Sudan, Britain and democracy

[fpb]

Sudan, a country that has spent the last generation under a bloody tyranny and fighting a civil war, recently had a general election. More electors turned up than the facilities were able to handle; so, by common consent, the electoral commission allowed the polls to stay open for an extra day. In spite of widespread fears, there seems to have been no violence, and everyone who wanted to vote was able to.

Britons were called to vote yesterday. For God knows what reason, unexpected numbers of electors - no less than 20% more than last time - showed up to vote, mostly for the same discredited cretins that have so mismanaged the country for the last several decades. This submissiveness of the electorate was properly rewarded by the authorities, who closed the polls at 10 in the evening, depriving thousands, maybe tens of thousands of would-be electors of their democratic rights.

Sudan gives Britain lessons in democracy. And the British, being idiots enough to reward the villainous three leading parties for their villainy, deserve the insult. They will pay for it, too, when the monsters who have destroyed British manufacturing, devastated British society, run up a debt that makes Greece's seem small, and lined their own pockets like it was going out of style, now make the citizenship pay for their errors.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Party politics in Britain is a trick, and people like GK Chesterton had seen through the trick a century ago. Let us talk a little history. Historically, Parliament is the political instrument of the British upper classes - which does not mean only the aristocracy, but also the London merchants - kept the king strangled and the people oppressed. Historically, it was more oppressive and rapacious than the kings themselves; it was through its rapacity - making them his own accomplices in the spoliation of the Church and the kingdom - that the worst tyrant in English history, Henry VIII, managed to neuter Parliament and reduce it for a while to a servile and terrified tool of royal tyranny. More often, Parliament enforced its own. Its closest parallel is not with any kind of democracy, but with the closed aristocracy that ruled and owned the Republic of Venice.

Come the nineteenth century, these classes were faced with revolution. Their response was this: we shall allow the lower classes the vote - so long as they vote for us. That is the purpose of parties, even in law and political theory: they are associations for the purpose of electing definite candidates. And until the reforms of the middle and late nineteenth century, parties as such did not exist in Britain. Candidates ran with their own money and tended to associate themselves with whichever prominent politician they fancied. But when masses of new electors were let into the registers to prevent the very real danger of revolution, the party apparatuses were contrived in order to keep the votes - even the votes of the new lower-class electors - flowing to the traditional political leadership. It was a ploy that succeeded: for decades after the Reform Bill of 1867, the membership of the House of Commons remained indistinguishable from what it had been in the corrupt old days. The people who had really fought for democracy, beginning with the Chartists, were left out of the equation and forgotten. For a while, a movement arose - Labour - that really did not originate in the old political leadership, and that even managed a certain amount of radical reform; but little by little, it was normalized, the Tory Blur being the last step of its complete surrender to the old, everlasting political leadership.

That being the case, the denial of the vote to tens of thousand of citizens has a deeper significance which you do not catch, because you imagine that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland owes anything to its citizens. No: it was the real bosses, the masters, the owners of the country, who, through their low-level lackeys in local authorities, told the public: we have had enough of your votes, we don't need any more. Go home and come back when next we call you. It was the total denial of real democracy and real liberty, it was telling the people that the vote was something that their owners required of them and could take from them as they wished. And that is actually what the United Kingdom is about. The people accept it because they have no notion what real democracy is. All their lives they have been driven along certain rails, and now, although NOBODY, but NOBODY, feels represented by David Cameron (of the House of Cameron, Eton and Oxford), nonetheless they obediently trooped and gave him their assent, under the impression that they were not allowed to do anything else except vote for the even more discredited Clegg or Brown. Prties are a swindle: they are the political classes' way to occupy the political process and leave anyone else no chance to enter it. And once again, they have served their purpose.

[un-crayon-rouge.livejournal.com]

Thanks for taking the time for this long response. I didn't know many of those things about British history. So, what do you think is going to happen now? From what I'm reading in spanish newspapers, it could take days to actually form the new government. Is Cameron going to be Prime Minister?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

There will be another election. People with any civic sense would realize that this is the time for a grosse Koalition to deal with the monstrous situation of Britain (whose current national debt is larger, proportionally, than Greece's), but not this lot.