Today the UK gets to decide whether or not it keeps the first-past-the-post system of electing Members of Parliament, or instead switches to ‘Alternative Vote’. It’s the single most pointless referendum ever, and owes almost nothing to a public desire for such a change. Zzzzzz.
Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, has entered the debate somewhat later than expected, in favour of the AV system, but merely to score points from the Conservative Party. Here is his recent contribution, in which he talks about putting ‘hope over fear’…
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Really? Hope over fear?
Is this the same Miliband?
Age of Stupid: Reactions: Ed Miliband from SPANNER FILMS on Vimeo.
Is this?
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And this?
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Ed Miliband putting the politics of ‘hope’ over the politics of fear would be a more dramatic transformation than the UK’s rejection of FPTP for AV. Whatever the outcome of the referendum, the UK will be stuck with the same, vapid, banal and self-aggrandising fear-mongers — David vote-blue-go-green Cameron, Ed Miliband, and Nick Clegg — for some time to come.
I don’t watch TV so this is the first time I’ve seen Ed Milliband. So the Labour Party chose him as leader using AV? Enough said…
In the last clip he mentions “dangerous climate change” three times in less than two minutes. Evidence? “.. warmer, more rainfall…” (which is worse than “colder, more droughts…?)
Maybe an idea as contentless as dangerous climate change could only get accepted in a society where TV has replaced print as the main political medium. Transcribe these burblings into written sentences and you can see how witless they are – Alex Cull has been doing just this with a number of radio and TV programmes at
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home
Behind the daftness of Milliband is something far more serious – the belief -shared by all major British politicians and practically the whole of the establishment – that they should be doing something about the climate.
It’s this disconnexion between politics and “the polis” which is so worrying, and which fires the accusations of ecofascism. It’s not that environmentalists are into building concentration camps, but that worring about the climate is akin to worrying about racial purity. It’s displacement activity – a psychological reaction to a political malaise.
Politics is, or should be, about society. When Mrs Thatcher said that there’s no such thing, she touched a raw nerve on the Left, because Anglo-Saxon individualism works by pretending, a lot of the time, that society is no more than the sum of its members. The left seems to have reacted to Thatcher’s taunt by saying “Maybe society isn’t important, but what about the climate then? You can’t deny that’s important!”
And here we are with three interventionist left-of-centre parties ready to channel all our social energy into turning back the tide. What a bunch of Cnuts.