I’ve been following them over on the Guardian.
In my local area we already have two Conservative MEPs, one UKIP, and one BNP. I am disgusted, and I feel terrible that I didn’t vote, I have no excuse – I was voting back home anyway, by post, and I lost the forms, and I’ve no idea what’s happening there because the votes haven’t come in yet. But anyway, I am appalled.
Nationally, UKIP is currently running second to the Conservatives.
Meanwhile, David Cameron is planning to climb into bed with the Nazis (I may be exaggerating slightly, it’s more that he’s linking up with a few pretty mad rightwing european parties and leaving behind the more liberal Merkel and co); whilst if you didn’t realise just how mad the BNP are, here’s a list of their policies. A just marched into my room and fumed and fulminated for quite a while, getting me to read various things whilst interjecting frequently with assorted swearwords, explanations (as if I needed them) about what it all means, and reading out the articles in suitably doom-laden and dripping-with-sarcasm tones. I can read, dear. His angry-political mode is quite amusing so long as he’s not actually yelling ‘Fucking hell’ repeatedly into your ear whilst you’re trying to read, or kicking your chair in frustration. But then, I entirely sympathise. I just don’t get angry.
I’m hoping I’m going to wake up tomorrow and that this will all be a really bad dream, The End, but somehow I doubt it. Now is not the time for fairytales, now is the time, apparently, for unmitigated political landslide disasters unfolding horribly and inexorably in an almost cinematic way. What a mouthful. And with that – what I think might actually be my fifth post of the day and therefore a record (I don’t even know why I bother with Twitter, apparently I can spend a certain amount of time every few hours finding something to blather on about) – I will shut up and actually go to bed like I’ve been saying I will for nearly two hours now.
But I want to know this: what the hell can we do about all this now? I remember, just a few months ago, I was sitting up excitedly, hopelessly failing to concentrate on the film I was watching, constantly rushing back to my laptop to check the progress of the American election. When Obama got in, it felt like the start of a new age – but since then it seems to me like things have only got worse. Where America is moving forward, we are moving backwards, people are getting more insular and just more awful by the day, and I’m honestly quite scared.
I feel I ought to point out that the kicking was more of an unconscious twitch than violent action likely to cause damage to property.
What can we do? We can get active.
Blog to follow.
BNP got fewer votes this year, to let you know. It’s just that Labour did less well. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8089108.stm (6th paragraph after the bullet points)
So what would you do? Censor them? The fact is that the two BNP MEPs are the product of democracy and you can’t get rid of them because you don’t like them. Whether or not this result bears any relation to what’ll happen in the general election is debatable – some people maintain it does, others that it doesn’t. So what would you do?
It’s long been maintained by the European Court of Human Rights that while freedom from discrimination is important, you can’t generally block people’s freedom of expression because they’ve offended you. Does that make them more or less liberal?
“We support the re-introduction of corporal punishment for petty criminals and vandals, and the restoration of capital punishment for paedophiles, terrorists and murderers”… say what now?
I can understand the chair-kicking and swearing…
And I can also see how parties like this get voted for.
But in my opinion, they use too many exclamation marks, and thus I will never ever vote for them.
Cxxx
I know they were democratically elected, but I’m also not sure that the people who voted them in necessarily knew what they were voting for – after all one of their prospective MEPs was going around begging people not to vote for her when she realised how racist the party actually was, and if someone can get to the point where she’s a prospective MEP before she realises what a mad party she’s ended up in, what hope has the common man to realise, necessarily, if he’s not habitually a reader of news or a watcher of dubiously hysterical Channel Four documentaries that secretly film people like Andrew Brons and Nick Griffin saying definitely Nazi things? That’s not to say that they should be taken out of power as such, it’s more that I want to register my disappointment with any- and everyone that such an awful party somehow managed to gain a foothold in power.
Would you consider it invalid because the people who voted obviously didn’t know what they were doing? They have as much access to information as the rest of us do. Someone disagreeing with you, someone voting far-right, is not necessarily evidence that they don’t understand what they’re doing.
An anti-BNP rally – fairly drastic for a registering of disappointment, no? It’s a difficult issue. I can’t quite reconcile it in my own mind. But I think, especially after this last year, I don’t feel right about doing anything but erring on the side of free speech. Even though it’s quite a lot less exciting, and it allows for some pretty nasty characters.
In theory I totally agree with you – they were democratically elected – we, teh people, one way or another, gave them these seats. But as you say, the BNP got fewer votes this time than last, and last time they didn’t end up with any seats whatsoever. The real problem is that the majority of us feel disenfranchised. I had no idea who to vote for and ended up not voting at all and I very much doubt I’m the only one. Ideally I’m a Labour supporter through-and-through but I just don’t feel represented by Labour at the moment, the party being what it is, and in the shape it’s in, and I strongly disagree with a number of their policies. And that is why the BNP got in – not because a large enough slice of the populace wanted them in, but because a large enough slice of the populace didn’t really want any of their given options, and the few that knew what they wanted – or thought they did (I still don’t think that enough people were fully informed about the policies of the BNP and didn’t know what they were doing, but that’s their own silly fault for not properly looking up the party they were voting for, but then I guess not everyone obsesses enough about how to use their vote that they go in for extensive (procrastinatory) internet research in the lead-up to any given election) – were the ones who voted, and those few just happened to be BNP supporters in enough cases to get them in. So I don’t think that the BNPs share of the vote is truly representative.
Thinking about it, it would be very interesting if the entire voting population were forced to vote – what would actually happen? More interesting still, if one of the options on the ballot card was ‘None of the above’ and the result of a majority NOTA view would be that no MEP was sent for that region. That way we’d be screwed in Europe but it would be a very clear signal to the government that they all need to start getting their act together. I know it’s possible to just spoil your ballot paper, but if everyone was forced to use their vote I think we’d get a very clear signal of some kind, one way or the other. What do you think?
Spotted this! I think we should have obligation to vote and abstention boxes in ordinary elections. In ordinary elections I think this should result in a coalition. In a European election… I have not a clue. You have to send somebody. Pass.
What I am interested by is that you would be a Labour supporter ‘ideally’. Why? Surely what a party stands for is what it stands for. What it stood for thirty years ago is neither here nor there. Every party has shifted its politics in the last decade. But we’re not voting for them a decade ago. So I don’t understand.
It’s strange, these last six months I’ve got a lot more lassez-faire in my politics. It’s law. Still think the vote should be compulsory with option to abstain, though. It might be weaker, yes, but it’d be representative, and surely that’s the point. Hmm. What say you?
I have still yet to write/ publish that blog. I will do at some point, promise!
PLease do – I look forward to it
xxx
[...] this leads me on to Jenny’s question. What’s done is done, but what the hell can we do about all this [...]
As in, Fi, within the labour party, there’s a whole spectrum of individuals with their own individual views about all kinds of things, and I agree some point on that spectrum. Unhappily I don’t happen to agree with a lot of it, and there are some Labour parties I am in absolute opposition to. So I can align myself with some Labour MPs and some Labour views, but not all, and I cannot in all conscience vote for them until I at least don’t disagree so completely with some of the things they say. So yes, I am very Old Labour, but I don’t think Old Labour has entirely died out. And ideally ideally ideally I’d live in an era where I *did* feel more represented by Labour, but that’s magic, and not going to happen, and if I *could* time-travel I’d probably actually be really frivolous and go and live out my Jane Austen fantasies or go and live on Firefly or something instead. Yes, I know both of those things are largely or indeed wholly imaginary. Never mind!
Meanwhile yes – what happens in European elections in the You Must Vote idea we’ve got going, I really don’t know. Tough one. Meanwhile in an ordinary election if you’ve got a majority abstention, what do you do then? That’s the interesting thing – because you can’t just have a coalition of all the parties the abstentors (I may have just made that word up, spell-check certainly seems to think so) clearly *don’t* agree with, or rather, you can I guess becuase what else would you do?
Jane Austen is looking more appealing by teh minute – in a Jane Austen world I’d have nothing bigger to worry about than just how I was going to paint this table, embroider that cushion, or convince Lord Something-or-Other to propose!!