Lament of the Mind

faisdm:

Okay so this week we had a general election in the UK.

The various polls consistently predicted an almost even split for Conservatives (aka Tories), Labour (the main opposition, analogous to US Democrats) and then a bunch for some smaller parties which would have created a hung parliament which Labour likely would have won out by allying with smaller left-wing parties to form a coalition or alliance that had a small majority.

Weirdly though what happened was a Conservative majority so Cameron and his Tories were re-elected. Or course, leading up to it, several popular newspapers owned by wanker conservative press baron Rupert Murdoch ran a massive smear campaign against the labour party, but weirdly that really reflected in the polls. There’s been some talk of boxes of postal votes being lost, and some people being deliberately only given local council voting sheets and not general ones, but I can’t confirm anything there, it’s all conjecture.

The many problems here: Firstly a third of everybody didn’t vote. Secondly the press were very biased due to a huge number of papers being owned by Murdoch, and not just tabloids, he owns the highly respected Times as well. Thirdly, of the people who did vote, not actually all that many voted Tory. Yes, more than the other parties, but due to the archaic “First past the post” voting system, actually only about 24% of people directly voted for the guy in charge of the country.

So of course, a lot of people are angry. Nearly the whole of Scotland voted for the left wing Scottish Independence Party, pretty much all the major cities voted Labour, but because the stupidly large number of small rural and small-town constituencies mainly in the South of England voted Tory, we have a Tory government (oh and you know WHY we have all those rural constituencies? because years ago the Tories Gerrymandered them to be set up that way). They literally want to repeal the human rights act and privatise the National Health Service (and if you want to know how bad and unpopular that is, consider that even the largely despised and very right wing UKIP (UK independence party) didn’t want to harm the NHS!) bring back the barbaric practice of Fox Hunting for all their rich toffy wanker friends, and allow oil and gas companies to frack under our houses and in spots of natural beauty. And so people protested. which the police goaded into some violence by kettling (pushing protesters into a small space and squashing them up), walking around with their batons drawn etc. but the mainstream news was really quiet about the whole thing except for the “violence” while downplaying the number of people in attendance.

Personally, as a Northerner born in the Thatcher era in a working class industrial town, I’m EXTRA FURIOUS.

Conservative governments around the world are using strategies EXACTLY LIKE THIS to take power with sharp minorities. If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying enough attention to issues that drastically effect everyone.