Last week we went to the polls for the fourth time since I arrived in the UK, and once again I ended up scratching my head at the bizarreness of Brit democracy.
As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
And it’s true.
The Conservatives won and judging by their reaction, you would’ve thought they had replaced sliced bread in popularity.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the Conservatives; they believe in you standing on your own two feet. As Prime Minister David Cameron said, their policies empower those who work and help those who can’t. Labour, on the other hand, empowers those who won’t.
But yet, maybe sliced bread is more popular.
Cameron may have a majority in parliament, but in the real world he only got 37 percent of the vote.
It gets even more bizarre. The Scottish National Party (SNP) won 56 seats with only 1.45 million votes. Yet the right-of-centre United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) got treble that – nearly 4 million votes – but only won one seat.
The reason for this is the first past the post system peculiar to these islands, where there are 650 seats and if you get 326, you win no matter how many people voted for you or not. Democracy for many – especially UKIP – means their votes don’t count as all. It’s better to have some supporters concentrated together than many spread thinly on the ground.
Pompous predictions
But the most bizarre thing is how the pundits got it all so wrong.
The chattering classes who loathe the Conservatives predicted with pompous certainty that there would be a hung parliament with resurgent Labour forming a coalition, probably with the Liberal Democrats or SNP.
Instead the Lib Dems were massacred and Labour ignominiously ejected from its Scottish stronghold.
It took me back to covering elections in the old apartheid days where reporters were dispatched to all political meeting (all legal ones – the National Party government would jail you for quoting the ANC) and so I listened to everyone from Eugene Terreblanche to Helen Suzman, both dead now, delivering vastly different messages.
The newspapers I worked for supported the PFP (Progressive Federal Party or Packed For Perth, take you pick), but that didn’t matter.
We went everywhere without comment. When the PFP candidate from Greytown gave a Black Power salute during a campaign meeting in 1987, I took a photograph and my Editor let the Nats use it as it was part of the election process. Indeed, if I had been paid copyright royalties every time that picture was used by the right-wing, I would be writing this from my condo in the Bahamas.
That ear-to-the ground reporting doesn’t happen here. Indeed, there is hardly any door-to-door electioneering – left-wing politicians do everything in their power to control the narrative rather than argue ideas. They don’t want to debate their policies; they want to shut you up. And the easiest way to do that is to call anyone who disagrees a bigot. Just mention the word ‘immigration’ and you will have ‘racist’ screamed at you before your mouth shuts.
Manipulation
Consequently, England is the only county I know where majority beliefs and values have been falsely manipulated into something considered shameful.
Most Brits want to do as well as they can in life and be rewarded for it. Most want to provide for their families without being dependent on the state.
Yet the left-wing (ie: every party except Conservatives and UKIP) considers that to be ‘socially outrageous’.
The narrative labels all left-wing parties as ‘progressive’ (despite the fact that socialism has been discredited everywhere), and not to believe in the nanny state is decidedly ‘unprogressive’. So when confronted with opinion polls, people lie rather than admit to ‘outrageous’ beliefs, such as controlling immigration or curbing welfare scroungers, which they only express at their local boozer.
The result? The chattering class is so out of touch with ordinary people that they’re on different planets.
That’s why Labour is shocked they lost. They have so assiduously tried to control the narrative that they have no idea what real people think.
That’s what this election said more than anything else.
