UK election 2005. -part 3

The most bizarre part of this election is that in terms of policies and issues in polls everyone generally sees the Lib Dems as having the sanest, most sensible and decent policies that they feel they can support. Despite this pretty much no one is going to vote for them in the General Election. Simply and purely because the Lib Dems haven’t been in power before, and because of that no one trusts that’ll they’ll be up to the job. Yet the only reason they’ve never been in power before -is because no-one will vote them into power because they haven’t been in power before...

(It would seem the Lib Dems only pick up any votes when someone is making a protest against the party they would normally support, rather than voting postively for the party.)

See the inanity?
Yes, indeed, the people in this country really are on the whole THAT stupid. Both Labour and the Conservatives know this and pander to this fact to the hilt. The Lib Dems are perpetually surprised by this, and being inherently decent haven’t learnt how to exploit this to their advantage. (I do have a sneaking suspicion that your standard Lid Dem voter has a higher IQ than that of your average Tory or Labour voter.)

My gripe about this sitituation is that to break this absurd deadlock is that we need to change the political system, we desperately need proportional representation. But we won’t get that until… the Lib Dems get into power -see the flaw? Of coursse Labour and the Tories aren't going to ever change the electorial system - it's not in their interestes to ever do that.

So the country remains trapped in this complete rut - we never really get to actually progress anywhere.

The other problem with the Lib Dems is that their Leader is a red head. I’m sorry, but this ignores another principle of modern politics which frequently gets overlooked: the fact that in this highly visual - completely televised world - politics is now in large part a beauty pageant. The political world is increasingly ruled by image consultants, every prominent MP you see is put under intense training to fake sincerity as convincingly as possible. Anything close to genuine authenticity was bled out of politics a very long ago.

UK election 2005. -part 2

Despite my deep seated dislike and distrust of Tony Blair -not under any circumstances must Michael Howard ever be allowed to gain power. He was one of the worst Home Secretaries we’ve ever had, he was one of the main forces behind the disastrous Poll Tax fiasco, the list goes on.

The Conservative Party played their race card early, all to make a direct appeal to their bigoted supporters. No doubt hoping to steal some votes from the BNP.

Also once again they’re dragging out their tired, completely threadbare and discredited promise for lower taxes. By which they always, but always, mean lower taxes only for their wealthier supporters, which in the end always involves sneakily clawing back this new shortfall from the poorer individuals and families in both indirect (VAT) and direct taxes, whilst at the same time cutting all the public services these people have to rely on. (Rich people never care about public services - they don’t use public transport, they don’t use NHS hospitals, they go to BUPA for their Health Insurance and go private hospitals, they have private pension plans -etc. Mark it all down to selfishness. If the Middle classes are about anything they're about all out selfishness.)

The Conservative Party has a whole have always disgusted me. I can see through how utterly primitive their world view is -it’s all so medieval, so completely feudal under-pinned with the mentality of the robber Baron. It's just nasty and grubby. So I can see why this is so popular amongst the 'less sophisticated'. Hell, it’s not far off from the whole monkey-mentality -"My banana! Mine! My territory! Mine! I’m bigger than you -I hit you. -I rule. Now I want your banana too. Give -or I hit you."

The only vaguely clever part of all this is where the Party leaders recognise this primitive mindset in their minions and exploit it to their advantage. They’ve been remarkable by how very successful they’ve long been in getting the working class to vote for them - despite the fact that everything the Tories have ever done and will continue to do has been totally against their, the Working classes own best interests.

(Much in the same way the Neo-Conservatives in the USA cynically took /take advantage of the Christian Fundamentalist Right Wing over there to help bulk up numbers at the polling booths.)

I hope that most people won’t fall for their lies - and can remember what a disgusting repellent ball of decadent sleaze the Tory party eventually devolved into after their far-too-long years in power. When you’ve got a primitive grasping monkey-mentality you’ve bound to start playing with your own shit and start flinging it around sooner or later. That's just what monkeys do.

In which the Groc has a long, long rant about the current UK election:

part one.

I’ve been hearing on the news that the current election issue of today is the Iraq Invasion. Which brings me directly to the reason why I certainly don’t think Tony Blair deserves to re-elected. As far as I’m concerned no matter which way you look at it he in no way deserves another term as our Prime Minister.

To quickly recap: Saddam was pretty much on his last legs, there were sanctions against him in place, everyone now admits there were no ‘Weapons of Mass destruction‘, so in actuality Saddam was complying to whatever was being asked of him. He certainly had nothing to do with the bombing of the Twin Towers. Etc. Yadda, yadda, yadda, we all know the story by now.

But today as on previous occasions all we’re getting from Tony is, something like, to paraphrase wildly: ‘well, I thought I doing the right thing at the time (according to what the American President told me). We won. So I’m not sorry. (Yaa-boo-sucks.)’

But Tony, if you end up doing everything President Bush tells you to -are you being a Leader (of our Country) or are you just being a follower? (Not to metiona complete suck-up?)

If you believe the moon is made of green cheese are you suddenly going to start to send rockets up there to mine it? It doesn’t matter what you ‘believe’. Running the country isn’t about articles of faith. It’s a pretty lame excuse for killing people in an invasion.

So in short, at best -being overly charitable here, he made a vastly bad decision based on completely dubious intelligence or else is (I dread to think) part of something altogether much more sinister. In either case -the cold hard facts are that it has cost thousands of innocent lives, is still costing untold amounts of money and has left Iraq in a far worst state than it was before -a mess which is going to go on costing and be a big problem for everyone concerned for many years to come. It hasn’t even lead to lower oil prices for the ‘Merikcans. It hasn’t even lead to contracts for UK big business taking a share of the cake in ‘rebuilding’ the country.

It also sets a dangerous prescient doesn’t it? “We absolutely totally need to invade - (insert name of any country we fancy here -China/Russia/Poland say)- because we have it on good authority (IE. That is from some people we captured from that country and tortured into getting them to tell us exactly only what we wanted to hear) that they’ve got a lot of weapons aimed our way and they’re threatening to attack us with them.
… … …

After the invasion: “Oops-a-daisy, - there weren’t any weapons after all, our bad. Never mind, what few civilians there are that are left -are very happy to be liberated… So that’s alright then isn’t it? Yay for us.”)

Either way all of this marks Tony Blair as someone I really don’t want leading our country.

I'm having thoughts...

about my blogging.

Years ago now -orginally I wanted my own domain because I'd heard way too much about Blogger eating up people's posts - and I liked the idea of being in control of every little thing there on my own gaffe. But with with all the hassles with MT, and the nasties of comments spammers running thorugh and trashing everything...

Blogger is a different space now from what it used to be - look there's even a spell checker now, I'm sure with a bit of effort I could learn how to make it look like something I want it look like, and there's a built in comments system now (and that seems to be - for the time at least immune from comment-spammers...) for the time being -even the problem of hosting my pictures has been solved by being with flickr...

so there's the issues of what I want to do with a blog and why I want to blog (do I want to blog?) and what I want to do with a webspace...

So I'm thinking, I'm considering...

What to do... what to do...