Tag: Gordon Brown

Dear Americans and other friends abroad – spare a thought for England

Have you got your STVs sorted from your FPTP systems?

I found myself wondering what STV stood for – Scottish TV perhaps?

Eventually I found that it referred to the Single Transferable Vote system of voting in Fair Voting (Proportional Representation) – the system that most of the UK  is desperately in need of.  Why?  Well to make real the ‘modernization’, following the expenses debacle – in which one MP actually claimed from tax-payers money to clean the moat around his stately home (one of several).

Other acronyms are falling into place e.g FPTP – the ‘first past the post’ system.  For how many in the population is all of this a mystery?

FPTP – this is England’s brilliant system whereby we end up being ruled by a bunch of MPs who represent 25% of the population.

The 25% representatives then gradually cock things over 10 years or so, upon which the other bunch take over to provide us with an ever so slightly different version – of how to cock things up.  And so it goes on decade after decade.

Currently it looks like a bunch of multi-millionaire Etonian toffs are about to take over from New Labour – New Labour is Blair and Brown’s neo-Thatcherism pretending to be socialism.  Tories have in their blood the belief that it is their God-given right to rule the rest of us, and to screw the general population – to increase their personal wealth.  How do you think they got their wealth and moats in the first place?  Don’t forget that even though New Labour wallowed in the Trough it was the Tories who invented it, as part of the ‘cosy gentlemen’s club’.

Why won’t the great British public wake up to the need for Fair Voting?  Why – because there is a conspiracy run by the two main political parties – selling lies such as you ‘don’t get strong, clear government ‘ with Fair Voting/Proportional Representation.  Strong and clear like Blair lying to get us into the killing business in Iraq?

Yes that Tory-Labour conspiracy exists.  But there are also other remaining quirks of the class system.  Where I live hourly-paid builders and game-keepers vote Conservative because of a cap-doffing mentality – even though the Tories tried to block the minimum wage time and time again.

We’re stuck – and that suits at least the two main parties.

Will England’s electorate wake up?  I have my doubts because enough people just don’t understand that there is an alternative to what we’ve got.  Who is trying to inform the general population?  The general assumption that ‘reality’ is just Tories followed Labour followed by Tories is deeply depressing.

The Wikipedia article provides a good introduction to Fair Voting.  You will see that the list contains some surprising countries as well as the most civilized, such as Denmark.

Glossaries about politics are

HERE – Hard to find a UK one – and PR doesn’t exist on this glossary (my conspiracy suspicions are growing)

HERE – doesn’t include PR, Fair Voting, STV, FPTP system etc. – American ethnocentricity?

Same HERE

To go over a door in Parliament re snout-troughing?

“What government is best? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.”

Goethe


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Dear Brown & Cameron; wise-up, the expenses furore isn’t primarily about expenses – is it? Part 1

Part 1:

The expenses furore isn’t primarily about expenses. It’s a volcano of pent-up grievances that has now erupted.

The public’s responses are disproportionate. Why? Because the expenses ‘crimes’ are the symptoms not the disease.

The disease is much deeper.

What are the characteristics of that dis-ease?

Fiscal Melt-Down and ‘The End of the World’

Video: ‘The End of the World’ – it worked for me as a video art, having come through the w/e of Oct 11th/12th that looked like the precursor to the Great Melt-Down;

Thank God for Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling ( even if they got some ideas from elsewhere – e.g. Bloomberg?)