The General Election

As far as I'm concerned, the General election produced mixed emotions. The Tories won with an acceptable majority, keeping out Labour and its extra taxes on the rich which would be required to fund their promises. I've nothing particular for or against the rich, but if they are to spend their money rather than keep it in a bank vault, it must result in additional employment and jobs either directly as staff or indirectly on purchases. But apart from the so-called mansion tax, the other proposed Labour taxes would end up falling on the ordinary worker. A tax on banks would mean that the banks would seek to make more profit elsewhere, which could mean even lower interest rates (hitting pensioners in particular) or even the end of free banking, as has been mooted from time to time. A landlord tax would do much the same; landlords would either find some way of increasing the rent for any new tenant, or sell-up and pull out of the market. Either way, it is unlikely to be the landlord who would lose out. A tax on non-doms looks attractive, but Labour overlooks the fact that they could equally live in another country, Ireland having made it clear that they would be very welcome. But the big thing, as far as I'm concerned is that both Ed Balls and Vince Cable are out and that the LibDems won't be part of a coalition.

The big disappointment is that UKIP didn't get more seats. The fact that Nigel Farage didn't win in Thanet, I would suggest is due to the effort that the Tories put into the election with almost every Minister visiting the constituency, plus the activities of various left wing organisations who were not standing for election and thus could effectively run riot with false claims about UKIP.

However to my mind, the biggest scandal is our electoral system, which allows a party, which overall collected more votes in the coutry than both the SNP and the LibDems combined, to get only have one MP, whilst Queen Nicola claims the right to tell us all what to do.

It one thing comes out of this election, it should be some electoral reform which ensures the parliamentary representation more closely matches the actual votes cast. One assumes that Cameron will push through the Boundary Commission's report, which the LibDems failed to support in the last parliament, so ending the anomaly of a vote in many cities being worth two in the country. But more than that. Now that Scotland has its own Parliament, and Wales has its own Assembly, there is surely no longer a case for having a disproportionately large number of MPs from these regions. We should be aiming for the situation in a modern democracy like Australia or New Zealand where all constituencies by law must have an electorate within 5% of any other. New Zealand is proposing to do even better and get the figure within 3%.
Other reform must be to ensure that Scottish/Welsh MPs do not have any say on English matters where such matters have been devolved to Scotland/Wales. It is iniquitous that Scotish MPs can come to Westminster and support tuition fess at universities and charges for NHS prescriptions, whilst their fellow members in The Scottish Parliament vote to make them both free in Scotland.

To a cynic like me, Cameron's biggest problem with having an overall majority is that he will have to keep his promises. No longer will he be able to blame the LibDems for preventing him doing something that he had promised!

As for the SNP, I'm sure they will make a lot of noise and hope to be able to tell Cameron what to do. He could simply point out that Labour have more MPs than the SNP which illustrates the relative importance of the SNP in the Union as a whole. As Queen Nicola won't be at Westminster, I would hope that Cameron would have no problem dealing with Alex Salmond who expect to the the leader of the SNP in the Commons.

We could have an interesting time ahead.

Thank Goodness for the Royal Baby!

The birth of the, as yet unnamed, Princess of Cambridge at least brought relief from the incessant drone of politicians and political journalists on the TV news programmes. Not that the reports on the baby actually provided any real news, but it was a change to see cheering crowds rather than the usual rabble of demonstrators which seems to be the norm these days. The BBC, of course, managed to produce an anti-monarchist for interview who ranted on about the cost of the monarchy (but didn't feel it appropriate to mention the far higher costs of Presidents like Obama, along with the costs of all the ex-presidents) and who also seemed to believe that the birth had been timed as a political event to interfere with the general election. If interfering with the general election means getting politicians off the screen for a while, please carry on interfering!

Elsewhere in the political news, Guido shows us this picture of a Labour Party Public meeting in Birmingham.

 

I wonder what Harriet thinks about it!

To most English this is totally unacceptable in a public place, and it simply shows how subservient Labour is becoming to the diktats of Islam. If I'd been going to the meeting with my wife and we were asked to sit apart, we'd have simply walked out. I do hope all the non-Islamic voters in Birmingham see this picture.

Now to the "Greens".  Breitbart tells us that Green Party leader Natalie Bennett has said her party would consider allowing polygamous marriages and civil partnerships in the UK. This of course was the fear of many of those who opposed Gay Marriage; that one thing would lead to another and that it would lead to marriage being redefined in other ways, including allowing more than two people to enter into a union.

Which brings us back to Cameron and the Tories. Traditionally, political parties in power have only introduced legislation that they had proposed in their manifestos unless there was some overriding imperative that was not anticipated at the time of the previous election. Gay Marriage can hardly said to fall within that category; there was no reason for it not being included in the Party Manifesto for this election and brought forward by the Tories should they be in power. For that reason, if no other, I am not prepared to vote Conservative and have informed my sitting MP accordingly. Who knows what Cameron might do if he thought polygamy might increase his share of the Islamic vote.

Every day as I read the news, or watch it on TV, I become more than ever convinced that UKIP is the only party that genuinely represents the ordinary voter of British ancestry.