democracy

The party needs you?
It is an anomaly that so few people are members of a political party yet the party system has such a powerful effect on UK politics. We should also be aware that we have a representative democracy form of government. Singly they are each a problem and in combination a disaster.

However, the political party framework is useful to the political elite as all they have to do is appeal to the party. It being such a small group it will be easier for the elite to influence and steer the public towards their wishes; rather than the other way around and be influenced by the public.

Then they can proclaim the the result is democracy in action. But is it? Traditionally there are but a few political parties in action at any one time. Can it be that the diversity of the voters, millions of people, can be satisfied with just two major and a few smaller parties?

The dynamic is wrong too. The voter must join them to make a difference. Whereas, you would have thought, that the parties hoping to get votes should do more to reach out and appeal to the public. But this is representative democracy in action. A system of many faults!

And it gets worse. Our failing system gives up its power, with scant reference to the public, to other power blocks. The EU is often portrayed as a counter-weight to 'failed' or 'obsolete' nationalism.

Liam Fox
Stories like the death of Gaddafi will, for a while, keep three men from the public gaze. For as we suggested the party political season was a bit of failure this year. Low on politics but high on laughs, it was all so silly. Then real politics came back with a bang, a bit like waiting for a bus as three interesting cases came along at once. This time it was the Tories who started it. Defence Secretary Liam Fox was caught being, well being Liam Fox, wanting it both ways if you like. Fox was followed by another Tory, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice since May 2010, Jonathan Djanogly. Like Fox, Djanogly also seemed to have a problem playing a straight bat, muddling his public and private duties. Next along was Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock, his problem was a simple leg-over affair. Alas the silly man chose a Russian spy for his entertainment. So three men and three cases.

Daniel Hannan gives another impassioned speech summing up the EU and the democratic deficit. He diplomatically fails to mention that Mr Cameron refuses to say whether the Conservatives would hold a referendum if they won the next election but the Lisbon Treaty had already been ratified by all the member states.

Cameron, Hague and friends simply repeat the enigmatic mantra that: "they will not let matters rest there".

Labour is going to listen to the people?

In the London mayoral election nearly 70,000 people voted BNP compared to 77,000 for the Greens on the first preference vote.The other candidates walked out whilst the BNP assembly member Richard Barnbrook was speaking and Boris evidently says that he will be ignored and will have no staff.

An unstoppable force ?

What shall we do with the drunken sailor? is the opening line of perhaps the most well known sea shanty of all. What shall we do with an unwanted country? is not a long-lost verse of this shanty recently found by a ferreting musicologist-cum-folksong fanatic, but is my question to you; and the country in question is Belgium. These things have a sort of connection, in so far as the music for the shanty was written down in 1825, the Belgian Revolution establishing that country, using bits of Holland and France, was in 1830, and the words for the shanty were first heard in 1891. Some of us are dreamers, and so it could just be that, to keep their spirits up during the revolution, someone did hum the music.Then again, by the mid 1890s perhaps the whole song was popular in the coastal taverns of Belgium - could be.