Well, it happened again.
I have written several times of the interesting phenomenon we see in the mainstream/progressive media, to wit, when they start calling an electoral result "too close to call" that almost inevitably means the conservative cause or candidate will win (here, for example.) Besides the Scotland independence referendum, we saw this phenomenon in various elections and referenda in Wisconsin; in several of the US mid-term elections; in Australia; and, of course, in Israel.
We now have seen "too close to call" in the UK general elections. As I write this, it seems the Tories are poised to win a majority or close to a majority of the seats in Parliament and the odds favor Cameron remaining PM. I am no fan of David Cameron--who reminds me of many of the milquetoast leaders of our own Republican party--but compared to Ed Miliband, well, no contest: I'll go with Cameron.
I would have preferred a big UKIP win. Alas, that was not to be; absent that, I'll take a Conservative win.
UKIP polled quite well but have only won 1 seat; and as Farage failed to win a seat, he must now resign as leader. First past the post is being blamed, but those in the UK who think preferential voting or proportional representation is the answer need only look at Australia to see the problems associated with those systems.
ReplyDeleteYes, UKIP got twice as many votes as SNP, but only one seat to 56 seats. Pundits will be harping this as sign of UKIP's decline, but I would think differently. Yes, these 3+million voters were scattered diluting their political effect, but this scattering enhances the spread of UKIP's message amplifying the cultural AND political effect over time. This is how tidal waves come into being.
ReplyDeleteThat "Anglo Saxon" being Europe's greatest threat speech from Juncker the Drunker may have swayed some votes in this "surprise" win.
ReplyDeleteOnce upon a time there were three political parties in the US, the Republican Party being the newest of the three. It was smaller, at first, than the Whigs, but eventually the older party elected to merge with the newer.
ReplyDeleteUKIP might have a similar trajectory.
Green Bear
Remember Israel? A Leftist landslide.
ReplyDeleteThe same pattern time and again. Days of a route by The left. huge gains. Then election day. A tie. To close to call. Allegations of fraud and "problems" with the conduct of the election.
Then the next day. acknowledgement the Conservative won (but never any mention of the magnitude of the win). Continued allegations left hanging in the air.
And finally, on to the next election to repeat the narrative, hoping the results match the meme they are trying to present.
Entertaining read from across the pond. Comments're edifying too.
ReplyDelete(Post can be linked to directly from Dip's sidebar if y'all don't want to bother pasting this into a Search engine.)
http://duffandnonsense.typepad.com/duff_nonsense/2015/05/crikey-i-was-right.html
Agree with your comments (especially about preferring UKIP), but (beneath the surface) this was not a bad performance by labor at all - it represents a new structural problem.
ReplyDeleteLabour actually increased their share of the vote by 1.4% relative to 2010.
In round numbers:
The Liberal Democrats lost twenty-five seats to the Tories.
The Liberal Democrats lost twenty-five seats to Labour.
Labour lost fifty seats to the SNP (yielding a net loss of twenty-five seats for Labour).
As long as the SNP can win over ninety percent of the seats in Scotland, Labour is not getting back in power without going into coalition with them (which, if suggested in advance, certainly isn't going to sway many marginal voters).
Politics as we understand the term, is a bourgeois endeavor. We do not fight. We deal. We negotiate. Negocios, in Spanish, just means business. This sort of governance began with the Medieval towns, in which the guilds elected Aldermen, who elected a mayor. Then, as the Reformation developed, their theorists may have provided some sort of ideological or theological justification, but, churches elected elders, who might, in some places, elect a bishop,or they might not bother. New England town meeting grew out of Congregational annual meetings, and I have sat, and gotten up and talked through many years of those. This is why the Communists and the NAZIs denounced the decadence of "bourgeois democracy." .So, the Brits, a nation of shop keepers, made a deal. They looked at the UKIP, and liked what they saw, but they calculated that they'd get more of what they like in a straight up Tory House of Commons. The voters are not always so stupid. Who knows? Maybe intelligence will break out on this side of the water, and we'll elect Walker, or, even better, Cruz. To quote Judy Tenuta, "It could happen!"
ReplyDeleteCruz and Rubio are for the future. For this time, I go with the governors - Perry, Walker or Jindal. For VP, Fiorina or The Brain surgeon.
Delete@Michael Adams: Re the Reformation and the Bourgeoisie, forget about Max Weber. He wanted badly to be the anti-Marx (noble ambition), but pulled something out of his hat in order to be it.
DeleteThe Reformed ("Calvinist") wing of the Reformation contributed to the politics of the deal by its firm belief that no single sinner (that's all of us, forgiven or not, who descend from Adam by ordinary generation) could be entrusted with enough power to destroy the people; that the "manner of a king" delineated in I Samuel 8 is a warning rather than a list of divine right prerogatives; that Deuteronomy 17 is to govern any political head's behavior; and, that since David, for all his being anointed by Samuel, still made a covenant with the elders of Israel, so, too, should other political heads; that all authority in home, church, and state is ministerial rather than dominion; etc. (a number of ideas Locke got from them)--politics is a matter of compact. That's why elders were elected from the congregation. As for bishops, the Reformed church order, following Acts 20, sees elders (Presvyteroi) and bishops (episkopoi) as the same office.
Robert of Ottawa, my opinion is that few VP selections could be as detrimental to a campaign as Fiorina. I happened to have been at HP during her tenure, and there's just no way to describe that lack of leadership and the absolutely boneheaded, egocentric disaster.
DeleteI encourage everybody in the GOP to "go there" and "ask those questions", because HP under Carly was basically the Costa Concordia of tech giants. Attempted to satisfy her ego via reckless endangerment, and when the well predictable disaster happened, she was first off the ship with an *incredible* golden parachute.
How a person manages to "fail up" to a senate campaign and then hold aspirations of "failing up again" to a potus campaign is just beyond me.
- reader #1482
Maybe with a clear Conservative majority, Cameron will grow a pair. It will be interesting. I'd like to see Walker and Jindal. Fiorina is inexperienced and "The Brain Surgeon" skipped economics.
ReplyDeleteThe way our Budgets are crafted and have been systemically abused for decades leads me to believe the majority of our Elected Representatives have skipped economics.
DeleteCarly is beyond simple "inexperience"... in fact, I'd say she's the opposite.. she's "over experienced in running the ship aground." (HP commonly considered itself a ship, with Dave Packard coming back here and there to correct the course... and then he passed on... but nobody expected the disaster of Carly.)
DeleteI hope the GOP is looking into this... it's not what I've seen in the news.
- reader #1482
Interesting observations. I decided to give my vote to UKIP as my Tory MP was on a definite winner in our seat and I thought it would give a little bit more to this anti- EU movement. IMHO the critical factor which a few pundits are commenting on and has been identified before is the "Shy Tory symdrome" - when the pollsters get to work perhaps as many as 6% of their interviewees say they will support the party to the left (generally Labour) because it is fashionable, encouraged by the BBC and other MSM, it is caring and compassionate and so on. Although on the day they exercise their good sense and go Tory. The big question now is how is this factor identified and even more problematic - calculated. The give away that was not picked up (and should have been) was that DC far outweighted EM in the "who would be the better leader" catagory.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your thoughtful comments. I would hope to see a development in the UK not unlike what we have seen in the USA, whereby, the UKIP movement becomes integrated into the Conservative Party and begins to swing that big beast around to see and serve the interests of Britain and not of Europe. The Tea Party has had some of that effect on the Republican Party here, though not as much as I would have hoped.
DeleteNote to US readers: In Canada, red is liberal "progressive"; blue is Conservative.
DeleteMay I draw your attention, Diplo, to the recent experience of Canada. After two governments of liberals in blue suites in Canada, under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, the so-called Progressive Conservatives were annihilated by the red Liberals.
This created a split in the Conservative movement as many people, of a Tea-Party frame of mind, didn't like Mulroieny's blue-suited Liberal-Lite.
It took ten years in the wilderness until the two Conservative factions finally reunified to form an actual Conservative party, that didn't pretend to be Liberal in blue suites.
Currently, Canada is doing very well with a truly Conservative government (as much as the press, judiciary and bureaucracy will allow them).
As an aside, in the US the Conservatives were the Blue States while the Left Liberal/Progressives were Red. Since 1984 their were variations as each Network used their own scheme of red/blue to depict one side or the other. In 2000, with the Bush-v-Gore issue consuming the grid, the MSM made a concerted decision to depict the Democrats in Blue and Republicans as Red. They have held than standard ever since.
DeleteIMHO it likely had more to do with trying to remove the long standing association of The Left with Communism/Socialism (whose color is Red) than any actual standardization scheme.
Dunno how else to contact you.
ReplyDeleteDo you think that Seymour Hirsch is accurate in this piece on bin Laden?
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden
I have serious doubts about Seymour Hersh and his credibility. He always seems to have "sources" nobody else can find.
DeleteI would echo Diplomad's "cautions" - especially as the op was Agency and SF.
DeleteBut time will tell I suppose. The guy it must be admitted though has gotten "pretty close" - at times - in the past.
Yes I read it too. There were plenty of things at the time that didn't ring true.
DeleteHow do two helicopters fly right across Pakistan, land just a few mile from an army base and fly out - without Pakistani support?
How did bin Laden manage to stay there without the Pakistanis knowing?
And the whole burial at sea story was just bizarre.
Whether it went down exactly as Hersh states is not clear.
My comments above 11 May 11:11 again at 1835.
ReplyDeleteI read it.
The article is complete balderdash. If one needs a dictionary make that Horseshit.
Adulterated perhaps but recognizable as Horseshit.
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