Tuesday 19 May 2009
Two Polls
Given the continuing crisis over the MPs expenses scandal and the call by David Cameron for a petition for an immediate general election I have added two polls to the blog to give some idea of what people are thinking locally. The first poll asks if people support the call for an immediate general election and the second poll is to find peoples voting intentions in the event of an election being called. I have noted 5 parties, Labour, Tory Lib Dem, Respect and UKIP (Respect and UKIP one each) who have seats currently in parliament plus 2 others, BNP and Greens who have sizeable blocs of councillors, and in the case of the Greens a euro MEP and who might be expected to challenge the major parties in any upcoming general election.
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4 comments:
It's depressing, though not entirely unexpected, to see that the BNP appears to have some support in the village.
Its constitution says: "The British National Party ... is wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples. It is therefore committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, bylegal changes, negotiation and consent, the overwhelmingly white makeup of the
British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948."
The big irony, of course, is the BNP seems to have borrowed most of its policies from the African dictators Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe.
Amin threw the Asians out of Uganda and Mugabe has driven the Europeans out of Zimbabwe. Uganda remained a basket-case country and Zimbabwe has become one today.
The worldwide repercussions of a BNP-run UK would be enormous and damaging - we would become a pariah state in the eyes of much of the democratic world.
The well-off would leave these shores; foreign investment would dry up and be pulled out, costing millions of jobs; inflation would soar as countries not imposing embargoes on trade with us demanded ever higher prices to supply our oil, gas, other commodities, goods and produce. In return, we'd find it increasingly difficult to sell our goods and services overseas. In short, our economy would collapse. We'd have more in common with North Korea and Zimbabwe than we would the Commonwealth of nations that the BNP sees as our future.
The BNP promises to put the 'Great' back into Great Britain, in reality it would the 'Grate' - a giant plughole down which everything we value and hold dear would disappear.
I fully endorse what The Thinker says. Anyone considering supporting the fetid heap of rat droppings which is the british nazi party should think long and hard about the consequences should they ever be elected. Always remember that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Patriotism maybe the "last refuge of the scoundrel", Babyblox, but patriotism is not what the BNP is offering.
Patriotism, for me, is having a belief in shared values of honesty, tolerance and respect for others, of doing one's best, not just for yourself and immediate family but for those around you, for our nation.
These attributes are what makes this nation "great", not the crackpot imported policies of African dictatorships as espoused by Nick Griffin and his cohorts.
Agree with Babyblox.
I think its worth pointing out that european parties of the far right were promoting the kind of thing highlighted by The Thinker long before the rise of Amin or Mugabe and that their policies were very much a reaction to the racism inherent in the British and other european empires virtually from the time that they begasn conquering large chunks of the world and decided that they had to provide a rationale for why it was in everyones interests that they should carry on doing so. Worth remembering that one of the founding fathers of the racial side of Eugenics was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman.
Whilst deploring and opposing the rise of the BNP, and I think its now almost inevitable that they will win at least one seat in the european parliament next month, the real question that has to be asked is why the state of politics in the UK has become so dire that the BNP are on the verge of winning euroseats at all and that the biggest winner in both this and any subsequent election is likely to be apathy. One reason I would advance is that beyond the obvious MPs expenses scandal giving the impression that all politicians have their snouts in the trough, there is also the impression that on many issues all the major parties appear to be singing from more or less the same hymn sheet.
Thats why I would support the call from Mark Serwotka, General Secretary of the PCS union for union backed candidates to challenge the main parties at forthcoming elections on issues like privatisation off the post office and welfare reform. Even if such candidates failed to be elected, and under the current electoral system that would be the most likely outcome, it would at least ensure a wider public debate on such issues then is currently the case.
Worth remembering also, that in the Scottish parliament a wider range of political views have been represented at various time due to elections by PR and that in Scotland the BNP hardly register on the political radar at all.
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