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Sham democracy!

Do the people really have power by voting once every 4 or 5 years?

It's all a con-trick.

Labour, Tory, Liberal - where's the choice?

They will all enact policies that attack workers & leave the billionaires & millionaires alone.

Don't get taken in by it - Don't vote!

COME TO NEWBURY PAUL - I'LL GIVE YOU A STORY.

I stood for Parliament in 2005 (Newbury, Lib/Con contest - Con majority: 3460) - no rosette - no party - just a retired local businessman, calling for voters to SPOIL PARTY GAMES. Britain was still in the Blair Brown Bubble - they 'didn't get it'.

I shall be among the people of Newbury again, from now to the election, this time as 'agent provocateur'. SPOIL PARTY GAMES is still the sound-bite, with the message below challenging them to 'consider their position'.

"Now we must watch, impotently, as parties that the rump-electorate voted for, reciprocally annihilate tens of millions of pounds (perhaps hundreds) fighting a crass battle to sway the sort of voter no self-respecting party should wish to be associated with. What an unedifying spectacle.

Soon the wannabe Westminster ciphers will swirl about our streets, attempting the PERSONAL seduction of individual voters, while carrying the IMPERSONAL, dogma-whipped, rosette of their party. What a sham.

Would it not be appropriate to ask all aspiring MPs why they do not stand as INDEPENDENTS, on their own merit? I doubt any would answer honestly. That being so: what is all this hand-shaking and door-stepping about, if a candidate is, IN TRUTH, simply a rosette stand, beholden to their party, over and above any representation of the people?

It is not enough to hang Parliament, the Westminster ethos would continue manifesting through the undead. We need to return enough INDEPENDENDENTS to 'spoil party games', and bring fundamental change to that Chamber of Horrors, before they can repair the small breaches in the Westminster Citadel's defences."

WESTMINSTER POLITICS

THE ART OF SELF DECEPTION
WRAPPPED IN THE CRAFT OF DECEIVING OTHERS
'FOR THEIR OWN GOOD'

By following the politicians you will not be on the front line, you will be reporting from within the westminster bubble swept out of westminster on a wind of meaningless rhewtoric designed to manipulate rather than lead and into the regions, but still a bubble non the less.

lets hope for afew eggs and rotton tomatoes along the way to briefly penetrate that bubble before it magically re-seals itself and carries on regardless.

#2 I will ask my dad to vote for you barrie he lives down there, good luck.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

Any chance you could blog a digest of just how tied 'our candidate' is by whipping etc, and just how free to do as they please due to the loose ethos they work under? Excerpt below speaks for itself:

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF YOUR MP (not exactly voter orientated)
"Your MP will generally do everything he or she can to help constituents, but will not feel able to
support every cause, nor will he or she be able to get the desired solution to every individual
problem. Members may not be willing to support one constituent if in doing so they will deprive
another. At times a constituent's demands may conflict with party policy and your MP will have
to decide where their first loyalty should lie. The Member may think that, in any case, a majority
of constituents would support the party policy - after all that is likely to be one of the reasons why they elected him or her.

JUST A RAMBLING EXCUSE - REALLY!

DAMN - I WOULD HAVE GOT ONE VOTE! (#3)

Hi Jericoa. Your post heartening. Get you dad to ask MP-Benyon why he does not support an abstention option on the voting slip. (I have his email to that effect.)

#1

Hear, hear!

The phoney war enters the final phase.

Dont vote!...spoil your ballot paper!

REMEMBER!... all spoilt ballot papers are counted, recorded and announced on election night.

From your previous blog Paul, I had assumed you had gone to China to avoid the election?

Now we are faced with weeks of endless hours of dull grey men & women in dull grey suits on the television talking non-stop about the election - and that is just the journalists!

If ever we needed a time for aliens to land on the planet and tell us that we are not alone in the Cosmos then it is right now - by the time the 5 or 6 weeks are up we might even welcome 'Independence Day' type aliens!

Personally I am torn between a general malaise of apathy now spreading across the nation or one of increasingly vocal anger from the electorate - oh, I forgot, we are British. We don't get angry!

tawse57

If Paul was in China he would not be talking about elections.

not one of the three main parties will discuss the elephant in the room which is immigration...how can we ever progress?

Blah, blah, blah......bored to tears already.....

Paul
Be sure to let us voters know if you spot any leadership going on. No, REAL leadership, not the shallow sham that passes for the current party leaders. When that is spotted we will know that there is a chance, just a chance, of solving our nation's problems.
Voters, just remember tactical voting is allowed. Spoiling ballot papers, why bother showing up? Remember people died securing that vote, don't waste it. It may have been cynically subverted, but if you believe in democracy voting matters.

...and Paul, Please can you award a prize for the most obvious blog squad invasion. We all know Labour HQ and Conservative Central Office will be hogging the blogosphere, rebutting policy and demolishing personalities (what personalities?). Tories (and expats) always out in force on timesonline and telegraph, Labourites in the grauniad. Often so obvious it's laughable. Do we have a tune for the election (D-Ream thankfully now redundant)? I humbly suggest "First cut is the deepest"

Hopefully you will bring up the effectiveness of QE/ supposed nominal spending boost, bank bailouts 1-7, how banks plan to refinance themselves whilst politicians plan to break them up/tax their transactions and raise their capital/liquidity quality and ratios - all critical as well as the fiscal position. Get Mervyn out on the election buses for the odd comment!

The three main parties think they have us over a barrel when it comes to elections. They know that in the end one of them will win because most of us are tribal and the argument that 'A vote for a minor candidate just lets the other lot back in' generaly wins us over.

Nothing ever really changes. As I've got older its become more and more apparent that we've got one party with three faces, it makes no differance who you vote for. The reason you can't get a policy out of any of them is that given the choice they would all do the same thing. Whoever stands at the dispatch box in a few months time, the list of cuts will be the same regardless. They just want us to believe it would be different and that we've got a choice....a voice even.

Remember ID cards? They were first proposed by Micheal Howerd when he was the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Secretary in the mid 90s and the Tories loved them, Labour opposed them with a vengance, but when they came into office suddenly it was all change...On both sides! How credible is this kind of thing? Do they think we don't remember stuff like that? One party with three faces.

We have a political class now in Britain, totally out of touch with people who vote....because it doesn't matter who we vote for....nothing changes. Where are the policies? Where is the choice?

Who really pulls the strings? The Unions or Lord Ashcroft? Neither....its the Banks, or the City, when you have a system that ensures that whoever wins nothing changes. It takes the power away from us and gives it to the vested interests, because our votes can be taken for granted we have no say....and thats the way they like it.

What am I going to do on May 6th? Sit on my hands or go down to the polling station and spoil my ballot? Well I've decided to vote for the first person on the form who is not in the three main parties, I don't care who it is they will get my vote. If everyone who was fed up with what has become of our political system did the same thing we could sweep away the lot of them. Its OUR democracy not theirs but the illusion they like to create is that we are the ones that have no choice.

TO VOTE WESTMINSTER OR NOT TO VOTE WESTMINSTER (#14)

Nice post MW.

While we watch, appalled, Westminster on TV, proving to the world (and any of our young who might catch a glimpse) that Britain is ungoverned, NOT ONE MP EVER FEELS AS WE DO, SO STRONGLY THAT THEY STAND UP TO BE COUNTED IN THAT CHAMBER!

Questions for candidates in the high-street: 'Do you support an abstention option on the voting slip?' 'If you stood as an independent, against a party-replacement, would you be voted in on merit?' 'Why do you accept the party whip over the constituency 'whip'?' 'If I vote for you, does my vote go to your rosette, or you as a rosette stand?'

Amazing that they got away with talking about expenses when the real problem is that they have TAX EXEMPT INCOME which means that the average MP would need £316,000pa NOT £67,000 if they were taxed like you and me. Deception by all of them?

Gordon must answer how the tax cut would take money out of the economy. Does he mean that the voter can’t spend it only him??? Economically illiterate or if not then yet another deception

What is democracy?

Is it voting for a political party?
Is it voting for an 'independent'?
Is democracy about voting for representatives?

Why can't we all just vote on the issues instead of our 'representatives' supposedly voting on our behalf?

Instead of trying to 'win' Westminster for the people why not form our own rival system of local democracy?

Arguably the social forum movement was embryonic direct democracy.
A forum for all to discuss how we the people should organise society.

Why not set up your own local social forum?

At the very least it's a place for exchanging ideas.
And who knows, with enough people participating, it may one day take the power away from the politicans & bosses.

Right on Stevie #9

If NN continues to just follow the 3 party cabal of non issues rather than taking truning the agenda to what people want politicans confronted with, NN will not have an audience for the next month.