The artist Andy Warhol is once said to have predicted that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. He was, as we can see from the absolute state of British politics at present, more than a little wrong.
It’s not so much that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes but with Suella Braverman sacked (or resigned, depending on what ‘news’ source you consume) as Home Secretary but that everyone will, at some point, be Home Secretary for fifteen minutes.
I’ve been a Conservative party voter for years, sometimes because I have agreed with some of the policies but sometimes I’ve voted Tory in order to keep out a Labour Party that I saw as being likely to be much worse than the Tories. I cannot hold to that position any longer. Both Tories and Labour are equally as revolting. I’ve spent too many electoral cycles believing the Tories when they say they will secure the nation’s borders, energy supply and culture, only to be let down every time. These ‘conservatives’ are conserving nothing. If they were a commercial product then their labelling themselves as conservatives would be against the Trade Descriptions Act.
Next time I’m going to vote for a challenger party and there’s a commentator called Mark over at Longrider’s place who has given me some good reasons why I should do so and no longer vote Conservative. Marc said:
This is where our much derided first past the post electoral system does give protest votes and parties real value. Look who wants to change it and why.
I see no reason why reform, some sort of revived UKIP or any new protest parties that might arise, would be wasted votes.
They cannot be “magicked” away by “transferable votes” or whatever system can be imagined to favour parties over voters. I think FPTP made a more than trivial contribution to keeping us out of the eurine. Get us into that – what rejoiniacs truly want – and that be game over. Trapped below decks behind the sealed bulkhead of the sinking titanic.
Don’t despair. Vote – for anybody but tories, labour or limp dumps. The only thing inevitable about toytown Austria-Hungary is its demise. Don’t underestimate just what a massive setback 2016 was for these creatures and how desperate they actually are. And just ask yourself where we’d be today had that vote been stay.
They had on their side the spurious argument of inevitabilty. They have this no longer. The most powerful weapons they have are despair and indifference. These are weapons we give them. Stop giving.
Mark is dead right with regards Proportional Representation. It might work in places like Israel where it gives parliamentary influence to a multitude of different, sometimes vehemently opposed voices, in what is a very small country, but in Europe and especially the larger nations on the continent, it just makes political oligarchy much more of a problem and silences dissenting voices. There’s a reason why the Liberal Democrats (two lies for the price of one) want PR and that’s because they and their EU-phillia benefit from it.
It’s not a wasted vote to choose an alternative. What is a wasted vote is to choose a wet Tory in order to keep out a Labour party whom you are told by the Conservatives is a ‘worse’ option. I’m faced with two viable choices for an alternative vote for the Tories. The first is Reform, although I dislike some of their policies or the Social Democratic Party whose policies I also have some issues with. However despite these misgivings, either of these parties would be better than the Tories who have failed us and continue to fail us or Labour who would just be more of the same but just wrapped in a red flag.
A spot on article, the Tory party is an utter shambles and after a lifetime of supporting right wing politics I don’t think I will ever vote for them again. I agree with you about Reform, if they have a candidate on the ballot paper I will vote for them. To be honest I now hold my Tory MP in such contempt if it’s a choice between Tory or Labour I will vote Labour just to throw him out. When I as a party member I asked him to help with skyrocketing council tax his reply was “opponents who needs them”. I have since resigned for the Tory party in total disgust. Well in the coming election he will find out just how dangerous opponents can be to your job security.
I voted Tory in my constituency primarily to keep our Labour but the MP is wetter than an incontinent tramp’s piss soaked mattress and to be frank might as well be a Lib Dem. I have grave reservations about Reform’s plans for an elected House of Lords as it has the capacity to create conflict with the Commons if party A runs the Lords and Party B runs the Commons. An elected HOL would create deadlock as occasionally happens in the USA. However I’d vote for them on the grounds that they are not LibLabCon as I hope that this particularly misguided plan for the upper house might be dropped if the party sees the potential problems. BTW here’s a long form explanation of where the HOL has gone wrong and how to put it right with randoms chosen from the voters register https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2020/12/31/a-radical-suggestion-for-house-of-lords-reform/
Up until recently I was hoping the Tories would hold on until 2024/2025 in order to rebuild and to give more time for Labour to show their incompetence and general nastiness but after the last few weeks I’ve changed my mind. We should have a General Election NOW and give the wet Tories their cards.
To add: The best outcome for a GE in my view (a Labour supermajority would be a disaster) would be for there to be a Tory win with a very small majority but with the tories kept honest by a few Reform or SDP MP’s or even a minority Tory govt with Reform and SDP or maybe Reclaim MP’s making the Conservative Party do conservative things. If the Govt needed the support of parties tht are explicitly favourable to free speech then it would not propose abominations like the internet ‘safety’ bill.
Roy you have seen the post of mine that I’m linking to below on alternative parties (and I thank you again for your kind words about it) but others may not have. If I’d written this today then I would have said some things differently. Back then the jury was out on lockdowns but now there is a growing consensus about the harm that they caused, I would have changed that if I wrote it today. I do still believe that the Heritage Party has no broad appeal, that UKIP is a shadow of its former self and that Reclaim made a bad tactical decision to push anti lock down stuff when polls showed that lockdowns were popular becuase there were enough people being paid with Weimar style funny money hot off the printing press, which meant that a lot of people lockdown had caused them no adverse cost. They along with everyone else will suffer from The Treasury and the BoE behaving like they were Germany in the early 1920, as the bills for both the monstrous and costly lockdown bills become due to be paid. Reform have upped their marketing game which is good and Reclaim is picking up publicity as far as I can see after Fox teamed up with Harry Miller of ‘offensive trans limerick’ fame.
Here’s the small part ies article https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2021/10/29/wither-british-politics-are-there-alternatives-to-the-big-two-parties/
Thank you for your kind reply. We have exchanged views on an elected second chamber before and reached different conclusions, I am still of the opinion that in spite of occasional conflicts you can’t be a real democracy with a second chamber stuffed with place men, friends of past prime minister’s, failed civil servants and those born in the right beds. Maybe it would have been better if parliament had lost the civil war and we were an absolute monarchy. (Only joking honest.) We certainly live in interesting times.
I can see where you are coming from on that. The US had appointed Senators up until I believe it was the early part of th e20th century when there was an amendment to the constitution that made them elected. With the Lords I tend to think that it’s not the working peers or the more switched on hereditaries that are the cause of the house’s problems but the PM’s mates, the party donors and those who get kicked upstairs not because they are successes but because they are failures.
Ran out of popcorn earlier so went for a pint of ‘goodens’ in my favourite olde English pub while l continued to follow events. Damn that pint’s strong – Starmer’s lot are beginning to look attractive! Hope it gets better as l sober up.
Your point about about fptp is valid l think, like you l have reservations about reform but currently intend to vote for them at the next election (l’ve been a supporter for a while anyway). Frankly, a period in the wilderness might do the tories a bit of good – an opportunity to figure out who they are and maybe cultivate some new blood. I suggest they start by culling the lib dem student activists, careerists, progressives, and globalists but what do l know?
By the way, thanks for your posts on Jewish tradition and beliefs, as a gentile l find them interesting, informative and enlightening.
I think I’m going to need a 7.5 tonne luton truck load of popcorn in order to look at the Tories or indeed Britain’s governance in general for the rest of this year or more. Re Labour and booze. Yes, Starmer’s lot are a lot of nine pinters ain’t they? It doesn’t get better with Labour whether your drunk or sober. Their latest wheeze is to criminalise misgendering and any gender counselling that isn’t affirmative. Despite the very rapid winds of change around gender ideology and there being a lot more criticism and challenge of it, rightly in my view, Labour are clinging to appeasing the cult of trans. Labour are still wedded to divisive and destructive identity politics.
FPTP has some benefits and many deficits but on theother hand PR can be anti-democratic as deals are stiched up post election. It could help smaller parties get represented in the Commons but at the cost of backroom deals delivering a government of nobodies liking or choice. I still look at some of those who make the most noise about pr and they are not the sort I’d like given any more political power.
For me it’s SDP or Reform despite the different reservations I have of them. We’ve got local elections where I am next year in a council that is run by some less than stellar independents and the Greens. I would really like to see either SDP or both take the Green’s seats as after the winter, people will start to understand that it is because of the greens ideology, co-opted by the government, why they are freezing cold in their homes.
There are quite a few Tories who should really go back to the Lib Dems where they deserve to be, both because of their position on the political compass and their Janus faced political personalities.
The Tories used their time in the wilderness in the mid seventies very well. Margaret Thatcher got a team around her who had a track record for doing things in business, politics and academia and they worked with and around the leader to craft a viable response to the problems of the Labour govt and a response that ordinary people could see some sense in and which looked better than Sunny Jim Callaghan and Wilson were serving up. However to get the space for such a team the Tories would need to get rid of the Lib dems that crept in from Cameron onwards. Nothing wrong with being liberal it’s perfectly possible to be politically right but respect the individual, but as you say the tories have a lot of activists who might be better off in the Lib Dems (who are now not at all liberal). The Oxbridge types who go into politics almost straight from University have also been partly to blame and have tended to have a more globalist / rejoin mindset, becuse this sort of thought appears to be common in some universities as I’ve heard. The local party at least from what I can see is often made up of doers, people in business, farmers, self employed and a whole lot of others who do stuff and create the economy. The problem is the national party is made up of something different and includes too many who haven’t done much outside of politics or the public sector or some left leaning quango. If there were more doers at the top then I wonder if things might be different?
Thanks for that about my piece on the Prayer for the Royal Family. There’s a lot of what some of us call ‘weird Jew stuff’ out there. Like how we didn’t cut our little boy’s hair until he was three and made a bit of a party about it. It’s called an Upsherin. I think it comes from the time when infant mortality was much higher in teh West, more like war torn Africa today. If a boy made it to three then he was going to make it is how I understand how it came about. There may be other reasons, more esoteric, but that’s what makes sense to me. Being the only Jews in the Village I had to spend a lot of time explaining to people why his hair was so long before he got his hair cut. The only trouble was that when his next birthday came around he was expecting the same sort of hair cut party LOL
Nothing wrong with a bit of “weird jew stuff” I think the Jews add a bit of welcome colour to our lives. Especially those guys with such interesting taste in hair styles and head gear. What a sad and boring world it would be if we were all the same.
What I meant was stuff that seems normal to me but might look odd to outsiders. Aha the Haredim and their hats. I don’t know the code but different groups can wear the same hat but just wear it differntly or pinch it differently. Agree if everyone ws the same it would be boring.
WHAT? You haven’t got the hair style, the hat and overcoat??? My mental picture of you is shattered 🙂
I’ve got the hat but no overcoat and particular hair style LOL