Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Election: Absolutely Disgusted

So, after a clear, but not decisive Tory victory and what seems like the minimum amount of negotiation Nick Clegg could get away with (and simultaneously courting Labour behind the scenes), Gordon Brown has been given the shove and we're now hearing about an oh-so-stable coalition of everyone-but-the-Tories to run the country.

That's "putting the national interest first", apparently. Welcome to the New Politics, same as the Old Politics.

So what can Labour, the Lib Dems, the Green Party, the SDLP, Alliance, Plaid Cymru and the SNP have in common? Other than a desire to shaft the English electorate to further their own individual agendas? With all 7 parties, and the DUP going with the Tories as usual, that's about a 10-seat majority - and 21 different internal squabbles as the Welsh fight the Scottish for more handouts, the Irish fight each other (if they can work together, why are there so many different parties?), the Greens demand the abolition of electricity against the wishes of everyone else in Parliament and the economy collapses under the weight of the spending commitments.

The announcements were made after the stock markets closed last night. Forex, which is 24/7, saw Sterling drop by over $0.01 against the dollar immediately. The FTSE100 opened this morning nearly 100 points (~2%) down, and is still down well over 1%. The markets clearly aren't enthused by this.

Reading the comments from Iain Dale's readers, the electorate aren't going to be happy with an alliance of the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th parties scraping together to get enough seats to overpower the country's first choice to further their own agendas. That's not "democracy" by any stretch of the imagination, and I expect the second General Election this year will be a decisive rejection of all those putting narrow party interests in front of the country's interests that they claim to serve.

- KoW

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