Anti-politics
Posted on June 9, 2009
Filed Under A Progressive Viewpoint | Leave a Comment
The people have spoken, and the politicians have ignored them. Again. Labour “won” less than 16% of the vote on a turnout of 34%. About 5% of the electorate (that’s one out of twenty people on the electoral register, folks) turned out to vote for the government party last Thursday. And yet the Prime Minister vows to fight on, vows to change. Labour politicians witter on about the need to re-engage with the British people, which is exactly what they have been saying year-in year-out for as many electoral disasters as there have been – none of which have been anything like as bad as this one.
When Labour politicians promise to listen to the people, they prove only that they’re not listening. The people want this government gone: they might just put up with another Labour prime minister, but they won’t put up with Gordon Brown. And so the Parliamentary Labour Party has pledged to stand behind its jellyfish cabinet and its useless leader, proving only what the people had already suspected: that in general MPs will act in the interests of their own careers and finances before the interests of the people and the country.
Meanwhile there are plenty of Tories rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of another year of a fatally wounded prime minister lumbering from one crisis to the next, only in the end to lead Labour to still greater defeat. Frankly those Tories are no better. The country needs a competent and effective government, and it needs it before next May. The economy is failing, politics is failing, democracy is failing, and yet the politicians lack the will and inclination to act.
And in the midst of all this, politicians find time to bewail the fact that there is an anti-politics sentiment in the country, and are perplexed and appalled that the people of Yorkshire have seen fit to send a Nazi to represent them in the European Parliament.
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