself as a reasonably articulate man but I am struggling to find the words to adequately express just how much I despise and abhor the loathsome (and fraudulently misnamed) Liberal Democrats. The most charitable thing I can say about them…No, sorry I cannot find anything charitable to say about them at all. This creepy collection of local government officers, geography teachers and assorted smelly cranks combine the hungry opportunism of a trap-door spider with the prim, bossy condescension of an Edwardian school ma’am, only without the good looks of the former or the moral fibre of the latter.
Even their ostensibly laudable opposition to ID cards was borne out of their instinct for grab-a-headline hucksterism ratherthan any real principle. If they ever got close to getting their hands on the levers of power (God forbid!) they would not only flip-flop on the ID cards but would most likely insist on surveillance cameras in our bedrooms to boot.
But, and on the bright side, their decision to position themselves well to the left of the government means that they have also painted themselves into a corner. The marginal seats where they are the principal opposition are all Labour held and that means that their activists are going to have to tack ever further to the left in their relentless campaign to mop up New Labour’s excretions. But what these stupid sods have forgotten are the very reasons for Tony Blair’s emergence and subsequent success. Much to the chagrin of the Guardianistas (and the principle reason for their thematic self-pity), the bulk of the British public have never had any sort of truck with or appetite for hard left politics.
So, actually, I have got something good to say about the Lib Dems: they are doomed.
Now for the Conservatives. It seems that they have finally finished cleaning up after the wild excesses of the Thatcherite party. The blood has been mopped up from the carpet, the vomit washed from the walls and all the empties have been bagged and binned. Things are back to normal now and the Party has returned to its default, 1950’s incarnation of being a bunch of dull but decent chaps whose job is to convince the voters that they are the steady hands required to steer the tiller on the ship of a bloated and dirigiste state.
The true problem for Tories is that they just do not do politics. Politics is a messy and confrontational business that is best left to others who know how to do it properly and are not so averse to getting their hair mussed. Deep down in their hearts, Conservative MPs just want a very quiet life, a reasonable stipend and a researcher-cum-catamite. All this nasty politics stuff just gives them a headache.
This being the case, the immediate future (for them) looks good because their Party appears to be more durable than many (including I) had previously thought. Due almost entirely to some desperately fed-up sections of the electorate willing to drag the Party out if its grave, the advances made last week are probably just comforting enough to convince the leadership that they are on right track and that this is not time to begin shilly-shallying around with dangerous ideas. Much better (and more agreeable) to carry on cruising and rely on their dependable Shire vote.
The Conservative Party is a benign tumour: difficult to remove but incapable of causing any real damage.
The Labour Party is an altogether different beast. They love doing politics and they do it with a ruthless professionalism, that a part of me at least, is forced to admire and which has enabled them to win three General Elections on the spin (pun intended).
But this last victory may prove to be a pyrrhic one. Last week the Labour Party took 36.2% of the vote on a turnout of some 61%. This means that only 21% of the electorate voted for a Labour government and 79% did not.
These figures do not, of themselves, invalidate the result. Under the rules as they are currently configured, Labour unquestionably won. But, by not-at-all-curious coincidence, 21% is only very slightly higher than the proportion of the electorate that now works, in some form or another, for the state. It is their bloc vote alone which has given Labour their third term in office and formed a government of the public sector, by the public sector and for the public sector.
In some corners, there are already dark denials that this government has any sort of mandate. This is untrue. It has a very clear, nay resounding, mandate to maintain (and, wherever possible, accelerate) the process of plundering the productive sector and transferring the resultant booty to their client-voters in the form of income, status and privileges.
The huge majorities which Labour won in 1997 and again in 2001 enabled them to plausibly present themselves as a ‘Party of the people’ with something good and wholesome to offer everybody. But the result last week has made that snake oil much harder to sell and perhaps even impossible. The New Labour project has not changed. It is the same now as it was then. But last week’s result has stripped it bare of its pretensions and left it standing naked and plainly visible for what it really is: a kleptocracy.
Sometimes a village is inundated by a man-made reservoir. Often, though, that is not the last that anyone has seen of it. In the hot summer months, when the water level drops, a rotting church steeple can be seen poking up accusingly above the water line. If the level drops further, then the roofs of ruined buildings which one housed a thriving community become visible too, reminding everyone of the price that was paid for the reservoir.
Economies are rather like that. While there is plenty of money sloshing around, no one can see the ruins that are mouldering away in the murky depths. But when the money begins to dry up, the hitherto-hidden damage rises up starkly into plain sight. It does not require anything as dramatic as a full-blown recession. A mild to moderate interruption of the good times is enough to uncover the damning evidence of destruction. If that happens, then it will no longer be possible for the government to fool even the most dull-witted of taxpayers as to the nature and methods of those who are wrecking their lives. When that day comes, the government of the public sector, by the public sector and for the public sector will perish from the land.
As to the matter of its replacement? Search me. There appear to be no desirable candidates.
Some unknown US radio pundit was opining the other day that it’s not just the reduced majority that matters but which Labour MPs lost. According to him, the influence and power of the Old Labour crowd has been significantly enhanced by this election. Thoughts ?
Bravo!
Firstly thanks to David for a nice article. The one pleasant aspect of this election was the Tories gain of a few Lib Dem seats. If the Lib Dems nationally are anything like the ones in my local area then there will be a backlash against them and perhaps we are seeing that. Here the local council has been a Labour one since the 1930’s but in recent years thanks to series of financial scandals they have been vunerable. The Lib Dems way of fighting the local election was interesting. They identified a very local issue probably one for every 2 square miles of the city. I arrived home from work one day to find various old folk have a lay down protest on my road to campaign for speed bumps to be installed. The next day a “fake” newspaper came through my door telling me all about the protest complete with a little quote from the local Lib Dem council candidate promising the speed bumps. All of my colleagues at work who live in the city received similar newspapers targeting very local issues to them.
The campaign paid off with the Lib Dems taking this ward and the council. At this point they did nothing ! They didn’t install the speed bumps here they didn’t improve the childrens playground near my Mothers and they didn’t even bother with an excuse. But people have long memories and at the last local election they lost both this ward and the council. At this election the Lib Dem candidate came a poor third.
Now I now in the scheme of things these broken local promises are nothing. But if they are as a I think part of a nationwide pattern then the Lib Dems have a limited life and are building a lot of problems in the long to medium term.
Out of interest do we have any readers in any of the areas the Lib Dems lost to the Tories ? If so did the Lib Dems do these tricks in earlier campaigns ?
Unfortunately I have to disagree with David. Being now in my mid 40’s I grew up during the last disasterous Labour mismanagement of our country.
It is hard for anyone who wasn’t there to really believe the appalling state of everything in the late 70’s. And yet we had 17 years of the Conservatives doing ok with the economy, if nothing else, and then the moronic wavering voters sided with the intellectually inadequate and voted Labour back in.
Even though they were helped by the implosion of the Tories, anyone with half a brain should have seen through phony Tony. But they didn’t. In fact they didn’t three times now. And they won’t again. Sure Nu-Labour or Nu Nu Labour will have to sit on the sidelines for a while because the economy is going crunch again. But they will polish up their lies again and fool sufficient of the electorate to get back into power for long enough to screw it all up once more.
Hopefully the shit we are about to experience will not be as bad as the mire that that jackass Healey dropped us into.
It seems to be a constant cycle refreshed by a new crop of gullible voters each time. Labour will promise jam tomorrow and the mugs will fall for it and very few people will ask “how?” In fact I am fairly sure that most voters do not have the capacity, or education, to know how to ask.
Democracy seems a poor system when most of those who bother to vote seem to be unable to understand basic economics and have no memories.
Nick Timms – Because each successive socialist/Gramscian government brainwashes the young to be dependent on the government. It takes very committed parents (or parents who can afford to go independent) to militate against the deeply embedded socialist culture of the education system.
The first thing the next Tory government should do to ensure its successors don’t inherit too many more brain dead voters is render all education private – with vouchers or local sales tax or whatever. And outlaw belonging to a trade union for teachers. The institutional, propagandising left has no place in any education system.
Verity, I agree with you but I think that it is unlikely to happen. The Conservatives, it seems to me, only get voted in when enough people are sick of the foul ups of the socialists.
The Conservatives have always been utterly hopeless at selling their message. Recently their message has been almost indistinquishable from Nu-Labour but each successive Tory leader seems as inarticulate and stiff as the last. Hague, IDS (the man that was so quiet nobody listened), and Howard all seem to be operated by strings. Major had a personality bypass and at the end Thatcher was disconnected from everyone by her incredible ego. Thatcher had some good policies. If one must have a local tax – and I would rather not – the poll tax seemed pretty fair to me, but, they couldn’t sell it.
Until they get a leader who can talk to people without having to take elocution or body language lessons I think they will probably continue to be runners-up.
“This creepy collection of local government officers, geography teachers and assorted smelly cranks combine the hungry opportunism of a trap-door spider with the prim, bossy condescension of an Edwardian school ma’am, only without the good looks of the former or the moral fibre of the latter.”
Hah, excellent! A good article all round, except I wonder if you could cite a source to back up your public sector bloc theory? I doubt the claim, since the subject of sacking bureaucrats wasn’t high on the agenda; but I could see it happening in future.
Did any of you happen to pick up on this EU Referendum article? Without UKIP there could have been an “unworkable” Labour majority, costing them 26 seats.
Verity – A few weeks ago I think I discovered what happened to all those NUS Trots who never grow out of it. After curiously flicking through a “Sociology GCSE Exam Guide” in WHSmiths I encountered “Marxists believe..” followed by some tripe about “wage-slavery” and the need for a gargantuan state to take over businesses to protect the little guy. I admit I’m totally ignorant about the subject, but it seemed to just get sillier (Post-Modernists and Feminists came up next!). Worrying how they teach kids this stuff I asked a younger friend who elaborated: His teacher has a Che Guevara poster and a Hammer and Sickle. What came up next though was unexpected: Having to put up with a middle-aged, unmarried man ranting on about his religion as a matter of routine embarrassed the lad away from the whole thing as much as 10 years of Church put him off Jesus.
Maybe there is hope after all.
Absolutely completely spot on.
Nick – I would abolish, or much reduce VAT, and impose a local sales tax, collectible and disbursed locally. This would pay for education of local children. There would be a local (elected) schoolboard responsible for disbursement of the funds and employment of teachers. They would be free to set their own standards and exams, in conjunction with universities’ entrance requirements. The national government would have absolutely nothing to do with it. If they didn’t want any “graduates” of lefty universities, that would be up to them.
I can’t see the objections. What the taxpayers want for their children is all that counts. Ruth Kelly can go and put her head in a bucket or go and work at a Tesco’s creche or whatever – not on the taxpayer pound. She serves absolutely no purpose.
I would also have the sales tax pay for the local police, led by a police chief who had been elected by residents of the constituency and not an institutionally stupid David Blair or his ilk.
I have no idea what Jond was talking about.
Just a wild guess, but look for Nicola Horlick to be named to do something in the Blair government as it retreats in dissarray – the junta to the bunkah, so to speak. Horlick has been mentioned in the news twice in the last few days – once as a victim of a robbery she cleverly foiled. Very Za-Nu Lab – overweight, achiever, loads of children – very much in the Cher/Ruth Kelly mode. But two mentions in the news within a couple of weeks …
As often happens in marketing, goods are given names that are the opposite of what is in fact the case.
The [contemporary] Liberal party is opposed to Liberalism – you vote for it if you dislike Liberalism.
The Conservative party opposes Conservatism – it seeks to give people the freedom to better themselves.
The Labour Party – as David Carr rightly notes – views working people as serfs from whom they extract money in order that they (the deserving rich) may spend it on themselves.
In the past those who sought plum jobs aspired to obtain titles such as Wiper of the Royal Arse, but fashions change, and they now aspire to titles such as Minister of Culture.
The Liberal Democrats are yet another Leftist Party – one that is not funded by the Trade Unions. The Conservative Party is a coalition of all the other non-Leftist parties.
When Libertarians attack the Conservative Party – often it must be said with good reason – what they are doing is attacking other factions within the anti-Leftist coalition.
It will not have escaped your notice that the Left are morally and intellectually bankrupt, and yet if you combine the votes for various Leftist parties they form an electoral majority.
The conclusion is inevitable. Only an intellectual could be idiotic enough to fail to realise it. Instead of pleasuring yourself with unreal possibilities, your duty as a Libertarian is to put your skills at the service of the Party that is most likely – I put it no more strongly than that – to uphold the practices of a free society.
In the UK that Party is the Conservative Party.
The thing I am amazed at is that the Conservative party _still_ haven’t realised that they carried a storming majority for 17 years with policies that everyone now claims to hate and a leader that everyone claims to despise.
Everyone loves to rant about how evil Thatcher was and how selfish the 80s were, but they all voted for it at the time – if everyone that said they hated Thatcher actually voted Labour, she wouldn’t have had one term, let alone three!
For all intents and purposes, Thatcher and Thatcherite policies were the saviour of the Conservative party in 1987 and their backbone that ensured them a huge majority during not one but two recessions.
The big question is why anyone in the Conservative party is suggesting anything but Thatcherite policies. They really should stop listening to what people say to pollsters – very few people have the balls to say to a pollster ‘I want to keep all my money to myself and fuck everyone else.’
Politicians nowadays are such cowards.
Nick Timms, you’re wrong. Old Labour is forever unvoteable because of that period. Even when the Tories were already rotten to the core, they stayed in power because Labour was known to be worse. People who weren’t out of nappies before Mrs Thatcher still knew and only voted for “New Labour” precisely because it was a genuinely new thing – the “third way”, a political philosophy which seeks to pragmatically use the mostly-free market to further socialist causes. I suspect as much as anything, the recent electoral victory is still part of “giving them their fair chance to prove theory in practise”. But the public can and does learn, and once the fiction becomes openly unsustainable, probably within this electoral term, they’ll eject the Labour government – permanently.
There appear to be no desirable candidates.
So in which constituency would you be most likely to win, David?
The campaign paid off with the Lib Dems taking this ward and the council. At this point they did nothing ! They didn’t install the speed bumps here
I can’t fault them for that. I’d vote for any party which didn’t install speed bumps. In my area they have spread like a rash, even as the roads fall apart. Different budgets you see. The budget for road maintenance has been cut, whilst the budget for building mini road blocks keeps on growing.
I agree with the premise that if the Tories convince themselves that the way to victory is to manage decline more effectively than NuLabor they are doomed. Even if they get elected next time, what would be the point? Britain declined economically between 1945 and 1979 under Labour and Conservative governments, because they both held to very similar policies: high taxation, heavy public spending, public housing, strong trade unions, business corporatism etc etc etc. Britain was ready for a change in 1979 because we had hit rock bottom. I hope that’s not what the “thinkers” in the present Tory party are waiting for, I can’t face 40 years of NuLabor!
“It seems to be a constant cycle refreshed by a new crop of gullible voters each time…”
Elections are indeed a cyclical phenomen. After some time, usually two terms, people get fed up with the bums in power and throw them out. Then the other party gets it’s two terms, after which it too is thrown out.
The ideology of the respective parties or of the public in general play an insignificant role. Personalities of the candidates – i.e. their capacity to rouse rabbles and present a polished, good looking and fluent image – are more important then ideology. Note: it is not their ability to actually do things – just their ability to create an image, a perception.
That’s Democracy.
Tory policy for the foreseeable future should be three pronged
They should set their stalls out as the true party of liberty
They should shout from the rooftops that the Liddems are a socialist party (sue for mis representation under both of their titles)
Support New Labour policies where they clash with old labour and follow conservative thinking, health service reforms etc.
This will isolate TB and allow Labour to re invent itself as a porper left wing party competeing for the loons with the libdems
TB is going to be out of the leadership within 12-18 months. The election has resulted in a more leftist parliamentary labour party than previously. TB will be succeeded by GB, who will consolidate the party’s leftward shift.
Everything you ask for here is inevitably going to happen pretty soon.
EG
The rain chased me in from the garden yesterday and so I saw the brilliance that was an episode of the Fry and Laurie version of Jeeves and Wooster. And, lo, it was a parable. Dim, agreeable, well-spoken ignoramus Bertie Wooster is Toni; bonkers, bug-eyed Madeleine Bassett, who likes to say “Good Morning” to the flowers, and lurves Bertie, is Mrs Blair (a.k.a. Ms Greedie Boot) and Alistair Campbell is the malevolent, bad-tempered Jeeves who manipulates his Wooster so effectively. The chaps from the Drones Club – Ooffy, Tuppy and so on – are our Cabinet. No?
Euan, I am not so sure that the desired train of events will happen unless the Tories actively get their house in order. The idea that the party can or should just sit around and wait is silly. Of course events may work to the Tories’ favour, but that party has so far shown a remarkable talent for shooting itself in the foot.
Maybe we just need the old guard to die off.
Re: John K and speedbumps yes they are stupid and I suspect they cause a lot more problems than they solve. The problem is around here is that the council have messed up the main roads so badly that drivers are forced to use residental streets as short cuts. That couldn’t be to bad just at rush hour but we also get idiots doing 70 mph down the road at night and the road has now made 2 apperances on the BBC’s Police Camera Action program. Hence considerable and I admit selfish support for them locally.
I must agree with all that was said about the Lib-Dims, we have them as well. All they do here is alter perfectly good roads so as to create traffic jams. Their candidate got re-elected in the area despite the fact that most have at least one car and public transport is a joke. Unfortunately the Conservative candidate was not seen in the area very often, perhaps he was attending one of Howards focus groups at the time
I must agree with all that was said about the Lib-Dims, we have them as well. All they do here is alter perfectly good roads so as to create traffic jams. Their candidate got re-elected in the area despite the fact that most have at least one car and public transport is a joke. Unfortunately the Conservative candidate was not seen in the area very often, perhaps he was attending one of Howards focus groups at the time
David:
A commentator recently pointed me to this site(Link)
The opening words are:
“Liberal Future seeks to bring together those who believe in the central tenet of liberalism: that there should be less power for government and the state and more power for individuals and communities.”
Interestingly, it seems to be some sort of LibDem fringe group, with at least one serving LibDem MP; so maybe things are changing amongst the LibDems.
Shame the same can’t be said for the Tories!
Julius
If that happens, then it will no longer be possible for the government to fool even the most dull-witted of taxpayers as to the nature and methods of those who are wrecking their lives. When that day comes, the government of the public sector, by the public sector and for the public sector will perish from the land.
I fear Mr. Carr is showing some optimism here. Once the soft-left policies of government are shown to be vacant lies, it won’t just disappear from the landscape, but the entrenched bureaucracy, along with a frightened mass, will formulate hard line policies of the left or right variety.
When the soft-left edifice crumbles, people will be left without proper savings, public welfare plans will be dead, private welfare plans will be just as bankrupt, and people will be highly resentful of having worked so hard, and bought into promises, and misallocated their wealth, that there will be a backlash that only seems to find an outlet in a hard line amalgam of one sort or another.
The nightmare has only begun. The accounts, public and private, and too out of balance for a simple fading away of the hucksters under cover of night. The realignments that will occur after decades of smoke and mirrors misallocation won’t be easy or calm.
What comes after, I don’t know. I’ll probably be dead and gone before the cycle works itself out.
Excellent post, and I agree with most of what has been said. However, I would have to say that the Conservative councillors and would be MP’s that I have recently encountered could all be called arrogant and ignorant. That is the unattractive side to the Party. That said, I find myself wondering what the alternative is to having to endure Blair and his cronies conbtinued destruction of this country and it’s culture.
The continued growth of the incompetent civil service management culture is equally depressing. The vast majority of these post holders are incapable of making decisions and do not have any qualification or understanding for the post they hold. It is all “buzz phrases” and cronyism. At 21% (I have seen recent figures which suggest 25%!) of the total workforce, they are indeed a political power in their own right – and I have no doubt that this is used to their benefit at every opportunity.
How to get rid of them remains, as the auhtor has suggested, a very tricky question!
Julius,
There is no hope in the Lib Dems. This from Lib Future:
Liberalism is not libertarianism Libertarianism is the belief that the role of the state should extend no further than the defence of the national and policing its streets. Liberals do see an active role for government, but one which acts to enhance equality of access at the same time as acting to end discrimination.
Always be careful when LibDems talk about freedom and individuals, it is always code for ‘rule by liberal activists’.
No definitional hope, then, for those of us who think of ourselves as liberals in the philosophical sense that still survives in political language in the rest of Europe. 🙁
Firstly great post David.
Secondly unfortunately it is not government of the Public Sector by and for the Public Sector – it is government of all of us.
I agree with your analyses of the LibDems and the Conservatives but have less optimism about the outcome of it all.
I am firmly of the belief that the class war we are currently losing needs to be named at every opportunity. Then perhaps a party or movement might emerge to speak for the producers in society and the parasites will come to have the same status as paedophiles currently enjoy.
The various entitlement programs of the Western welfare governments are basically Ponzi schemes which rely on eager new investors to provide the payouts for the previously enrolled.
Given the declining birthrates of the societies, and the rising costs of the pension/medical/social benefits programs about which any talk of reform is political suicide, there are few possible good outcomes.
When the crunch comes, as it inevitably will, the only certainty is that the villains will be anyone who opposes major new statist policies that are “desperately” needed to combat the crisis. The only solutions considered will be those which expand and further increase state power and budgets.
All of this will occur….unless, in the few decades before the fecal matter strikes the oscillating blades, those who do not define all social situations as amenable to statist remedy make those arguments continuously and consistently.
If, as was stated in an earlier posting, the arguments of the current statist regimes are bankrupt and devoid of moral content, then those whose positions are based on rational consideration and moral coherence have no one but themselves to blame if the former carry the day against the latter.
Revolutions in ideas, like any other, are carried out by those willing to carry the fight to the enemy. Just as a simple electrician could lead Solidarity to the overthrow of a mighty empire, so ordinary people who are clear and adamant about the failure of the state to ever actually solve social problems can lead to the fall of the current ideological edifice which allows no other possible course of action.
You have to admit it was fun to watch the Plaid Cymru squirm as the Tories matched their seat count in Wales and saw their vote rise, instead of tank like Plaid’s.
Is a ‘desirable candidate’ an even better oxymoron than ‘military intelligence’? 🙂
What we’re reliving, in the 20th and 21st centuries, is what the Romans discovered, after failing to learn the lesson from the Spartan-crushed Athenians. That democracy will always give rise to a client state and that a client state will always give rise to demagogues in search of the client vote of the tax recipients and to hell with the consequences for any of us in the minority.
The Roman politicians only had to worry about the client votes of the welfare recipients in Rome itself, but even with only this tiny welfare state to maintain, look at the mess they got themselves in; inflation, corruption, slavery for victims, serfdom for citizens, military juntas, ever-rising taxes, ever more complex law, centralizing regulation, a flow of population to wherever there was welfare to be had, continuous war, conscription – you name it, the Romans had it first, millenia before we re-invented them all in the West.
The forthcoming replacement of Tony Blair by Gordon Brown is simply the hated and successful Caesar being replaced by the muscular and dour Mark Antony. No doubt some heroic pretty boy Octavian will rescue us eventually from M. Antonius (G. Osbornius, perhaps?), but maybe we don’t need rescuing. Maybe we’d be better off without any of these lizards, at all, strutting around and telling us miserable tax serfs how to live our lives.
If we don’t get rid of these lizards now, who knows what horrors await us if (or when) the bloated western welfare states finally do collapse. (I hate to be historicist about it, but this does currently seem inevitable.) The final desperate act of the Roman State, before it imploded, was to introduce serfdom, which then held sway in many parts of Europe for a further thousand years.
Things could be a lot worse than even Roman-inspired serfdom, in a world of micro-chipped ID cards, and omni-vision cameras on every street corner.
I think what we witnessed last week were the further deteriorating symptoms of the affliction of democracy. Fortunately though, my Party won. We non-voters got more than the Party which formed the government. Ferdinand Mount tells me this is the first time this has ever happened in Britain. And I rejoice in it.
Because until we stop skipping around the edges of this central ideological prop of democracy, and stop trying to fix it; and until we start attacking the idea of democracy itself, things are, to misquote D:Ream, only going to get worse.
You know it makes sense. None of us should ever vote at all – ever again – and we should stop looking for desirable candidates. If we do, we only encourage and legitimize all of the buggers, of whatever stripe or hue.
It is time we got rid of all of them.
Ye Gods, Verity. Nurse, the screens!!
In a system which allows you to put a cross in a “None Of The Above” box, not voting for any candidate in a General Election makes sense. In our electroal system however, not voting has the same moral weight as becoming a conscientious objector in the 1939-45 war i.e. none at all.
electoral
Chris, democracy is not an alternative to kleptocracy; democracy is a synonym for kleptocracy. And the more we try to prop democracy up, and fix it, the worse the kleptocracy will become.
And if you actually believe the Tories have any chance to become a ‘proper’ libertarian party, forget it. They are stuck on the same social democratic hook that all the other major political parties are stuck on; that to win power, you need to appeal to the beneficiaries of the client state.
And just by the way, what right do 51% of the population have to steal my property in the first place? What right do 51% of the population have to tell me how to live my life (given that I’m not directly and physically interfering in theirs)?
In both cases, absolutely none. There is no moral authority to democracy. It is simply legalised theft from the minority by the majority.
BTW, I’ve been in the Army, my father nearly died in Northern Ireland, in the Army, and my grandfather did die for the Army, in Italy. I’ll be first on the white cliffs of Dover should any significant menace approach these gilded shores. So please don’t go quoting and linking in WWII to a debate about whether democracy is a busted flush. It’s finished. The only questions are how long it will take to die, and when it does die, how we can make the post-democratic world one worth living in.
I think linking in WWII to debates like this one should be put on the same footing as quoting Hitler (BTW, did you here Blair’s statement about the 100 year Labour Reich? 🙂
Getting back to democracy, voting for these tax-thieving crooks simply legitimises them. We non-voters now have the moral high ground of beating the Party in power, and I predict that postal voting fraud and other gimmicks notwithstanding, we are going to gain an even greater ascendancy over time, at every forthcoming general election, until eventually the whole crooked shooting match comes falling down.
Our leader, David Starkey, of the “What’s the Point in Voting, They’re all Crooked Fraudsters” is right. We are in a historical flux, and as far as I’m concerned the sooner we come out the other side of this rule of the mob, known as democracy, the better.
Sorry I can’t debate this further. I have to make a presentation to some Swiss Bankers in the Gherkin building in two hours, and I haven’t yet got a clue what I’m going to say! 🙂
Gruss Gott, als wir sagen im Zurich! 😉
(apols. for the schrechlich Hoche Deutsch)
Jack,
There were some brilliant critics (admittedly in a town where brilliance seemed to be commonplace) that argued that it was democracy in Athens that had led to her defeat in the Peloponnesian War e.g. the comedy writer Aristophanes, the historian Thucydides, and the philosopher Plato.
If you accept their analysis your case against democracy would seem to be pretty strong.
It should however be borne in mind that Athens was a participative democracy not a representative democracy.
In the Roman example, it was those who described themselves as advocates of the people who ultimately triumphed in the power struggles that followed the increase in wealth that accompanied the military success of the Republic, and, as we know from Julius Caesar, this led to a dictatorship.
In the late Empire the cost of the ever growing bureaucracy led to higher and higher taxation, and the State taking increasing control of the economy, which led to further economic decline, and yet further control by the State; a process that eventually led to serfdom.
Another strong case for you it would seem, but the Roman Empire was not a democracy.
Your final claim is that a democratic system, in the words of the French writer Bastiat, results in a system ‘by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everybody else’ i.e. you vote for the robber who will reward you at the expense of somebody else.
This scenario is I admit all too familiar, but the alternative to a democracy is a system in which rulers are not restrained by the possibility that they may be voted out of office.
In short, with reference to historical examples, you make a case, a powerful although not wholly persuasive case, about the defects of a democratic system. I did not however seek to challenge you on that ground. What I questioned was the claim that the best way of responding to abuses of power within a democratic system is to refuse to vote.
I suggested that in our system such an approach has the same moral weight as refusing to fight Hitler, on the grounds that war usually leads to death, and death is not good.
For what it is worth I never doubted for a moment that you would fight to defend the liberty of this country, quite the opposite, I used that example to show that refusing to vote should be as offensive to you as those who choose not to fight (and in the case of your grandfather, die) for our liberty.
You may argue that your ancestors fought for your right not to vote if that is your choice, but in a system that has no “None of the Above” option, refusing to vote is to give up your chance of restraining the power of those who – in reality – do in fact exercise power.
Do you think Gordon Brown when he becomes leader will be restrained by the fact that his majority in the House of Commons is based upon a minority of those eligible to vote?
New Labour = Old Corruption
It should however be borne in mind that Athens was a participative democracy not a representative democracy.
If I remember rightly, and I don’t have my favourite history books to hand to quote, you only got to vote if you weren’t a slave (who were the majority of the population), and the hundred or so who were chosen each year to sit in whatever they called Parliament, were chosen by lot. To me that’s a better system than we currently have, where only slippery greasy pole climbers on the make, who enjoy telling other people how to live, get to become “representatives”, but it’s still pretty crummy, having your property and rights to life decided by feckless idiots who happened to have been drawn by sherd out of a pot.
And wasn’t it this marvellous “Athenian democracy” that murdered one of the greatest thinkers of all time, Socrates, for daring to disagree with the democratic mob?
This single barbaric act alone, from this historic “beacon city”, should have warned the ancient world, and indeed us, to watch out for the true evil and horror of democracy.
Another strong case for you it would seem, but the Roman Empire was not a democracy.
Well it didn’t end up as a democracy, Chris, in the same way that our “democracies” are going to end up as military dictatorships. But if our schools actually bothered with any of the 800 or so years of history before Julius Caesar eventually turned up, and got beyond Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, we’d realise the whole of the formation of the Roman Republic was based around social democratic struggle, between the tribes (represented eventually by the tribunes), and the patricians (represented by the knightly equites and other nobles). Think ‘House of Commons’ vs. ‘House of Lords’, but with lots of real blood on the carpet.
Yes, the democracy never really went much beyond the walls of Rome itself, just as US democracy doesn’t go beyond the shores of the US, despite the US having troops in over 200 countries, but the Roman Republic was all about the failure of democracy. The horrific genocidal Roman Empire was the result of the failure of democracy.
But our schools don’t want to go there, do they (I suppose most of them don’t even want to do more than gay icon, Emperor Hadrian), because if they did, some of us could come to realise how similar the Roman Republic is to our current decivilising predicament.
Particularly interesting is how the tribunes rose up to gain new ‘rights’ for the tribes, and then once in power, how they joined the patricians to become a new closed elite for a hundred or so years, before Marius, Sulla, and then ultimately Sulla’s heir, Caesar, had their murderous blazes of glory. Not that this isn’t happening again, of course, with all those New Labour apparatchiks giving rise to sons and daughters who move directly from Hampstead into Parliament, without bypassing Macdonalds or the factory floor first. God forbid.
It’s all there. It’s all been lived. And unless we do something about it, we’re going to re-live it all over again. The Road to Serfdom? We’re on it.
My favourite book is the following:
A History of Rome: Down to the Age of Constantine
M. Cary, H.H. Scullard
A classic. And available for a measly 17 squids.
And even in the time of the Caesars, the senate was never wholly ignored. And no Roman imperator ever dared risk the wrath of the mob. One year four of them tried, and four of them were killed for failing to keep the mob onside (if my poor memory serves).
Right up to the end the tribunes, and the tribal comitia they represented, kept some form of political power, as did the senators, and no matter how powerful the Emperor, it was bread, dole, and circuses all the way, for the pampered welfared clients or praetorian armed bureaucrats of Rome, all to keep the mob onside and the demagogues in power.
This scenario is I admit all too familiar, but the alternative to a democracy is a system in which rulers are not restrained by the possibility that they may be voted out of office.
No Chris, you just don’t get me. I don’t want any office for anyone to get voted out from, because they’d only get replaced by another load of equally bad officials taking their turn in the ministerial cars. And most of the officials kleptocratizing the country don’t even change anyway, no matter how radical the new ever-so-slightly-different social democratic party is, which replaces them.
It never mattered which Emperor was in power. It was always bloody and awful to be a tax serf in a Roman province. And got worse over time, until its own dead weight brought about its collapse.
Have you read Alan Duncan’s thoughts on what a new conservative government should look like? Bejesus, it could come from the mouth of Tony Blair, on a day when he’s feeling particularly left wing.
And let’s say Nu-Labour had been voted out? So what? A hundred monkeys in government would have lost their ministerial dole-outs to have to survive on their miserable back-benchers pay, plus other sops given to them because they live in the seat of power. And a hundred or so blue monkeys would have take over, to pursue an almost identical program. And we’d still have 25% of the country (including some civil servants on over a quarter of a million a year), still feasting at the trough, regardless.
refusing to vote is to give up your chance of restraining the power of those who – in reality – do in fact exercise power.
I don’t want to ‘restrain’ anyone’s power. I don’t want anybody to have any power, which I need to restrain. The lot of them can all sod off. We don’t need this entrenched Mafia, and we never did. Voting out the lizard, so that we can be ruled over by a better lizard is a feeble argument. Let’s just get rid of the lizards.
BTW, that Gherkin building is fabulous inside. And what a view! 🙂
Shame about the windows falling off.
Right, got to go. I’ll think we’ll just have to agree to disagree. Trip to LA tomorrow, to sort out. Ten hours watching Ocean’s Twelve trying to work out why they bothered staging a fake robbery, and then two hours trying to get through the Praetorians at US customs, without smiling or telling any jokes. BTW, I can’t believe what they did with Julia Roberts. There ought to be a law against it.
(apologies to any fans of Douglas Adams)
screw you all you evil tory cunts. may you burn in *hell* for your soulless ignorance and selfishness.
this is my last post
No chance of a shag then Samantha?
jkgljdldjkttfngnfmgdgkfkgf