No Election

The Leader does not do elections. The Leader does unopposed assumption of office, appointment by controlled bodies, concentration of power in safe hands (mostly his own), and a politics of draining democratic institutions of their authority and, where appropriate, their funding, into parallel governmental and quasi-governmental decision-takers defined as stakeholders, citizens' forums, providers and clients.

The Long March through the institutions is completed and there are three parliamentary terms for the consolidation of the systemic re-ordering of the body politic begun in 1997.
We have watched the dismantling of all fashions of personal and direct protest - foolish those who throw themselves against the forces of law and order now interposed between the people and their rulers.
We have watched as the powers and capacities of the other parts of our constitution have been splintered into sectors controllable by the ruling junta so that while ostensibly carrying out their primary purpose their deep, intertwined functions, each acting and reacting with the others to form the checks and balances upon the control of power within our state, are forever undone - a parliament so cowed by whipping, so hidebound by rule and precedent, so rarely sitting, so vulnerable to executive order, it cannot act; a judiciary beheaded and divided, and excluded from the Upper House, (though the judges may write to the parliament they may no longer address), that has lost control of its own appointment and formation; and with the loss of its single, authoritative voice, has lost, too, the capacity to form and mould our laws through interpretation and extension, or represent the rule of law in the other orders of our constitution; the office of head of state deprived of the private paths of power that have been blocked and broken by this regime, which enabled the Head of State to advise and warn and, at times, deny, with the Privy Council, the hereditary lords (whose roots were literally in the country), the Lord Chancellor, despoiled and downgraded .

All this and, less formal but as crucial, the destruction of a disinterested home civil service loyal to country and governance, replaced by party political administrators loyal to partial ideology and self interest; a military starved of funds then sent to fight in situations of outstanding danger and dubious legal or political propriety, to be rewarded with responsibility for goals and political choices that changed as the soldiers died ; and a church assaulted and defeated by demands that morality should reflect political requirement, so that now the regime speaks and rules even on the most private aspects of individual and family life; the centres of learning and research, and in this the schools too should be included, subjected to constant interference in the name of egalitarianism: there is no egalitarianism in intellectual achievement and it is a confusion of thought to equate deprivation with capacity.

All this needs to be bedded down, fixed as the new politics, and cheap substitutes must be provided for what we have lost. The democratic ladder used to take positions of power must be broken down so that the permanence of this seizure of power by democratic means is ensured, but democratic means are denied to all others.

The Scottish people seized their chance in their last general election and, despite the London regime's best poll-rigging efforts, ousted them; it is hard to believe we will get the same chance.