Election Notes

[poliphilo]

The Mediterranean boat people aren't exactly David Cameron's fault but they do point up the futility of his Libyan policy. Dropping a few bombs and walking away was neither helpful nor responsible. Mind you, I don't know what the alternatives were. Do nothing? Send ground troops to keep the peace? I don't suppose Ed Miliband has the answer either.

We're living in an age of mass migration and we need policies- global policies- to manage the chaos. At the moment all we're getting is knee-jerk reactions. Go after the traffickers, burn their boats, pick up the refugees and dump them back in Africa. It would nice to have leaders who could think beyond the next headline- leaders with a sense of history.

Cameron has been told he isn't being passionate enough, so now he's haranguing his audiences like a football coach. O dear.

All the real passion in this election is coming out of Scotland. Everyone else is just going through the motions. Ed Miliband has been bullied by his enemies into saying he'll never form any kind of alliance with the SNP- an undertaking he'll almost certainly have to break if he becomes Prime Minister. He thinks the English public is afraid of the SNP because the Daily Telegraph has told them the SNP is evil and dangerous.. Is that really the case? All the members of the English public I know would love to have someone as dashing as Nicola Sturgeon to march behind.

I supported Ed Miliband at the time of his election to the Labour leadership because he wasn't his brother.  That now seems a very poor reason. A leader has to lead- which means looking and sounding good on a podium and having some sort of vision. Ed fails on both counts. Has any British political party ever gone into an election with such a wet noodle in charge?

It's been noticed that neither Cameron nor Miliband is willing to expose himself to the unpicked electorate. They go from photo-op to photo-op, deliver speeches to audiences of party trusties and tour facilities on industrial estates where the workforce is on its best behaviour (with the bosses looking on) and they can be guaranteed not to be accosted by an angry pensioner or a disrespectful child. It's pathetic. In the good old days a candidate was expected to show his mettle by facing his public. For instance, there's an election in Trollope's Dr Thorne where both candidates address the crowd from the balconies of coaching inns. One gets his frilly shirt front soiled by a rotten egg  and retires in confusion, the other wards off a dead cat with his stick and goes on talking. The dead cat man wins- and quite right too. This trial by voter continued until quite recent times. Remember how John Major used to plonk a soap box down on random street corners? That seems heroic now. How far we must have fallen for John Major to seem heroic. How far and how fast.

Comments

[matrixmann]

With the Mediterranean, actually there's never ever been a kind of strategy how to handle migration in any kind of time period of the world, not even for the kind of desired migration. Those problems with people coming from foreign cultural circles and not learning how things work in that circle which they migrate to, it has been there in the decades after WWII, and before that during the last period of technological boost at the beginning of the 20th century, and even before that as the industrial revolution started - as people moved again to the places they could find a job at.
There's never ever been anyone which had a concept to control or to guide where this development runs at.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think you're right. When large numbers of people take it into their heads to move from one place to another there's nothing much that can be done to stop them...

Hello again

[(Anonymous)]

To my mind, the problem is a lack of progressive politics - consensus, proportionality. You mention knee jerk reactions.... That's the only kind of reaction we can have with our type of political system. Nothing can be planned, organised, carried out that has a longevity of more than five years in length. And the leaders can only act and react within that system, so it's not entirely their fault either. We suffer from such short-termism that to actually say and start to plan something sensible would be futile because there may be a swing next time round that would cancel those plans.

This whole fptp system must be costing us an absolute fortune the number of times departments have their names changed, school curriculums are suddenly discarded after a few years for some other curriculum because a different party is 'in power'. The whole thing is a nonsense. The paperwork, the training, etc etc.

Few want to relinquish that power it seems; I'm still hopeful (but with a touch of cynicism) that the SNP can achieve some much-needed electoral reform. Then we can maybe build on some decent long-term ideas for our group of countries.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I'm becoming more and more depressed with the political classes as this election campaign progresses. :o(

[matrixmann]

If one complains about the problem that people don't adapt to the culture they move to, be it the regular work migration or be it the refugee migration, one needs to think of a concept how he wants to conduct this. Because obviously if you let it run freely, it doesn't take the directions that you want. If people are left alone with that challenge and they don't neither have the means nor they experience anything that picks them up from the state of mind where they're at, then this is going to end up in failing at that challenge. Either by people not wanting to take it up or by people failing at it who try.
Regardless of the capacities that society has to take people like this in.

Re: Hello again

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I see what you're saying, but if you don't have frequent changes of government you find yourself lumbered with a one party state- with all the stagnation, corruption and abuse of power that that entails. We allowed Mrs Thatcher to spend a long time at the top and she became autocratic and a little deranged. Then we went through exactly the same thing with Tony Blair

I don't have answers. I wish I did.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Me too.

Re: Hello again

[(Anonymous)]

But it wouldn't be a one party state, it would be a multi party state, forever moving forward (albeit I imagine more slowly, but forward nevertheless) by consensus, so everyone gets a bit of what they want, but there aren't the extremes that come from one party terms of parliament. And there isn't the same amount of damage done by having one of the two 'big' parties 'in power' for long periods of time.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Sometimes immigration works out pretty well and sometimes it doesn't. There are parts of our cities where cultures seem to bounce off one another happily and creatively and others where the different communities sit it out in their ghettoes and stare balefully at one another.

Personally I think we have to make multiculturalism work because I don't see any other way forward.

[matrixmann]

And obviously this only seems to work if you have a strong society and a strong state which quickly signalizes to you what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do (basically this is not a bad idea also in regard to the resident citizens - since they also have their problems trying to see the do's and the don't's in their culture.)

Re: Hello again

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Multi party politics seems to have arrived. Everybody agrees that the next government will be some sort of coalition- official or otherwise.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We went through a long period where no-one would criticise or move against minority communities- even in cases of child abuse and political corruption- for fear of being thought "racist". That phase seems to be over now. The Mayor of Tower Hamlets- an Asian guy who shouted "racist" at anyone who dared to question him- has just been sacked- by a judge- for electoral fraud and misconduct in office.

[matrixmann]

Over - yeah.
But which kind of direction it will take to meet the problems at stake, I won't vouch for that it goes that way which one probably wishes it to take. (I might suggest it could also take a step backwards, back to "National socialists were right" and such.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes it could go that way but I don't think it will.
At least not here in Britain (which is all I really know.)

[matrixmann]

In Britain this mindset doesn't have such a great tradition, but for the mainland Europe...
Say it this way, it's the only people which dare to install some kind of order with solid rules and solid do's and don't's, and they don't care if they break active law or not, and they don't have any problems grabbing guns if it's about sleeper cells from the Middle East.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

No, parties of the far right never gain much traction here. They come into being, scare people for a while, then fall apart. We like to think our fabled sense of humour prevents us from taking them seriously and we're very proud of the fact that when Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts attempted to march through the East End of London in 1936 the working class rose up en masse and gave them a jolly good kicking. An event that has gone down in history as The Battle of Cable Street.