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Banana Republic
Posted by el toro calvo grande on 11 May 2010 - 7:29am.
So, how do we feel about the ever growing possibility of having yet another unelected PM running the show? I'm beginning to know how the good people of Zimbabwe felt now...
Is Brown's resignation the action of a statesman carried out for the greater good of the country, or just another shameless, cynical manipulation by the Dark Lord Mandelson?
Is it just me or does Miliband have more than just a touch of the B'stard about him?
Good to see we're giving the world another lesson in how to run a country.
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All of our PMs are unelected
You're thinking of presidents.
you know
what I meant......my brain was addled by the Sky News clip.
Although might it help...
...if all the party leaders were forced to stand in the same constituency?
Honestly
I still don't know what you meant.
I think
what I meant was that as we are now, more than ever given the Leadership debates, in a quasi-presidential system where a large number of voters probably vote for the face they prefer, it seems that we could end up with a PM who took no part in them.
This assumes that we end up with that disasterous hybrid, the Lib-Lab camel with assorted Celtic appendages, being steered by the boy Miliband or Hatty Hymen or similar.
I know, a piss weak effort at explaining. Another example of why I should never commit my political views to writing.
Eleven
mid-term PM changes since 1901. Seven of them Tories, I believe.
We vote for our local MP's, choosing the party and its representative who we think will serve our community best. Any party winning a big enough number of parliamentary seats gets to form a government and the leader of that party (NOT elected by us) gets to become PM. If you want to elect the PM, join a political party and then you'll get a say.
Winston Churchill
1940. He did alright without an election.
Cigars are the answer!
Shove a Havana in the gob of whoever becomes Prime Minister and we'll love him!
1945. He did not so well.
Look what happens when you get the British public to vote.
Winston has been credited with saying,
"The best argument against democracy is to spend five minutes talking to the average voter".
Not sure if that's an accurate quote, but you get the gist.
Or Sid Vicious
"I've met the man in the street and he's a cunt"
Sid for PM!
Sid for PM! Sid for PM!
Oh. Really? REALLY??
Bugger.
More Churchill
He also said something about democracy being the worst form of government. Except all the other forms which have been tried.
Zimbabwe?
Toro, do me a favour! I think we need something like Godwin's Law, but instead of "reductio ad Hitlerum" it should be "reductio ad Mugabum". We all got a vote. A third of the fucking country chose not to exercise it, which is more of a scandal than anything else I can think of right now, but still, the two-thirds who did gave more votes to the Tories. A Labour/Tory coalition is out of the question, so you surely have to go with the most workable alternative.
All elections are questions of degree. Just because the Tories didn't get past the arbitrary winning post doesn't mean they don't have more of a mandate than the other parties. There's some very, very scary stuff which needs sorting ASAP, and I'd prefer it if the fucking politicians could stop worrying about their electoral future and set about doing their best to fix the present.
Zimbabwe, sir?
Unless you were brutalised or put in fear of your life by henchmen at Gordon Brown's behest, you are NOT beginning to understand how they feel in Zimbabwe. Can you see Robert Mugabe offering to stand down?
Banana Republic?
I think progress has actually been pretty smooth so far. Try Belgium for a good example of genuine political madness.
A somewhat overcooked comparison, perhaps, but...
"shameless, cynical manipulation by the Dark Lord Mandelson" works for me.
Democracy
is not always binary. We have a system and it (and all the people in the country) have provided a result which doesn't give one single party a clear majority under that system.
So its either a coalition or another election. If you want to elect a Prime Minister, then you'll need a change to the electoral system. Which is probably more likely now than at any other time in my life.*
* 43 years.
Maybe
we get the government we deserve?
What is more worrying
I read in The Guardian, (I think), that The Dark Mistress in the human form that is Thatcher is offering her "advice" to Cameron.
Hisssssss, hisssssssss. (ghastly sucking sounds) Hisssssss.
Sssstay out of the sunlight, David, oh yesssss, hisssssssssss, it'sss bad for your sssssskin. Hissssssssss.
Contrary to media propoganda
I think the current political situation is quite healthy. Many people people choose to vote for the local representative of the political party whose manifesto they disagree with less than the others. This then gets turned around by the party as, "We have a mandate from the electorate to do such and such..." So in the current position they can end up pushing through a measure that is supported by, say, 60% of their supporters who in turn account for 40% of the 65% of the electorate who voted. Numerically, this means that if 10m people vote for a party, the opinion of some 6m can choose the policy for a country of 60m. Some mandate!
If we're now moving to a system in which policians actually have to a) give and receive feedback from the electorate more than once every 5 years; and b) stay in tune with what people want or are prepared to accept, that's a Good Thing.
6 million would be some mandate indeed.
For one thing, it would be three times larger than any that could be claimed by the Tories today, since only 2 million more people voted for them than for Labour.
I think you're mixing things up
because I was talking about an assumed number of people who support a particular policy within a manifesto, not the overall vote.
If you want to look at total numbers and say the Conservatives "only" got 2m more votes than Labour - which you could also describe as 24% more people voting Conservative than Labour - you could also say that Conservative 10.7m + LibDem 6.8m = 17.5m compared to Labour 8.6m gives mandate of about 9m and more than double the Labour vote. Now we're talking real numbers.
That's not a mandate either.
The only fact is that no-one won.
It's like the end of the Premier league season
and Man United do a deal with Wigan, pool their points, and decide they are Champions
No it isn't
And the fact that a large proportion of the British public seem to think it is a sport of some sort is worrying.
Mayeb this could be
the new mational anthem
I'd vote for that!
relax yer kaks
Jesus, people need some perspective. The sky isn't falling. Coalition is not a dirty word. Only 4 full days have passed since the election. It takes longer to get broadband, ffs.
The current media angle that's annoying me is saying that a LibLab coalition wouldn't have "legitimacy". In what way? It would be illegal, would it?
I just had a look, out of interest, at the NY Times website
and I had to look pretty carefully under "World News" at the bottom of the page to find any reference to the "British Government"
Things have actually gone quite well
We've had an election with no clear winner.
There have been discussions amongst the different parties re putting together a majority in the House of Commons.
In the meantime, Gordon Brown has continued in a caretaker role.
All perfectly proper and presents me, at least, with no problems whatsoever; all is in working order.
You want a scary read, try some of the right-wing blogs, such as the over-hyped Guido Fawkes. There's a strain of paranoid, right-wing nuttery that I had assumed only existed in the USA. Yikes.
Paddy Ashdown said something like
"The people have spoken - we just don't know what it is they've said"
Which, despite being mocked by HIGNFY, is (in my opinion) as good a description as I've yet heard of the current political situation.