Poppycock

Stroud News & Journal, 17 July 2024

In last week’s general election, Labour attracted a paltry 22 per cent (i.e. just over one in five) of the registered voters, and yet 'won' (ha ha) an unbelievable 63.4 per cent of the seats in the House of Commons.

Note also that Starmer's new, allegedly change-orientated Labour Party attracted less votes across the UK than did Jeremy Corbyn's 'old' Labour Party in both the 2017 and 2019 elections. And yet the commentariat propagandists continually delight in telling us that 2019 was Labour's 'worst election performance since 1935'.

What utter poppycock.

What they really mean is that we have the worst, unforgivingly unrepresentative electoral system imaginable, that routinely generates perversely unfair outcomes.

I’ve been writing a variant of this letter to the press for well over 20 years now – essentially, all I need do is change the latest numbers.

Ever more people are realising that our current electoral system is utterly broken, and is not a 'democracy' in any meaningful sense. It makes Third World tin-pot dictatorship elections look fair and proportionate in comparison.

Counterintuitively, the two main parties, Conservative and Labour, share a common vested interest in continuing to ensure that they have the current system stitched up between them.

In their Faustian pact, each party is prepared to accept that it will sometimes be out of power, as a small price to pay for knowing there are only two parties that can ever gain dictatorial political power – and theirs is one of them.

In his campaign for the Labour leadership, Keir Starmer campaigned on a message of electoral reform which – surprise surprise – he seems to have now dropped.

More opportunistic dishonesty – and yet another reason why so many people are contemptuous of our political class.

So what we have to endure, again, is an 'elective dictatorship', as Lord Hailsham famously called it, pretending it has a mandate when it has no such thing; and a dishonest prime minister who reneges on previous commitments on electoral reform that he's made just to win power.

What on earth do people do when those who have the power to change the existing broken system will never change it to a fairer one, because such change will scupper their own self-interest?

As we all know, turkeys never vote for an early Christmas.

Richard House

Stroud

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