Reason 6: Election Night
I had not long been born and the Third Reich was already providing my childhood playgrounds just round the corner. It had prepared plans for one of its battle routes to London along the A20 which came right past my dads pub in Maidstone. Rather than serving these travellers a drink or two my dad would have been shipped off to a slave labour camp somewhere. The rest of us I know not where, although I have a few horrible ideas. When I last looked over the English Channel from Hells Corner tucked away in the cliffs below Dover Castle I couldn't help pondering how that twenty miles of sea has affected me and what I like to believe is my thinking.
In 1943 it was just wide enough for this sceptred isle to dig in, prepare the defence lines, get ready to flood Romney Marsh as we had done in readiness for Napoleon, to build all the pill boxes and tank traps and to get a network of last stand heroes hidden away in their bunkers among the chestnut under-wood of my home county of Kent. The Men of Kent would have been in the front line. In 1066 on the other hand these narrow seas were just not wide enough and the Norman invader met a battle worn army. Once again, all these centuries later I ponder how those events have affected my thinking.
Some wars are completely pointless, and indeed I might go as far as saying that most of them are. Some had their point but it is lost somewhere in the library. Some had clear causes while others like the First World War need a lecture course to explain, yet still leave you asking, 'Why?' My granddad was in the Boer War and my dad in the First but the reasons and the significance of the Second is at another level of understanding and justification. Election Night reminds me that it was a close run thing back in the 1940's and that it was worth the fight. That is why I will be an aggressive democrat, both in the sense of using it and criticising its product, till the day I die.
On Election Night we witness the re-constituting of a Norman institution which was teased out of a succession of Kings, including the despotic King John. We won't be having a King choosing that name in a hurry. Many great improvements have been won down the centuries but it must not be forgotten that at the centre of our Executive branch of government the vestiges of despotism still lurk in the modern equivalents of the contingency plan filing cabinets and , given the wrong conditions from the citizens point of view, are ready to be implemented by a latter day despot. Anyone who thinks otherwise has failed to understand the purpose of democracy, the rule of law, scrutiny and accountability. Worst still, they know nothing of the nature of our system of government or our history. Democracy is all very inconvenient to the bureaucrats but that is how it should be. That is why those bureaucrats who advocated the abolition of Election Night for administrative convenience are the unwitting, not to say witless, enemies of democracy. They also give an insight into how governments can become divorced from the people. A small example but nonetheless revealing.
This is my sixth reason why I will not only enjoy this General Election but both savour it and thank my lucky stars that it still happens. As the results come in I hope you will join with me in celebrating this fact of a decent life, and think of those in the world who are denied fair elections. Whoever wins, if we lose sight of the reason why we are going through this process, we are lost.
Showing posts with label Election Night. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Election Night. Show all posts
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Don’t let them Rob us of our Election Night Results
Although the thought of an election is somewhat daunting and depressing I can’t help looking forward to them. For as long as I remember election results have been more a feature of election night rather than the following day. It was the ‘night’ which really made my day. At first this was on the wireless, yes it is still wire less, and I used to ask my parents who the various people were and why they were always having ‘Parties’. My parents were from a mixture of tradesman, military and professional stock and so I was always curious to know whether the latest result would help the Conservatives or not. I think the first election I remember must have been the one which resulted in the defeat of the Atlee Government and the return of Churchill in 1951. Ever since I have always taken an interest and with the coming of television coverage I have managed to stay up for much of the night to see how the villains and the saints would get on. The election of 1964 and the end of Sir Alex Douglas Home’s ambitions is probably the most memorable especially as I saw on my bed-sit TV that my then MP, Home Secretary Henry (babbling) Brooke, had lost his Hampstead seat. A close second must go to the defeat of Michael Portillo with what must go down as the one which drew the loudest response. I think most of the street where we were living at the time could not have missed the wave of cheers which rippled along the terrace at about 3 am.
Whether it has all been worth it is a recurring question but it has certainly been fun. I think I have managed to catch most of them down the years and a young teenage daughter eventually joined me in this late night lunacy. Imagine the disappointment then when I heard that more local authorities are planning to postpone their counts until the following day. Talk about hiding the democratic process. While trendy suited types try to convince us we should be able to vote in supermarkets and probably soon by hitting the red button, turn outs falls and fewer and fewer people vote. Consequently more and more people fail to recognise the dangers of going into to their own little private worlds as though this makes them comfortable and safe. It does neither; it simply makes them more and more ignorant of what is going wrong with the system. The tragedy of this retreat is that they have no idea what the growing British Mediocracy and Bureaucracy, which is stunting the growth of British Democracy, will lead to.
Is the hiding of the electoral process in the daylight hours when so many voters are at work, give or take 3 million unemployed, part of a cancerous plot? I suspect not, but I do think that it is part of this nations unwitting progress into undemocratic ways, which, if we are honest, have hardly advanced much since universal suffrage began to emerge after the Reform Act of 1832. The Duke of Wellington is reputed to have said after the passing of the Act that, ‘ the mob will now rule’. Unfortunately that mob, the ordinary working and trades people of the country, do not seem to have had much of a look in as the aristocratic embrace of the British Constitution has worked its magic and produced all kinds of leaders which eventually revert to the status quo of middle or upper middle England. We may well be about to see an election which will give rise to a government, which like that of Sir Alec’s or Harold Macmillan’s, owes more to the playing fields of Eton, rather than to those of the grammar school, let alone the New Universities, comprehensive and secondary moderns: yes they still exist as well.
. The minor public schools, Winchester etc, (Fetters?), have always been well represented in Parliament, and this will no doubt continue, although many Oxbridge students now see their destinies elsewhere. How can the less fortunate people get into Parliament, let alone feel they are represented by people they have something in common with? There are those who will say that this might not lead to better government, but judging from the social background of the many Parliaments I have seen come and go, I remain to be convinced that it has yet been properly tried. Robbing the ‘ordinary people’ of the traditional circus of Election Night will not help, and will probably do great harm, to any attempts to re-engage people in the political process. The move away from the depressing low turnouts that our ‘democratic processes’ seem to bring about will not happen. Perhaps compulsory voting will be the next bright idea to finally turn the electorate into the unthinking, obedient servants of the failed Jerusalem that Britain will have become.
Dacier
Whether it has all been worth it is a recurring question but it has certainly been fun. I think I have managed to catch most of them down the years and a young teenage daughter eventually joined me in this late night lunacy. Imagine the disappointment then when I heard that more local authorities are planning to postpone their counts until the following day. Talk about hiding the democratic process. While trendy suited types try to convince us we should be able to vote in supermarkets and probably soon by hitting the red button, turn outs falls and fewer and fewer people vote. Consequently more and more people fail to recognise the dangers of going into to their own little private worlds as though this makes them comfortable and safe. It does neither; it simply makes them more and more ignorant of what is going wrong with the system. The tragedy of this retreat is that they have no idea what the growing British Mediocracy and Bureaucracy, which is stunting the growth of British Democracy, will lead to.
Is the hiding of the electoral process in the daylight hours when so many voters are at work, give or take 3 million unemployed, part of a cancerous plot? I suspect not, but I do think that it is part of this nations unwitting progress into undemocratic ways, which, if we are honest, have hardly advanced much since universal suffrage began to emerge after the Reform Act of 1832. The Duke of Wellington is reputed to have said after the passing of the Act that, ‘ the mob will now rule’. Unfortunately that mob, the ordinary working and trades people of the country, do not seem to have had much of a look in as the aristocratic embrace of the British Constitution has worked its magic and produced all kinds of leaders which eventually revert to the status quo of middle or upper middle England. We may well be about to see an election which will give rise to a government, which like that of Sir Alec’s or Harold Macmillan’s, owes more to the playing fields of Eton, rather than to those of the grammar school, let alone the New Universities, comprehensive and secondary moderns: yes they still exist as well.
. The minor public schools, Winchester etc, (Fetters?), have always been well represented in Parliament, and this will no doubt continue, although many Oxbridge students now see their destinies elsewhere. How can the less fortunate people get into Parliament, let alone feel they are represented by people they have something in common with? There are those who will say that this might not lead to better government, but judging from the social background of the many Parliaments I have seen come and go, I remain to be convinced that it has yet been properly tried. Robbing the ‘ordinary people’ of the traditional circus of Election Night will not help, and will probably do great harm, to any attempts to re-engage people in the political process. The move away from the depressing low turnouts that our ‘democratic processes’ seem to bring about will not happen. Perhaps compulsory voting will be the next bright idea to finally turn the electorate into the unthinking, obedient servants of the failed Jerusalem that Britain will have become.
Dacier
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