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Posted: 20-09-2013 08:19 Post subject:

This is a quality discussion. Too many good points made since I last dropped in to quote them all.

My opinion is that the current situation is unstable. We cannot go on borrowing money indefinitely, if we carry on as we are sooner or later the government will have to tighten the screws beyond the point that most working people can tolerate, or alternatively someone else (the EU, the IMF) will step in and do it for them.

It is what happens at that point that determines whether we continue as a civilised society or not.

I would like to avoid coming to that crunch point, because revolution / social upheaval is basically letting the Law of Unintended Consequences off its leash and telling it to go and find its own dinner.

To which end I totally approve of Jimv1's idea of changing from left to right (which in any case I have felt for some years is a faux choice to fool the proles, the current politicians with few exceptions basically all being from te same out-of-touch background) to a right vs wrong alignment.

Sadly it isn't going to happen, unless the people outside of Parliament - us - take some action to shake them out of their complacency, so I can only repeat my suggestion to a) make sure you vote and b) vote for someone - anyone - who isn't one of the current troughers.

The PTB's may be able to move fast enough to assimilate anyone elected in this way, but their inept response to UKIP - who are not themselves the sharpest knives in the drawer - suggests they are not as clever as they think they are. This perhaps because of their own isolation from what the man on the Clapham omnibus is now thinking in this post-Internet age.

Posted: 21-09-2013 08:04 Post subject:

This article sums up much of what I think, and what others here have been saying, about political parties and divisions:

The masses have deserted the political parties, and no wonder
Today’s voters want a constant conversation, not set-piece occasions that pay them no heed
By Charles Moore
7:57PM BST 20 Sep 2013

This week, my father attended the Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow. Indeed, he spoke in the debate on Syria. He confirmed to me yesterday that he has attended every such conference since 1953, so this was his Diamond Jubilee.

I mention this admittedly extreme example of participation because it is unimaginable in the new generation. How many young people this month will attend the main party conferences? Plenty will be there on behalf of the media, and plenty more working for corporations, politicised charities and lobby groups; a few would-be MPs, of course. But how many because they are simply interested and want to take part?

It is well known that tiny numbers of young people join political parties. Total party membership numbers have also collapsed. Even the Conservatives, traditionally the party with the largest number of truly voluntary members (as opposed to Labour’s compulsory trade union ones), could not now fill Wembley Stadium twice over. When you read in the press about “party rank and file”, remember that there are virtually none left. It is estimated that at the Conservative conference in Manchester next weekend, only one in five of those present will be a party member.

This trend is extraordinarily regressive. From 1832 until 1928, in a series of Reform Acts, ever wider classes of people got the vote. They responded by joining political parties: it was a natural consequence of their emancipation. Huge national party conferences began. If today, supposedly an age of much greater democracy, the “demos” has fled, the system is not working. If they are not mass movements, political parties have no reason to exist. The basis on which democratic power is parcelled out crumbles.

Some people shrug their shoulders. “No one joins anything any more,” they say. In their view, the lack of participation is a symptom of a selfish, trivial culture.

They wrongly analyse what is going on. There are plenty of things that people do join – environmental groups, for instance, the Alpha Course, and even, as we witness this weekend, Ukip. There are plenty of public issues that people wish to debate and affect. The latest hot topic, which has implications for justice, education, hospitals, religion and the role of women, is wearing veils. The internet is buzzing with arguments about it. It is not true that no one cares. What is true is that few think the main political parties care about what they care about.

It is unlikely they are completely wrong. The modern consumer-citizen is quite shrewd about whether the goods he/she wishes to buy, the services he tries to use or the causes he wishes to influence are responding to him. As a consumer, he is adept at detecting the capture of anything by the producer. If he sees that a political party wants him to come to a city for several days, submit to endless security checks, pay £500 and then sit and applaud while leading figures read out self-praising speeches crafted by spin doctors, he will spot that it is having a joke at his expense. Evil or Very Mad

In the case of the Conservatives, he may note that part of the “offer” is that this is the party that brings you real power, yet it has not won a general election outright since 1992. He has to be at least 39 years old to have taken part in that vote.

In the case of both Tory and Labour, he will see that the central control of the party, in a culture when other leadership structures have flattened out, is more top-down than ever before. Those early 20th-century party conferences may have taken place in an age of deference, but they were genuinely run by the members, not by the leaders. In the Labour Party, the National Executive ruled. In the Conservative case, the leader attended only by the invitation of the National Union and appeared solely to make a speech on the last day. He was not supposed to manipulate its deliberations.

Tony Blair and David Cameron both noticed that their party activists were becoming more and more detached from the wider population, but they responded in the wrong way. Instead of finding means of widening and growing their memberships, they decided to attack the residue. Nowadays, the big party leaderships are not the authentic expressions of the wishes of hundreds of thousands of supporters. They are more like coups in banana republics, in which a small band of ambitious people storms the main public buildings and starts playing martial music on the state radio. Twisted Evil

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/10323315/The-masses-have-deserted-the-political-parties-and-no-wonder.html

Posted: 21-09-2013 10:34 Post subject:

Edit for 'general error'

Posted: 21-09-2013 10:35 Post subject:

...and again.

Posted: 21-09-2013 10:41 Post subject:

Posted: 22-09-2013 01:45 Post subject:

Posted: 05-10-2013 12:50 Post subject:

How could I have missed this?!?!?!

http://www.dailyshame.co.uk/2013/09/satire/david-attenborough-should-just-die-says-non-entity-tory-councillor/