Thoughts on Stupid Things

I am doing my utmost to find more positive subjects to write about. Unfortunately these days, pieces of good news are few and far between. I promise my first post of 2015 will be positive. However I do want to have one last rant in 2014. One YouTuber I recently subscribed to is called Steve Shives. He makes many videos where he picks five stupid things about a subject and talks a little about them. I love his videos so I'm going to emulate that here.

Hey, here are five stupid things I've noticed about British Politics.

1. The first past the post system.

The first past the post system means that in your constituency you vote and who ever receives the most votes becomes the Member of Parliament (MP) for that constituency. Here's the problem. Let's look at Constituency X where 40% of the people voted for the Conservatives, 30% voted for the Labour Party, 20% voted for UKIP and 10% voted for the Liberal Democrats. The Conservative candidate wins despite the fact that 60% of the constituency voted for someone else. This is not a hypothetical scenario either, in fact it gets worse. During the last election in 2010 in the Norwich South constituency the winning candidate won with a mere 29.4% of the vote. That doesn't seem overly democratic to me. Speaking of things that aren't very democratic...

2. The House of Lords.

The upper house of the British parliament is not democratic at all. The House of Lords is currently made up of 792 Lords. Of the 792, 26 of them are known as the Lords Spiritual who are members of the Church of England. No matter what those 26 seats in the Lords are reserved for such clergymen. Of the other 766, 92 of them are hereditary peers. These people are the descendants of landowners who were granted titles by kings and queens past. The other 674 are appointed by the monarch on the advice of the Prime Minister or the House of Lords Appointment Commission. These people are often former politicians (like the Lord Prescott and the Lord Mandelson) or people who endorsed political parties (like the Lord Sugar and the Baroness Brady). I believe the House of Lords needs serious overhaul. It's not the only thing either that needs changing...

3. Prime Minister's Questions.

Let me clarify something here. I am completely in favour of making it mandatory for the Prime Minister to answer questions posed to him by other members of parliament. What's stupid is how it is carried out. First of all the MPs behave like football fans. They cheer and jeer on cue and just generally make noise. What's more the questions posed could generally be reframed into one of two questions. The first one is "Would the Prime Minister please bend over so I can kiss his arse?" The second one is "Would the Prime Minister please swivel on this?" with a raised middle finger. If we are going to pose questions to the Prime Minister (and we absolutely should) we should shut the members up and give the Prime Minister proper questions to answer. Speaking of Prime Ministers...

4. The stranglehold the Conservative and Labour Parties have on Downing Street.

Ok I'm very sorry for that awful segue. I really am. The point however is valid. If you want to find a Prime Minister who wasn't a member of the Labour or Conservative Parties, you need to go back a few years. His name was David Lloyd George, who was a member of the now defunct Liberal Party (In 1988 it merged with the Social Democratic Party to form the Liberal Democrats). If you know your history, then you may know that David Lloyd George was the Prime Minister during World War I. He was Prime Minister from 1916-1922, so it has been 92 years since the UK had a Prime Minister who wasn't a member of the Labour or Conservative Parties. I have no segue at all for this last one, so I'll just go ahead and say it...

5. The Liberal Democrats

In America there's the Democrats and the Republicans and that's it. In Britain we have Labour, the Conservatives and many smaller parties (although UKIP is getting bigger). However in Britain we have a party that isn't as big as Labour or the Conservatives, but they are bigger than the others. They are the Liberal Democrats. Now I will admit that I used to be a fan of the Liberal Democrats, but over the last four and a half years, they've shown themselves to be inept puppets of the conservative party. Their leader Nick Clegg has stated he'd be open to a coalition with the Labour Party as well showing us all that he doesn't care who's hand is up his arse. These days the Liberal Democrats are losing popularity hand over fist, but whether it will translate into electoral losses in Westminster remains to be seen.

As Steve Shives always says "The hardest part is only picking five". I must say I know what he means now. 

Have a happy new year everybody!

Steven