'The PM told the Andrew Marr Show he would not be "boxed in" by announcing a date now.' [for a general election. ed.] (BBC)
The current Parliament expires at midnight on 10 May 2010. Nearly 80 Labour MPs have announced that they will not fight the next election; some 30 Conservative MPs have also done so, along with various Members belonging to other Parties. No matter what special circumstances might arise or be conjured up by Mr Brown to permit the extension of the life of the Parliament by amending the Parliament Acts, it is hard to imagine that he could command a majority in the House.
Mr Brown is no Winston Churchill. And we will not be at war with Germany in four months' time. Brown is already boxed in.
Should any attempt be made to maintain in existence the current Parliament, how will Brown command a majority - faced with all those backbench, demob-happy, Labour MPs? Many of whom loathe him and all he has done to their Party, and some of whom loathe him, more honourably, for what he has done to our country. Every vote would become a vote of confidence. You only have to win once (well, twice: first the vote of substance and then the vote to confirm the defeat.) Untenable.
Unless Brown intends a real coup d'etat and to attempt government without Parliament. Even Angels doesn't believe that, not even before breakfast.
So, sorry for not taking into account the effects of the expenses exposures, and for not considering the effects of the greatest turnover in MPs since the second World War, and for not listening to the assurances of blogosphere elders and betters that there will be a general election within constitutional time limits.
Thank Goodness the box is now so small, and shrinking by the moment. We must hope there will be no intervention by the French - in Toledo or any other part of the European Union.
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7 comments:
He doesn't need a coup. Electoral fraud on a large scale would suffice to manufacture another Labour controlled parliament. There's long been suspicion that the postal voting system is deliberately open to easy abuse. Delaying counting the vote whilst ballot boxes are held overnight under poor control, disappearing electoral registers and suchlike tricks have been tried in Scotland and may be in place throughout the country in time for the election. We know Stalin's attitude to vote counting, and Brown is a Stalinist. The authorities who should investigate irregularities are under Labour control. No fuss was made about the suspected frauds in recent Scottish elections. The media script of a hung parliament is being promoted to prepare public expectations. The police forces have been Blairised, and the army is kept busy abroad, so there's no one to take effective action even if many of the election results are suspicious. Something's making Brown look more cheerful these days, and it's not because he expects to lose despite being so far behind in the opinion polls.
The Wiki entry on electoral fraud is scary in its coverage of fraud practices, even unto those I'd never even thought of Raven. And recent electoral fraud and suspected fraud has resulted more in shrugging, desultory inquiries, and the results left standing, agreed; (though the Midlands judge sent down a few factory-scale postal vote fraudsters.)
The surest way to defeat electoral fraud is to vote in huge numbers and overwhelm it. I'm not an insurrectionista - the police's first duty is to keep order so they always get blamed for taking the side of the status quo - which they may not like at all and have voted against themselves.
Get out the vote - or get out there and vote - is the priority. I do enjoy the image of the walls slowly closing in and driving Brown closer and closer to the pit.
Odin's Raven
No "suspicion" regarding postal voting fraud. An electoral commission review two or three years ago noted that it had aspects of the Banana Republic about it as it stood, and that the government needed to tighten up how it worked.
Nothing has happened about this.
It is also quite clear that Brown has no qualms whatsoever about lying; witness his statement that he and his girlfriend Obama have been working together on Yemen.
They haven't. He has had no dialogue with Obama re Yemen.
We are planning our exit if they get in again.
I think that a lot might happen in next six months.
I don't think GB will fight a competitive election where he might not win (Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think he ever has before?)
I agree with HG that GB probably has (still is?) thinking about ways that he could retain the Prime Ministership without an election, but short of a war it's hard to see how he can do this.
The next line of attack is surely then how to fix the election? You might do this with wild, vote-grabbing policies such as millions of highly-paid puclic sector jobs, and wild promises to try and keep the vote as high aspossible, topped up with some electoral fraud. He might go for that... if he is certain it will work...
But you can never be certain, so I think that - in the end - he will bottle it, and not fight the election on grounds of ill-health or somesuch.
It's four months to the expiry of the current Parliament, not six, B. The walls have moved closer than we might think, the Pit beckons.
Even war, and that option is being wielded as best Brown can even now (Elby's point on his untruths about his co-ordinated actions with the President of the US is telling on how important his position as 'war-leader' is becoming to him) won't guarantee him power. Brown is so regarded, personally and on his abilities and record, as to be an unacceptable national war leader.
Brown has chosen, further, to campaign on 'dividing lines', not on national unity in the face of national difficulties or threats to the nation.
In a general election a Brown-led Labour party, or even a Labour administration in which Brown has any senior role, is expected to lose.
And now there are serious fears that in his vindictiveness he has set up circumstances via the Chilcot Inquiry that will severely damage Blair in any further political capacity in the UK (or indeed much of the world).
Brown might genuinely be ill, and unable to continue; a damascene insight into his unfitness to lead either Party or Country is less likely.
Why on Earth are we having to cope with this man perverting our economy and our political process? Labour isn't my party but it is the party of many millions of fellow citizens. It deserves so much better than Brown.
Here is a post on just this topic on The Tap blog:http://the-tap.blogspot.com/2010/01/campaign-to-save-election-night-fails.html Its not just Brown. There's a large number of leftists and quangocrats, council vermin and assorted riff-raff living at public expense who don't intend to go quietly, so he could have all the help he needs to steal the election, and enough media collaborators and street thugs to enforce his rule in the post-democratic era.
These are the people whose livelihoods should first be cut to get public expenditure under control. Instead, they intend to further tax and enslave those who actually produce anything, in order to sustain this new kleptocratic kakocracy for as long as possible.
Labour deserves what it got, HG, they lay down and accepted GB without even a whimper of protest...
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