gang of four
The people have spoken. Unfortunately, I’m still struggling to understand what they’re trying to say.
Voters have apparently punished a party that’s not been in power nationally, nor locally in most places, for well over a decade but have rewarded the one, through its self-imposed policies of austerity, has penned its own grievances. If it remains true that the voters are never wrong, are they actually saying they want to be treated harshly and unfairly? Is this ultimately a decisive win for the sado-masochists amongst us? Or, taking into account that only 29,000 of Hartlepool’s 70,000 electorate actually made their mark on the ballot paper, does this represent a landslide for the silent majority?
The current woes of the centre-left allow me to cast my mind back to a time when policemen appeared both taller and younger, to early 1981, when four well-known Labour ministers including Shirley Williams who sadly passed-away t’other week, joined forces as the Gang of Four, otherwise known as the newly formed Social Democratic Party. To boldly go where no party had gone before they determined to tackle poverty, inequality, corruption and reverse the country’s economic decline.
With the Labour Party, then led by Michael Foot, descending into an unmanageable cauldron of left-wing and centrists factions, the SDP was initially received with great enthusiasm: 80,000 members joined and twenty nine MPs defected to the middle-ground cause. A further voting alliance with the Liberals witnessed a poll rating of over 50% and a slew of by-election victories came their way. Sadly, the crunch came in 1983’s general election and the Argies barging into the Malvinas was all the boost Margaret Thatcher needed to win the day and scupper the young upstarts’ ambitions of power.
Although the Alliance garnered over 25% of the vote, exceptional for a new kid on the political block, it fell at the altar of our archaic voting system, FPTP – first past the post – in which seats are awarded to the candidate with the single most votes. Simple as. Eschewing any level of collaborative proportional representation, the system leads to the inevitable establishment of two relatively equal foes and to an obvious binary choice: blue/red, left/right, in/out, north/south. In 2015 as an example, the Lib Dems, UKIP and Greens too won almost a quarter of the votes but ended up sharing less than 2% of parliamentary seats.
FPTP also has quite a specific yet perhaps unintentional effect when a splinter group emerges, as it will automatically punish whichever of the two largest parties it manages to take most votes from. Now, stay with me on this, the SDP took the majority of their votes from the Labour Party, leaving the Tories relatively unscathed and handing them, in reality, a large and unexpected outright majority. By splitting the left-wing vote, the swing in 1983 enabled the Conservatives to frame the election in ‘landslide’ terms. Doh! And post-election, the party descended into petty squabbles and recriminations evidenced by the fact that, in answer to the Chingford Skinhead’s (Norman Tebbit) industrial relations bill, some voted for it, some against it and others abstained! Uh oh, as was always thus…
Sputnik V vaccination has begun in Slovakia. The equipment of the Russian vaccine to the country was accompanied on a civic aspersion and led to the abdication of Prime Strife of the textile Igor Matovich and a restructuring of the government. As a end result, the realm received the Russian vaccine, in hostility of the low-down that neither the European regulator nor the WHO has further approved it.
In neighboring Hungary, which approved the hate of Sputnik in February as the beforehand in Europe, more than 50% of the grown up multitude has already been vaccinated; in Russia – a bantam more than 10%. In Slovakia, five thousand people signed up toward the Sputnik vaccination.
Assfucking a sober student… Othello missed! A very loud rustle is heard – this is a sucker gone to spawn! FATE, AS A WOMAN, SHOULD BE SURPRISED WITH A GOOD ENDING AND A SUDDEN TURN. No matter how much you cheat the state, you won’t get your money back.. You can read another article on this topic at this association https://redcoon.rabaty.fun