At the macro level in Britain, the farce of the CP or Tory “leadership” election has illustrated a few home truths:
One concerns the utter dearth of talent … so it’s either vote in these lily-livered CINOs or else go the full horror of Labour and then it’s electronic ankle bracelet MPs or Momentum who drove Kate Hoey out of the party. Starmer? You have got to be seriously kidding.
Now to the micro level and a completely hypothetical small election within a small group, illustrating that though the procedures initially put in place are important … of course they are … far more important is the political will to respect what was agreed.
Perfect illustration [back at the macro level] is America today when large numbers at every level and on both sides are perfectly happy to ride roughshod over what had been in place for so long.
Or to put it another way … the long march through the institutions is proceeding, with agents in thrall to special interests ignoring, say, the Constitution at the bidding of their sponsors, their controllers, in order to wreck the procedures themselves and create societal chaos. A perfect example is this:
… which showed in detail, if you had the patience to wade through it, that two amendments ridden over on Jan 5/6 were the 5th and 12th, whilst at the same time trying to impose the 25th, section 4, without telling anyone.
That is precisely the abuse we’re speaking of over here as well. We’ve seen all sorts of abuses in a less visible way, from the expenses scandal [remember the chipmunk?] to the night of the GE in South Thanet when the boxes were to be unsealed at 2 a.m. and yet the Tory headkicker was able to announce, accurately, at 11 p.m. [the other side of midnight], that Farage was going to lose by a substantial margin.
Sometimes, it’s not even abuses which wreck the procedure but the inevitable result of polling. If, for example, a local knitting group, hypothetically, were to hold a poll on a new member … lets say there was a round dozen in the group. Let’s say five respond to the form mail, of whom three are fine with it and two not. The problem is that overall, only three from twelve have instated that new person.
The alternative is a nightmare … wait eight weeks, as in the Truss/Sunpak farce, insisting on a quorum? Which of course you’ll preventby various tricks behind the scenes? Who’s at fault there? Well members of course, for being so slack, for not understanding, for not even caring.
Unless of course there’s a system in place where silence confers assent, as in no objection, whilst an articulated objection counts heavily.
And coming back to national politics again, let’s say one party got 58%, a pretty substantial majority, almost a landslide in fact, yet only 43% voted overall in the country, many of the 57% refraining out of disgust or disinterest. What is the fairest thing to do there?
Well have a referendum, no?
Only to offer two of the possible alternatives, when in fact there is also proportional as a variant?
What then of the Australian compulsory, preferential voting, on pain of large fines, and a system which ends up producing a two party fightout at the end of every vote … red versus blue as always? It’s called preferential voting down there, where you mark the card 1, 2, 3, 4 … down to the last candidate. Miss one number and your vote is informal, go 1 2 3 4 down the card, called the donkey vote, appropriate in America that would be … and that seems fine with the EC.
And what of a bunch of MPs and those who control them from the shadows afterwards completely ignoring the theatre and doing exactly as they wish for five more years? Such as with the egregious HS2 nobody wants.
