6 Reasons for enjoying the General Election 2010: Pt.6

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.

6 Reasons for enjoying the General Election 2010: Pt.1

Reason 1: The Internet

For once I feel I have a voice either via this blog or through Twitter. I have been interested in politics from the first time I heard my mum and dad calling to each other as another result was announced by the BBC Home Service. My parents were Conservatives and I now know that this was the 1951 election which brought Churchill back into power after the post-war Labour landslide had rejected his party's policies despite his wartime leadership.

Once the results came out on election night TV the whole process became much more dramatic and so by the 1964 election when it looked clear that the old grouse moor Tories would be bowing out the true election night tradition for me began. I had access to a TV! Where the Internet makes everything so much better is that if you have the time to spare you can track the election debate from start to finish. For those who have never engaged with the political process, especially those young people who feel elections will not make any difference to them, there is a chance that the Internet might just draw them in. There is certainly no lack of comment, from the comic through to the serious world of the political analyst, whether dealing with voting projections or the stature of the party leaders. The statistics for Twitter alone show how many go in for re-active TV viewing.

There will be those who say that the Leadership Debates have changed the election campaign into a sort of Pop Idol event to the exclusion of the traditional hustings and interviews. At the moment I see no signs that the latter will come to an end. What I do see is the possibility of previously disillusioned voters engaging with these new electioneering methods. Whether the leaders will agree to such debates again remains to be seen but with the arrival of the Internet, television is only one part of the democratic process . The Internet will have an increasingly important role if computer literate youngsters become convinced that an election can lead to improvements in their lives, rather than waste, ineffectiveness and broken promises. This is crucial because an election with few voters is meaningless and there are elites who would be very pleased to fill the vacuum thereby created. In five years time who knows where the Internet Election will be.Such speculations should make it interesting and intellectually enjoyable. To those who say that nothing changes I answer, 'Yes it does, and often for the worse. If you don't vote you can't complain, and one day it could have serious consequences if you did complain.' There is no benign circuit hard wired into our political institutions. I am therefore enjoying this election because it means so much for the future of democracy in the UK.

Dacier

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