Last Straw

As you’e prob­ably already aware, Bri­tain re-elected a New Labour gov­ern­ment on Thursday. Well 22% of the elect­or­ate did that is; with the UK’s anti­quated vot­ing sys­tem that’s all it took for Labour to win 55% of the seats in the new par­lia­ment and become government.

As with the re-election of Bush Junior I couldn’t help but think, using the very argu­ments developed by the Blair­ites to sup­port their bomb­ing and inva­sion of Iraq, that you could for­mu­late a pretty good argu­ment for the bomb­ing of Bri­tain, or at least West­min­ster, to dis­pose of Britain’s very own elec­ted war crim­inal. Maybe the Inter­na­tional Crim­inal Court will get him first.

Some solace might be found in the slash­ing of Labour’s par­lia­ment­ary major­ity from 161 to 66. This may seem siz­able enough but it’s impot­ent when you con­sider many of the Blair­ite policies pushed through over the years have scraped through with very slender major­it­ies. We could be in for some decent par­lia­ment­ary rebel­lions and no doubt this will bol­ster the trade uni­ons and Labour rank and file in their efforts to put down Blair & Co.

Turnout in Bri­tain has hovered around 75 – 85% since 1922, but, after the Blair­ites scammed their way into gov­ern­ment in 1997, the turnout plummeted to 59.1% in 2001 and 61% in 2005. Pre­dict­ably, the experts prefer to blame the elect­ors, con­temp­tu­ously cast­ing the label of “apathy” onto those who have come to the obvi­ous con­clu­sion: the main parties all bat for the same side — the rich, unelec­ted olig­archy of bankers, fin­an­ci­ers and other capitalists.

When Newsnight’s Jeremy Pax­man recently asked Virgin’s Richard Bran­son which party would be bet­ter for busi­ness, the tycoon respon­ded, “Argu­ably, it doesn’t mat­ter.” “The dif­fer­ence between hav­ing a Labour gov­ern­ment for busi­ness to hav­ing a Tory gov­ern­ment has been fairly neg­li­gible,” he told Pax­man. You’re left won­der­ing when the Blair­ites will dis­pense with the bull­shit and get round to renam­ing them­selves Old Tory.

For some actual demo­cratic debate on the mat­ter of turnout you’ll need to look some­where other than the cap­it­al­ist media. The Daily Show’s Jon Stew­art cov­er­age hits the sweet spot as it so often does, and George Gal­lo­way anni­hil­ates Jeremy Pax­man: Win­dows Media Player or Real­player.