The Other Sarah

Tag: Conservatives

  • Number crunching: A Brexit democracy special

    A major bugbear of the Leave Campaign during the recent EU referendum was their view that the EU was an undemocratic behemoth. Gove told us there were five EU presidents, all unelected. Of course, they ranged from the EU’s effective head of state (whilst we have a Queen) to the Speaker of the European Parliament (which would be weird to directly elect) and the President of the European Central Bank (which would be stupid to directly elect)

    But no person drew more ire than Jean-Claude Jüncker, the Luxembourgish President of the European Commission. An unelected bureaucrat that nobody in Britain wanted! Of course, the Tories shied away from the fact that their strop from the European People’s Party in 2009 gave a lot of latitude to Angela Merkel to choose the European People’s Party spitzenkandidat.

    Of course, irony would eat itself when Theresa May was declared our next presumptive prime minister without a ballot of Conservative members, let alone a general election. Of course, May herself was not happy when Gordon Brown did the same in 2007, but that’s for another day.

    Today, I present some statistics for your convenience, to fully appreciate the post-Brexit democracy.

    Election of the President of the European Commission:

    • Number of eligible voters: 751
    • Number of indirect votes for Jüncker: 38.6 million (28,014 in the UK)
    • Number of direct votes for Jüncker: 425
    • Number of Scottish votes for Jüncker: 2

    Election of the Leader of the Conservative Party:

    • Number of eligible voters: 330
    • Number of votes for May: 199
    • Number of Scottish votes for May: 1

    Comparative statistics:

    • Number of votes for Al Murray, the Pub Landlord, in 2015: 318
    • Number of nominations received by Gordon Brown in 2007: 313
    • Number of votes for Margaret Thatcher in the 1990 leadership election (first round): 204

    I don’t know about you, but I’m personally very glad that we took back control of our democracy.

  • “Grand Coalition”: A Liberal Glee Club song about the inevitable.

    If you don’t already know, the “Glee Club” is a Liberal tradition where Party members, on the last night of Conference, get wicked drunk and sing songs satirising all aspects of politics,  including yourself. 

    The below is one such song, to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda”, by Andrew “Banjo” Paterson, itself already repurposed for the classic Liberal song “Losing Deposits”:

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  • Il n’est pas Charlie

    Il n’est pas Charlie

    “We stand squarely for free speech and democracy”, said David Cameron last Wednesday at Prime Minister’s Questions, not more than an hour after the attacks on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. This is a rather strange proposition for the leader of a party who proposed to reinstate the ban on “extremists” from appearing on television and have been trying for the past few years to reintroduce the “snooper’s charter”. Indeed, the Tories have gone rather native in the Home Office, in contrast to five years ago when we were all criticising Labour for restricting our civil liberties.

    Several hours later, the House of Commons then debated a somewhat–but not sufficiently–diluted Counter Terrorism and Security Bill, in which Tory and Labour frontbenchers alike praised the bill for being an important tool in the fight against paedophiles and terrorists: the two words that friends of this blog have previously highlighted as resulting in universally awful legislation.

    After this brief sojourn into hypocrisy, Cameron took a flight to Paris where he stood side-by-side with the world’s autocrats and despots in the name of free speech. Whilst there, he lent his name to an agreement for more surveillance powers. One would think that Charb and his seven colleagues would not want that in their name. But Cameron went one step further, and proposed the worst idea to regulate a specialist field since Labour tried to ban coffee eighteen months ago: a ban on encryption.

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  • Those homophobic Lib Dems and those gay-friendly Tories

    “Homophobia”, cried Conservative Future on Friday, the day after the Lib Dems won the Grove Ward by-election in Kingston. “A return to 1983!”, cried the Lib Dem bashers around the internet (including famous opponent of equal marriage Ben Summerskill, but that’s for the next post). Why? Because the election was described as a “straight fight”, when the Tory opponent just so happened to be gay.

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  • The deficit and all that.

    (Note, January 2013: This post was written when I was more naive to economic circumstances. It is best read in a perspective from before the cuts starting. It is kept in the purposes of transparency and does not accurately reflect my current thoughts on the matter.)

    Belt up, this is going to be a big one.

    So yeah. That march a couple of weeks ago. At a generous estimate, 400,000 marched against the government’s spending cuts. And while I sympathise with them, I also think that it was just a waste of time due to how it ended up. (more…)