Facebook comment from David Bradley

I'd like to share with the readers of this blog this great comment from David Bradley that he has graciously allowed me to repeat here for your enjoyment.

"The Prime Minister has announced a National Minutes Silence on Friday for those effected by the Tunisia Attack.

"38 people have died so far including 18 British (expected to rise to 30).

"Especially grief stricken is Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP who was hoping for more survivors to be disabled so he could hound and bully them out of benefits and into his ever growing, unrecorded list of deaths."

The politics of austerity by guest blogger Tom McEnroe

I’m proud to present the first guest contribution to this blog and I’d like to thank Tom McEnroe for feeling that he could voice his opinion here.

Since the financial crisis in 2008 until the present moment, the people of the UK have been terrorised by the present government, right wing think tanks and a supportive mass media into believing and accepting that this country is bust and has no choice but to inflict austerity on the nation and its people. That "austerity" has not affected the rich, the extremely rich, politicians or indeed, the Monarchy. What it has done though, is decimate jobs, stilted growth and infrastructure; sliced damaging cuts into the NHS, and Welfare claimants, lowered wages AND continued to double the debt it inherited.  It has demonised the unemployed and working poor of this nation as if they, and not the bankers and Hedge fund managers, were somehow responsible for this state of affairs. 

We are constantly being told, "We have to make some very unpopular, but necessary decisions, as a government in order to tackle this financial problem."

In regard to that, let me just say this: in 1945 this country managed to create, introduce and implement the NHS, it did likewise with the Welfare state AND managed to build 100,000 new homes - all at a time when we had 5 times more of a financial burden due to war debts.  Social progress created under a truly socialist government.  Why can't this happen today?  Because the banks, the powerful and wealthy oligarchs who control government, won't allow it. There is no private money to be got from socialist ideologies. There is however, money to be made from privatising the NHS, cutting back on the Welfare state and restricting the creation of affordable social homes so that private landlords can push rents up to the ceiling.

This extremely right wing, Conservative government has inflicted more socially damaging and draconian policies than even Margaret Thatcher ever dreamed she could get away with.

And all in the name of "austerity!" All in the name of saving the country.

It is a political philosophy based upon an outrageous lie, AND a betrayal of the very people they were elected, in good faith, to serve. And one which may very well lead to the break up of this United Kingdom. If it does, the rich and the greedy have only themselves to blame.

A quick look at the political Left and Right

Below is an experiment in putting across information in a vlog way.  It's not a long piece and looks at what I see as the differences between the political Left and Right as well as giving you an idea of what I want this blog to achieve.  I hope you like it.

Please do let me know if you'd like to see more of this vlog approach.

Submissions welcomed!

This is a call to anyone who's interested in joining me in trying to start a dialogue on how we can change the electoral system of the UK to something a little more democratic and a lot less corrupt.  Of course, there's also a discussion on how we need to change society as a whole too and all the stages we need to take to get to a better society as well.

I try not to push a particular political stance but, since I am against the current administration, I tend towards a disdain of the political right-wing even though I have areas of agreement with the right; however, I am open to submissions from all areas of the political spectrum as I believe that every ideology has something to contribute to a better society.

If you'd like to submit something I'd be happy to publish it on this blog to open up a massive dialogue.  The only stipulation is that your submission is not offensive to groups or individuals or generally offensive.

Please send your submissions (with your name/pseudonym) to vor.comments@gmail.com

Some thoughts on the reforms needed to the electoral system

This blog posting may come across as a bit of a lazy piece of work seeing as how it will be, more or less, a list of the reforms I believe are needed in the electoral system in the UK.  I will fill in more details in a later posting but I want to get the bare bones of my ideas ‘out there’ so that readers can post their comments on my ideas and add any suggestions of their own.

I have always intended this blog to be a forum for political and electoral change and want people to contribute their comments and suggestions or even write for this blog so that interested parties can engage in a dialogue as to what reforms are needed and how they can be achieved.

As I haven’t had any experience in running a multi-writer blog I have no idea how I can open up the blog for other writers to post directly so I have set up an e-mail address specifically for people to send their blogs to me for posting until I can sort out proper access.  I have also been made aware of problems in posting comments so, if you have a problem posting comments, you can use the same e-mail address or try typing up your comment in a word processor and then cut and paste it into the comment box.

The e-mail address to send your contributions/comments/suggestions is vor.comments@gmail.com.  Please include your name/pseudonym with your submission so that you can get your ‘by-line’.

So, let’s get started, shall we?

Valen’s suggestions for electoral reform

1. Scrap the ‘First-Past-The-Post’ system in favour of Proportional Representation 
2. Change the funding of political parties so that all donations to such organisations are put in a central fund and distributed to all political parties on an equal shares basis 
3. Change the rules on how much can be spent on promotional materials/events 
4. At General Elections, a single publication will be distributed that contains the manifestos of all the parties with the various strands of policy given separate sections
5. Manifesto pledges can only be added to the multi-party manifesto publication if they have realistic and independently verified funding strategies to pay for them
6. Election campaigns to be fought positively based on policies and no character assassination, scaremongering or divisive tactics 
7. Election campaigns must be fought honestly and focus on independently verified facts not opinions
8. Any breach of the rules will result in a 10% deduction in any votes cast for the party who broke the rules which will be evenly distributed to the other parties
9. People standing for the post of Member of Parliament must have been born and/or lived in the constituency in which they are standing for a minimum of 10 years 
10. Although there would be the ruling on who may stand in a constituency (point 9 above), all parties (except nationalist ones outside of their country) must be on the ballot paper so that voters can vote for the party of their choice and not settle for a tactical or second choice vote

I think that’ll do for a start, don’t you?

Please send your comments and suggestions to me via the comments section on the blog or via the e-mail address given above.

Where did the political system go so wrong?

Isn’t that the question we should be asking ourselves in the UK today?  How could a system that is supposed to ensure democracy suddenly start producing such undemocratic results?  How could this system produce such an unrepresentative Parliament?

Let’s look at the statistics from the 2015 General Election to provide some rigorous mathematical evidence:

• Total number of voter registrations = 46,814,081
•  Actual voter turnout = 66.1%
• Total number of votes cast = 30,944,108
• Total number of valid votes cast[1] = 30,691,680

From just these four figures you can see that we already have a problem of unrepresentativeness in the electoral system with a huge 33.9% of registered voters not even bothering to vote due to apathy caused by an almost complete disconnect with the political process.  For whatever reason, millions of registered voters felt that it was not worth the time to vote in the election.  Was that reason because they couldn’t find a candidate in whom they had confidence?  Was it because the party they wanted to vote for was not fielding a candidate in their constituency?  Or was the reason much more fundamental – a complete lack of faith in the veracity of politicians and the ‘First-Past-The-Post’ (FPTP) electoral system altogether?  These questions need to be answered.

In the FPTP electoral system the single winner is the person or party with the most votes; this does not mean that they have to have an absolute majority of votes, just a relative/simple majority.  This, however, can lead to some very dodgy results and has led the Electoral Reform Society to argue that FPTP is "bad for voters, bad for government and bad for democracy".  The graphic below shows how unrepresentative the results were in the 2015 General Election.

Table: The disproportionality of parliament in the 2015 election was 15.04 according to the Gallagher Index, mainly between the UKIP and Conservative Parties.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2015

As you can see from the table, the disparity between the percentage of votes cast for a particular party and the percentage of seats they won is, in some cases, hard to figure out.  How, for instance, can the Conservatives only get 36.8% of the vote but win 50.77% of the seats in Parliament?  Is it fair that the UK Independence Party (UKIP) got 12.6% of the votes but only won 0.15% of the seats?  And how can the Scottish National Party (SNP) get 4.7% of the votes but get 8.62% of the seats?

It seems that the current allocation of seats is hardly representative of the actual will of the nation.  In fact, under Proportional Representation (PR), a much more valid representation of the wishes of the country, the winners in terms of seats gained would be UKIP and the Green Party (as you can see from the infographics below).

Source: http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/heres-how-the-election-results-would-look-under-a-proportional-voting-system--gJenQmaW2gW

Looking at the above infographics and how unrepresentative the results of the election were compared with the general will of the people in terms of the allocation of seats in Parliament, is it any wonder that people have become so disaffected with the whole idea?

Yes, it is true that the overall result is basically the same with the Conservatives in pole position and Labour a poor second but the people who voted UKIP or Green Party must feel as if their voice has not been heard or that they wasted their vote.

The fact is that the Conservatives, despite having a majority of the seats in Parliament, do not have the percentage of the popular vote to back it up and is, in fact, a minority Government.  Let’s back that assertion with some figures, shall we?

• Votes cast for Conservatives: 36.8%
• Votes cast for Conservatives as a percentage of total voter registrations: 24.2%

So, looking at these figures, the Conservative administration has been forced upon the UK by only 24.2% of the registered voters, leaving a huge opposition of 75.8% of registered voters to anything the Conservatives want to do.  Hardly a legitimate mandate from the people, is it?  More to the point, what we are looking at is rule of the majority by the minority.

It is facts like this that led to the findings of a poll conducted by The Independent newspaper that “61 per cent believe the system should be reformed so that smaller parties are better represented in parliament (sic)”[2].

People who oppose electoral reform do so because they say that it will lead to more coalition administrations; the counter-argument is “So what?” as, so long as the coalition partners actually negotiate so that both partners, regardless of the size of their contribution of seats to the coalition, both stand up for their principles and come up with some kind of compromise on issues they disagree on.  The Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition of 2010-2015 was never a partnership as the Lib Dem members either gave little opposition to legislation that conflicted with their core principles or refused to vote on those issues at all, even selling out entirely on core manifesto pledges.

The FPTP system has shown itself to be completely inadequate to the job of handling the 21^st Century needs of a multi-party electoral world and needs to be reformed otherwise the UK will continue to swing between the Conservatives and Labour, leaving many to feel that it’s a waste of time voting because nothing ever changes.  The current system is completely unrepresentative of the genuine will of the electorate and is so open to corruption that large interest groups and individuals can call the shots (if only behind the scenes).

It is not just a move towards Proportional Representation in voting that’s needed, it is the implementation of voting for whichever party you want without the artificial constituency boundaries, total reform of how political parties are funded and introducing the idea of PR in Cabinet that’s required.  Whichever party has the greatest proportion of seats in Parliament should provide the Prime Minister for that is only right and correct but the Cabinet should be made up from representatives from all the parties in the same proportion as they are represented in Parliament.

It is only a system such as the one described above that will ensure that every vote counts.

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[1] Valid votes statistics are derived from the total number of votes cast minus spoiled ballot papers

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/generalelection/general-election-2015-sixty-per-cent-of-people-want-voting-reform-says-survey-10224354.html