A Referendum on Nick Clegg

Regardless of how you feel about AV, the process of debating voting reform in this country will have one beneficial effect. Nick Clegg - a man who has lied to himself about what the electorate wants, what the country needs and his own necessity – will finally come to understand what a dreadful series of mistakes he has made. The AV referendum shouldn’t be about Clegg, but it inevitably will be. Voters will associate Clegg with the ‘Yes’ vote. They know it is something he desperately wants, that his party will definitely need in the next election and that success for the ‘No’ vote will ultimately humiliate him. It is the electorate’s first opportunity to punish Nick Clegg for his broken promises, his misguided leadership and joining an ideologically opposed party in a coalition. They will find it very hard to resist that temptation. He is already absent from the public side of the AV debate – his image has been removed from campaign leaflets and he has failed to attend key ‘Yes’ vote functions and launches. Given that Clegg must have been involved in such strategies, surely he must now be beginning to question his previous decisions. There is a sick irony to Clegg’s justification for coalition government. One of the clear concessions he received for backing so many Tory policies to the hilt has been this referendum. It seems now that this very act is one of the biggest deciding factors in voters not backing his flagship proposal. Perhaps even Nick Clegg - deep down in some primitive part of his brain, the part dealing with survival instinct – might start to question the worth of his Faustian pact. It won’t be David Cameron coming for the Deputy Prime Minister’s political soul, however: it will be his betrayed voters.

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.

Benjamin Zephaniah Airbrushed From ‘Yes’ to AV Leaflets

Okay, so this is pretty disgusting. The Conservatives do not do well on race relations. In the past they have been plagued with a vicious racism, as evidenced in Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. In modern times they seem to be a self-serving vehicle to resist previous comparisons, for example David Cameron’s cringe-worthy TV Debate quote, ‘I met a black man...’ This is of course suggestive of the fact that this had been a previously rare occurrence for the Prime Minister.

Even the Labour Party has had its race-related problems. Phil Woolas ran a disgraceful race-riot-inducing election campaign, which ended with his subsequent dismissal from Parliament. Taking into account their political perspective and appeal, the Liberal Democrats should do much better. Here they are, however, on leaflets for one of their flagship (almost only) policies, in which they have sanctioned the elimination of a famous black literary celebrity. Zephaniah has been retained on leaflets sent out across London, but not areas of the country with a smaller race differential. He has been replaced with a white celebrity whom the Liberal Democrats presumably assume might ‘play’ better to audiences in Sussex and Cornwall. Naturally, this massively underestimates the people in those counties. This is pretty despicable of the Liberal Democrats who should be fighting this kind of conduct – not embracing it. It is the kind of tactic we might expect the Tory Party to employ. The Liberal Democrat Party under Nick Clegg really are the new Tories. Unbelievable.