A Place to Stand

Lesley Riddoch was doing the radio round up of the week in politics on the radio today with 2 Labourites & a Conservative. I sent this email which she read out.

Lot of Labour people on here considering they are only the 2nd party in Scotland.

Why are you not talking about Alan Johnson's call for Labour to stand on a policy of PR? Is this not their only chance of surviving the next election?

which did indeed produce such a discussion. The Tory opposed it. One of the Labourites supported it. The other, who was one of these dinosaurs who make it clear they believe Labour has a hereditary right to run Scotland, opposed it but entirely, as Lesley pointed out, saying that it is a system that allows other parties than Labour to win. This he described as "gerrymandering"

Apart from the ethics this omits the point I was making - that in this case it is the only chance for Labour to win. I don't want a Labour win but I do want an electoral system that reflects who people actually want to vote for - it is known as democracy.

I also want to mention something from her blog regarding the recent hustings & the BBC's attitude to allowing the public to intrude on their election coverage:

Regarding next week's European Hustings with the Federation of Small Business and Amnesty International, I do find the BBC's decision to cancel this event bizarre and have told them so. They are worried the public could form a biased audience. We'd given 10 tickets to each of the four main parties for their supporters – the way we've always done to overcome such possible bias in the past. I don't know why that suddenly isn't good enough, and having spent three months arranging the event it's tough to have it cancelled at the last minute. And even tougher to see how the BBC will ever manage to have an election programme involving the public without loads of staff and months of audience vetting. Is that really necessary or massive politically correct overkill?

It says a lot about how scared of anything even approaching real political debate involving the public, who can be an undisciplined bunch, they are. The BBC is the propaganda arm of the Civil Service. Even a meeting where 40, out of about 50, of the audience were selected by "approved" politicians & chaired by Lesley, who holds all the correct establishment views (I remember her once saying windmills deserve subsidy because they are "groovy") & can be relied on to silence any "unhelpful" questions was too real for them.

Having made the point that we need a democratic electoral system to be a democracy I also suggest we need free media, willing to tell us the truth rather than having essentially a monopoly that pushes fake scare stories & lies & promotes racial genocide to be a liberal & free democracy.

Once again I am convinced that if our media wanted a popular political programme they need only broadcast a formal debate & that they know this perfectly well.

"A managed democracy is a wonderful thing... for the managers... and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers define what is 'irresponsible'." — Professor Bernardo de la Paz/R.A. Heinlein