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Monday 27 October 2014

What Happens When Our Tolerance Runs Out?

I'm not sure whether I've read it somewhere, or if it's entirely a product of my own imagination, but I have a recurring idea in my mind that one of these days we're all going to wake up and find that good old tolerant, peaceful and multicultural Britain, isn't going to be so tolerant, peaceful or multicultural any more. I imagine that, not because of any sort of wishful thinking on my part, but simply because I question just how much tolerance, peacefulness and community spirit any single country can bear, before it starts to fragment and fall apart, because of the stresses and strains that are applied to its very social and cultural fabric.
 
In so many ways we are already a deeply divided nation, whether that's in terms of the old North South divide, the rich versus the poor, the haves versus the have-nots, the employed versus the unemployed, the young versus the old, the Scots versus the English, along with any number of other divisions or classes that actively separate certain elements of our native population, one from the other. In fact, were it not for those traditional ties that unify us, our shared history, our common language, our cultural heritage, our legal systems, our inherited freedoms, our mutual defence and our system of central governance, then it would be difficult to see how our country has or could survive in the modern age, given the immensity and variety of the divisions that have been allowed to spread throughout our society.
 
Those fundamental things that bind us, our shared history, our common language, our cultural heritage, our legal systems, our inherited freedoms, our values, our mutual defence and our systems of central governance, these are the pillars on which our country has been built over the past two thousand years. Yet, within the space of the last forty years or so, we have allowed governments of all stripes, social commentators of all hues, political advisers from all persuasions, scientists from all backgrounds to both fatally undermine and erode all of these supporting pillars, ostensibly in the mistaken belief that such fundamental changes were necessary for making our lives, our society, our democracy better and stronger, which they almost certainly weren't.
 
Today, thanks largely to these small, but highly influential groups of politicians, advisers, commentators and scientists our shared national history has either been trashed or forgotten, our common language is in danger of being subsumed by a myriad of foreign tongues, our cultural heritage is being diluted or even in some cases legally outlawed, our legal system has become subservient to foreign courts, our inherited freedoms are withdrawn or overlooked, our values are altered and amended to suit our newly imposed multicultural and European identity, the means of our mutual defence is diminished, undermanned and under-funded, whilst at the same time our systems of central governance is not only devolved, but fractured and left generally toothless, as real executive power is relentlessly released to the various regions, or worse still, freely handed over to a foreign parliament based in Brussels.
 
As a direct consequence of this surrender of executive and legal jurisdiction to foreign based courts and assemblies, the individual rights and lives of Britain's own indigenous peoples have been seriously blighted, not only be the arrival of millions of foreign migrants, but also from the increasing amounts of burdensome European legislation, the rules and regulations enacted by foreign politicians in foreign parliaments and in foreign courts. The resulting explosion of highly intrusive, ugly and extremely expensive wind turbine farms, along with the closure of coal-fired generating plants, will both ensure that British energy consumers will end up paying much higher fuel bills throughout their lives. Stringent and unrealistic environmental targets that will make little or no difference to overall global pollution levels ensure that UK customers continue to pay the price for unregulated Chinese and Indian consumption. Only today, Britain's years of cost cutting austerity measures were somehow rewarded by European demands for an additional payment of £1.7bn from the British taxpayer to the EU's coffers, simply because the UK had been relatively successful in managing its national economy. It is worth remembering too that such new measures and demands are not being imposed on us through force of arms, or implicit threat, but rather by our own nationally elected politicians, who having sworn a sacred oath to Queen and country, then surrender their personal allegiances to foreign powers in the form of having accepted the EU's shilling. 
 
And these previous matters are in addition to the thousands of foreign criminals who regularly pass from the continent to our own country, to rob, to rape and to murder our citizens, or indeed those who ultimately end up serving lengthy sentences in our prisons, before hopefully being deported to their homelands, always assuming of course that they can be removed in the first place. Where is the justice for the victims, families, or indeed for the British people, when foreign criminals, ne'er-do-wells and wrongdoers, often the very dross of humanity, can legitimately claim an entitlement to remain here, purely on the basis of their "right" to a family life, when little or no account is given to the victims rights, not to be robbed, raped, or murdered by a foreign born criminal, who shouldn't have been in the country in the first place? Is it any wonder that the British law is held in such low regard by the people of Britain, when the law itself pays such scant regard to the inalienable rights of the people that it purports to protect?
 
Crimes against the person or even  property aside, why would any right-thinking British subject have any regard for a judiciary that regularly supports the legalised punishment of people who dare to speak freely, where publicly expressing a personal opinion can lead to legal sanctions being imposed by the courts? What sort of judiciary is it that allows a national government, local authorities, or even a state-owned broadcaster to purposefully misuse anti-terror legislation to pursue what are often civil matters? What sort of independent judiciary is it that deliberately defers their authority, their duty of care, to what is first and foremost a foreign based power? Why should the British people have any respect or regard for a judicial system that has little or no regard for them? The answer is they shouldn't!
 
Then of course, we have the chief architects of our country's ongoing demise as a sovereign state, the political classes, those self serving individuals who choose to believe that they and they alone are best placed, to not only instruct us how to live our lives, but who are also content to undermine and destroy the founding pillars of our society. They alone are the people largely responsible for the steady erosion of our shared history, our common language, our cultural heritage, our legal systems, our inherited freedoms, our values, our mutual defence and our systems of central governance. It is the likes of Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg who have led these wholesale changes to our historic rights and entitlements, ably assisted by the likes of Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Iain Duncan Smith, Ed Davey, Andrew Lansley, in fact almost the entirety of Britain's political elite over the past thirty or forty years.
 
With every successive Labour or Conservative government it seems the country becomes a little more diminished, as step-by-step, drop-by-drop, people's traditional certainties and cultural norms, the very things that make us the sovereign people that we are, or rather were, are eroded, forgotten or forbidden by the prevailing political classes and climate. Speech, thought, opinion, comedy, religion, community, history, culture, language, laws, human rights, personal status and even government, have all in one form or another been reshaped and reconstituted to conform to one political ideology or another. Virtually every ethnicity, race, gender, religion, nationality and age is now a highly protected subject, for fear of offending someone or other and having the full force of the law brought down on your head for having offended them. You are not allowed to speak negatively about, think negatively about, or publicly express a negative opinion about anyone or anything for fear of some form of civil or criminal litigation being introduced. You cannot make fun of anyone, for fear of hurting their feelings, nor can you criticise, question or oppose anyone else's religious beliefs.
 
Community in the traditional sense is now widely regarded as an outdated concept for all native Britons, unless of course it suits a specific political leaders personal ideology, as is the case with David Cameron's "Big Society", which was simply a means of having vital community services provided for free by the local citizenry. British history has become largely selective, with only periods and events deemed to be highly positive being taught in schools and mentioned in polite society, while any reference to our "Imperial" past has to be avoided at all cost. Our native cultures, including those of the English, Scots, Irish and Welsh are perfectly acceptable, provided that they don't conflict with, or cause any offence to those foreign citizens living within our numerous towns and cities. However, if people are in any doubt, it now seems to be common practice that if there's the possibility of causing any possible offence to non-indigenous residents, then the general advice appears to be to cancel the planned cultural celebration, just to be on the safe side, Christmas, Easter and Birthdays included.
 
The English language it seems is now optional, but where necessary and assuming that the individual doesn't speak English fluently, then a translator will be provided for them free-of-charge. In respect of the law, the authorities may use whatever means they choose, to pursue British born miscreants, even if that means that anti-terror legislation is used to prosecute TV licence evaders, remembering that the ends justifies the means in any and all  circumstances. However, in order to ensure that non-indigenous suspects don't feel that they're being discriminated against, by virtue of their colour, ethnicity, or religion, it is probably best to assume that they're always innocent, have no case to answer and that their British accusers are just inventing the allegations through their own intolerant attitudes, a basic approach that has been seen to be successful in a number of places, including Rochdale, Rotherham, Manchester and Sheffield, to name but a few.
 
As regards personal status and the approach currently being adopted in modern Britain? The advice seems to be as follows. If you are a white native born Briton, a member of the 85% of the indigenous population whose opinions don't count for a great deal, then you are required to abide by a highly stringent set of social rules and regulations, designed to specifically regulate your inherently racist, xenophobic, homophobic, whatever-phobic, intolerant and ultra patriotic passions. As a member of this generally overlooked social group you implicitly agree to be treated as a second-class citizen by any government, political party, pressure group, think tank, social commentator, or adviser, that is advocating the primacy of multiculturalism in the UK. By virtue of remaining in Britain, as opposed to emigrating to another country, you have tacitly agreed to your nation being governed by an un-elected foreign parliament, for it to become a region within a larger United States of Europe, for your legal rights and protections to be transferred to a foreign court, for your elected representatives in Westminster to become mere "rubber stamp" functionaries within a federal Europe; and for Britain to surrender its historic military, economic, diplomatic and cultural independence, in exchange for it being subsumed by the bigger, supposedly much more influential European Union.
 
Obviously, there have been other significant changes to your status, if you happen to be a member of the majority white British born population. If you're working and making a net contribution to the economy of the country, then you can expect to receive no special consideration when it comes to your ethnicity, religion, colour, or indeed your cultural values, save for the fact that if you don't make a fuss about them, the government won't bother you either. However, if you're a white, British born citizen whose unemployed then you're going to be widely regarded as a scumbag, a freeloader, a waste of time, so it's likely that the government will pursue you until the end of time, or at least until you decide to get a job, or go back into full-time education, which just might well saddle you with an accumulated debt of £27,000, assuming of course you do a three year degree course. Alternatively, you might well decide to take a full or part-time job, assuming that they exist in your particular area, which pays the minimum wage, in which case the government will happily top-up your measly weekly wages with working tax credits, or housing benefits, or both, but at least you won't be registered as unemployed any longer; and that's all that's important.
 
If you white, British born and have young children of school age, whose education is being regularly held back by teachers and classroom assistants having to spend so much time dealing with other kids who don't speak English as a first language, then perhaps you should try looking on the bright side and possibly encourage your own children to pick up a bit of Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati, Arabic or even Romanian while they're in the playground. You never know, the way things are going, they just might need such language skills in the future, as there's clearly going to be a strong ongoing demand for foreign translators and interpreters in the UK.
 
Although it's easy to be facetious about such matters, the reality is of course that just as the current immigration situation plays havoc with our country's native inhabitants, our culture, our services, our jobs market and our language; and just as it makes it easier for worthwhile migrants to come to our country, so too the current system permits the worthless migrant to arrive and settle here. Just where exactly is the net benefit in the thousands of foreign born criminals who clog up our justice system, our police stations or our prisons and then can't be deported for fear of infringing their human rights? Just where is the benefit for our country in the dozens, hundreds or thousands of foreign born "dossers" who turn up on the streets of Britain begging off passers-by, pissing in shop doorways, or shitting in our public parks? Since when did vagrancy become such a vital skill that we needed to import it from the European continent? Since when did breeding & raising large families become a legitimate form of labour for non-English speaking couples, so that they can legally exploit our country's welfare system? Since when did selling the "Big Issue" become such a highly skilled job that we needed hundreds of foreign workers to undertake it, or that it became too technical for homeless British citizens to do it in their stead? And most of all, how is it that we have created a modern British society that not only actively encourages and protects foreign born rape gangs, sex traffickers and organised criminals, but then prosecutes anyone who might have the temerity to publicly state that they're unhappy about the entire immigration situation?
 
Surely it cannot have escaped the notice of the white British born majority, the 85% of the population who inhabit these islands, that the entire concept of multiculturalism, the imposition of largely unchecked foreign habits, languages, cultures and beliefs is very much like the two sides of the same coin, where perceived benefits are equally weighed by the cost to our own traditional British habits, language, culture and beliefs. In reality however, multiculturalism requires the 85% to compromise on virtually everything they hold dear, whether that's their culture, their faiths, their traditions, their rights, their history, their laws, their educational systems, even their food, simply in order to accommodate part or all of the remaining 15% of the population, many of whom hold absolutely no regard for this country whatsoever, never mind the priority issues for the 85%.
 
Clearly there are those within the white British majority who take the view that multiculturalism works and has brought nothing but a net benefit to our country, whilst at the same time being happy to accuse their fellow citizens, those who are opposed to it, of being small minded, uninformed, xenophobic, racists and any other form of personal pejorative that happens to spring to their mind. Of course, it is often the case that it is they themselves who are both biased and uninformed, being the sorts of people who see little value in retaining or protecting Britain's traditional culture, its history, its language, its laws, its inherent rights, its community, or indeed its everyday norms. It is precisely because they hold no faith in, have no regard for such things that they are content to discard them so readily, because if they don't believe in them, if they don't treasure or value them, then why should anyone else?
 
If the quality of our country's political representation and discourse reflects the level of protection surrounding our nation's traditions, culture, laws, foreign influence, individual rights, religion, inherited freedoms and values, then we are in deep trouble indeed. Modern day political leaders such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg have more than most been responsible for undermining the very fabric of our country over the past two decades. Not content with making most of our traditional freedoms illegal under a series of pernicious new regulations, they have also actively encouraged the saturation of our labour markets by migrant workers, to the extent that they have purposefully created a third world low wage economy, in what is/was a first world nation. Not only has this led to wage compression, the noted "race to the bottom" for the traditional working classes, but has also created virtually unmanageable pressures in associated service sectors, including the NHS, housing, welfare, education, transport and social care. None of these things were accidental or unforeseen, but were deliberately and systematically imposed on the UK by the Blair, Brown and Cameron governments, not for any economic, social, or cultural benefit, but purely for selfish ideological dogma and party political advantage.
 
It is hard to remember a time when Britain was so divided, either by region, by income, by status, by political beliefs, by culture, by ethnicity, by colour, or by nationality, even though we're all supposed to share a single overarching United Kingdom. With many of the ties that bind us having been eroded or undermined over time, our shared history, our common language, our cultural heritage, our legal systems, our inherited freedoms, our values, our mutual defence and our systems of central governance, then what is it that will hold us together now and into the future? Above all else the greatest characteristic of the British people is reputed to be their tolerance, but what happens if and when that capacity for tolerance finally runs out, which it inevitably will if things remain the same as they are now? Which rather neatly brings me back to where I started this piece!

Monday 6 October 2014

Finally, Putting The People Back In Charge:

Regardless of the tub-thumping declaration made by David Cameron this past week, about the 2015 general election being a straightforward choice between himself and Ed Miliband for Prime Minister, in truth there are so many caveats, conditions and addendums that might be added to his statement, as to make it little more than wishful thinking, or a special pleading on his part. Such is the parlous state of British politics today, with the main three legacy parties reviled and distrusted by the electorate in fairly equal measure, it remains to be seen whether any of the mainstream parties will end up with a big enough parliamentary majority to be able to form a workable national government.
 
Although Mr Cameron is right, in the sense that only he or Mr Miliband is likely to become the Prime Minister in May next year, it's perhaps also worth remembering that that particular office of state has its own specific limitations, in that the holder is only ever the leader of the government of the day and thereby little more than the main political and public representative of the United Kingdom to the outside world. Ultimately real political power, as much as it can exist, given our membership of the highly unrepresentative European Union, lies with the elected members of the Commons, who in turn rely on the support and sponsorship of the general public, or at least those millions who choose to exercise their franchise by turning out to vote at the various national elections.
 
But of course therein lies the major problem with our own electoral system. Our politicians, their parties, their leaderships, in fact their entire constructs are often so despised, distrusted and disliked by so many within the wider electorate that it is often questionable as to whether or not the government in office can ever truly regard themselves as being representative of the country as a whole, when they are regularly elected into office on fairly minor voter turnouts. It seems extremely odd that any political party can claim to be the legitimate voice of the people when they are able to take office having only achieved 30-40% of the popular vote, meaning that some 60-70% of the electorate either voted for someone else, or didn't bother casting their ballot at all. As if to prove the point, the present Prime Ministerial incumbent, David Cameron, only holds that high office by virtue of his Conservative Party having attracted 10.7m votes out of a national total of 45.6m, or 23.4% of the total popular vote. For their part, Mr Cameron's coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, garnered a total public vote of 6.8m, which is equivalent to 14.9% of the total votes available at the general election in 2010. The two parties having agreed to work together in government, purportedly for the common good, this means that with a combined total vote of 17.5m, or 38.4% of the available vote, the Tory/Liberal Democrat subsequently coalition was formed, even though 61.6% of the UK population had voted for other parties, or hadn't bothered to vote at all.
 
Quite clearly then, where one single political party, or even two in coalition, are unable to meet the basic criteria of a public majority, which would generally be 50% and above, there will always remain a question as to the democratic legitimacy of any government that cannot achieve that figure. And of course that takes no account of specific regional differences that question that legitimacy even further, as is obviously the case for the Conservative Party in Scotland, where its political legacy still remains fairly poisonous, decades after the hated poll tax and large scale de-industrialisation of the country's major manufacturing centres were first implemented by the London-based Tory administrations.
 
As to whether there is a way to resolve this question of democratic legitimacy remains open, although the proposal to introduce a form of proportional representation in the UK, put forward by the Liberal Democrats doesn't seem to have enjoyed much public support, possibly because of the party actually proposing the idea and that it didn't go far enough. Regardless of the reasons for that particular failure though, increasingly it is becoming evident that our current and long established First Past The Post electoral system (FPTP) is not sustainable in the long term, simply because the system itself is not conducive to a democratic outcome, as it takes not account of a majority view. Any result that falls short of the 50% plus criteria (something that the governing coalition has insisted on for Trade Union strike ballots) will always be open to question and criticism, simply because anything less is not an irrefutable majority. How the country is run and managed is far more vital and important than a foot, horse or car race, so to run them along the same sort of lines, or to suggest that they are similar types of competitions, is patently absurd. After all, it's also worth recalling that in most sporting competitions those coming second, third, or even those who participate get something for their efforts, often in the form of prize money, while in politics those coming second, third, etc. get absolutely nothing for their troubles and neither do their supporters.
 
As it is the 8.6m people who voted for the Labour Party at the last General Election, despite being some 18.9% of the total electorate, nearly one in five people, simply got their MP's, whilst the smaller parties including the likes of the Greens, Plaid, Respect, SNP, UUP and UKIP, along with their multitudes of supporters barely got a handful of MP's and little in the way of real political representation for their specific party views.
 
Whether or not some form of proportional representation will ever be introduced to UK national politics remains to be seen, but given that both Conservative and Labour parties would undoubtedly suffer as a result of it, would likely indicate that both parties would be resistant to any such change to the current UK electoral system. That being the case then it is almost certain that significant numbers of potential UK voters will continue to deliberately avoid exercising their franchise at both local and national elections, ostensibly because they cannot see the value in voting for parties that they consider to be unrepresentative, out of touch, or even in some cases inherently corrupt. According to some estimates up to 35% of eligible British voters, accounting for some 12m people chose not to cast their ballot in the last general election in 2010, more than voted for any of the individual political parties that were standing for election. Not only is this a shocking indictment of our electoral system that a full third of the voting population could simply choose to excuse themselves from their civic duty, but also that so many of our citizens felt so angry or indifferent to the whole electoral process that they purposefully decided not to participate, even though the outcome will doubtless affect nearly every aspect of their everyday lives.
 
Research on the subject of non-voting in the UK would appear to indicate that there are any number of reasons why people choose not to participate in the electoral process, including 19% of people who simply couldn't be bothered, 15% who found voting inconvenient, 13% who distrusted politicians generally, 10% who were either ill or who had suffered a bereavement, 9% who didn't like the choices on offer, 4% who didn't receive a polling card, 4% who believed that all politicians were self-serving, 4% who believed that voting didn't really make any difference, 3% who lacked specific information on the various parties, 3% who didn't like the choices on offer, 2% who were on holiday, 2% who didn't vote for religious reasons, 2% who were so undecided that they couldn't choose, 1% who believed that the outcome was already certain, 1% who felt that their favoured party couldn't win anyway, 1% refused to vote as a protest measure, 1% who were too busy, 1% who didn't know how to vote; and 1% simply forgot to vote on election day.
 
Taking the three largest reasons for people failing to vote, those who couldn't be bothered, those who found it inconvenient and those who distrusted politicians generally, this accounts for approximately 47% of the 12m eligible voters who failed to exercise their franchise in 2010 alone. It is precisely these sorts of voters who need to be encouraged to exercise their rights, if any future UK government is to claim any form of electoral legitimacy, or to avoid the sort of questionable mandate that the current Conservative coalition has been accused of having. Quite how the authorities can successfully manage to overcome voter apathy, unreasonable expectations and basic distrust is unclear, but one would imagine that increased knowledge and education about our national systems of governance, introducing alternative methods of voting and offering greater public oversight of politicians and their behaviour might just help encourage more people to take a greater interest in politics generally.
 
Unfortunately, given that our country's traditional electoral system is primarily founded on a tribally based and adversarial system of competing political ideologies, where a lack of both common sense and common ground exists, the likelihood of the major parties actually agreeing to campaign, let alone govern, for the common good of all the people, would seem to be a forlorn hope at best. Consequently, the tiresome and generally unhelpful "Punch & Judy" politics that we have all lived with for the past few decades; and that turns so many people off politics completely, so that they deliberately choose not to vote, not to participate, will almost certainly continue well into the future, to the detriment of our democracy.
 
Perhaps though, as is sometimes the case, broken systems often provide their own solution to the problems that affect and hinder them. For far too long our political system has been blocked by the increasingly centrist policies of the two major parties, resulting from both Labour and Conservative parties essentially chasing the votes of the same unaligned voters in the centre of the political spectrum, the squeezed middle, as they are commonly called. However, given that this group of citizens only represents a very small minority of the 45m people who are entitled to vote, it is hardly a surprise that the remaining tens of millions, both affiliated and unaffiliated are becoming increasingly frustrated by the major political parties overlooking and ignoring their needs, their demands, their plight; and as a result are looking elsewhere to offer their electoral support.
 
With concerns such as the economy, immigration, employment, education and healthcare being on everyone's minds; and with both Labour and the Conservatives failing to offer any comprehensive, long term  solutions to such vital issues, it is hardly surprising that large numbers of the electorate are beginning to look elsewhere for answers to the nation's many socio-economic  problems. Bearing in mind that between them both Conservative and Labour parties have governed our country for the past seven decades or more and between them have been the chief architects of Britain's cultural, industrial and social demise, so to expect either one of them to suddenly find a workably effective solution that will solve the national malaise that has beset our country in recent years, would be akin to finding money trees growing at the bottom of your garden. It simply isn't going to happen.
 
For far too long we have chosen to elect politicians who couldn't balance a household budget, let alone the finances of one of the world's leading economies. Can you imagine a housewife working to a budget, choosing to pay her neighbours bills, while her own children starved? Well, isn't that exactly what we're doing with Foreign Aid? Borrowing money from the markets, at a rate of interest, in order to give it away to foreign countries who just happen to be poorer than we are, even those like India who have their own space program, or like Pakistan, which has its own nuclear arms program! And just why are we giving £13bn away? Is it because it's vital to each and every recipient nation, or is to help create a political legacy for the British Prime Minister who initiated the 0.7% of GDP figure, the Tory leader David Cameron?
 
Our schools, hospitals, roads and armed forces have all been left short of money and yet successive governments have chosen to spend billions on administrative money pits, the Quangos, which seem to serve little purpose but to make more work for themselves and the industries that they purportedly oversee. Wouldn't their costs be much better used if they were abolished and the monies pumped back into the vital services themselves, for more and better schools, hospitals, roads or armed forces? If you believe that railways are little more than 19th century technologies in a 21st century country, why would anyone look to invest anything between £50-80bn in a new rail line, when upgrading existing railway infrastructure could be done far more cheaply and achieve the same sort of outcomes? Why would anyone join an international trade bloc of 500 m people, at a cost of billions of pounds every year, when you could just as easily re-establish historic trading links with countries totalling two billion people, which would cost you absolutely nothing at all?
 
According to various think tanks, which are generally staffed by proper economists and experts in virtually every field you might think to name, government waste in the UK, both at a local and national level, amounts to around £100bn, which is equivalent to our current financial deficit. Waste within the NHS is estimated to be in the region of £5bn per year, double the amount of money that Ed Miliband has pledged to inject into the health service if he is elected to government in May 2015. Interestingly though, neither the Conservatives, nor the Labour Party have specifically mentioned about tackling the outrageous levels of financial waste that exists within the system itself, suggesting perhaps that they themselves are part of the problem, rather than any sort of solution.
 
For me, the answer to our country's many problems is a relatively straightforward one. We need to break the system in order to mend the system; and to do that we must vote for anyone BUT the Conservative or Labour parties, the two competing economic ideologies that have trapped our nation in an ongoing cycle of boom and bust, spend and save, punish one group and reward another, divisive policies that have pulled our country apart, rather than holding it together. I'm not sure that it matters who one votes for, just so long as the two main legacy parties are denied the power to govern in the interest of the minority, rather than the majority of the British public. Only by breaking the system will people force the likes of the Conservative and Labour leaderships to reassess the priorities for the country, replacing the views and opinions of their focus groups and their special advisers, with those of the citizenry who actually live and work here. In other words putting the people of the United Kingdom back in charge of the country, which is where they should have been right from the outset.