A Plague On Both Your Houses

We cannot afford to pass the ball interminably between the Conservative
and Labour Party. Changes to the voting system are irrelevant in this respect. If the same parties and individuals are going to be in power - taking turns every decade-and-a-half or so - then it really doesn’t matter what the system is that gives them that privilege. Names might as well be pulled out of a hat. The electorate need more choice. Blair changed everything. The leaders of the three most popular political parties are all Blair clones. Slim, serious, media-savvy men, whose reach invariably exceeds their grasp. Men who would be dangerous in any political party. They live for power, and what they might do with it, and will compromise every principle that they ever held in order to achieve it.

The Coalition Government will undoubtedly do some serious damage during their five year shot. We cannot simply be complacent and hand power straight back to Labour, in an act amounting to nothing more than political schadenfreude. Life should be too short, for each of us to be repeating that mistake. If the last general election demonstrated anything worthwhile it was that anything is possible. It seems unlikely that there were even odds on a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition before the election. Smaller parties need to be ready to respond to the disappointment coming to traditional Conservative and Liberal Democrat voters. Labour voters need to question whether or not their needs might be met with greater success by another party: they have the benefit of recent memory to guide them.

Bystander, Inc. is non-affiliated and so does not endorse any of these smaller parties / independents. It does recognise that there will never be a better time than now for these people to prove their worth: on the run-up to the next general election, where literally anyone could take power. The last election resulted in a vote of no-confidence in all of the three most popular parties. The nasty horse-trading that took place following the result was all the work of politicians. The electorate’s verdict was clear: no one party had a majority and therefore no actual mandate to run the country on the basis of the policies they had spent years presenting. It was a plague on all their houses. They have all now had their chance. They keep telling us that there is ‘no other choice’. Fool the electorate once and shame on the party that committed that deceit; fool the electorate twice and shame on the electorate. We are not a nation of gullible fools. It is time to start listening to someone else. If there is even a chance that there is someone out there with an original solution to even one of the country’s major problems, then they deserve to be heard and considered.