The British General Election, 7 May 2015 : A Post-mortem

During the days leading up to Thursday, 7 May, the mainstream media bombarded the poor electorate with stark warnings of a hung Parliament and a minority government, either Tory or New Labour (Old Labour having died a painful death when the unspeakable Tony Blair made his pact with the media moguls and Big Business way back before his 1997 landslide victory). Increasingly, the hapless Ed Miliband, not accepted as genuine New Labour by BigBiz and media moguls, was emerging as a figure of fun in the media which was kinder towards Cameron. During those days Cameron's habitual poker faced expression metamorphosed into a passionate Churchillian one as he delivered speeches with arms flailing and his body language on fire. What exactly was going on, I wondered?

Having cast my vote for the Green candidate earlier in the day, I decided to take a pre-midnight nap. Shortly after the stroke of twelve I switched on the television. I stared aghast as the BBC exit poll shown on the TV screen predicted a comfortable victory for the Tories. I soon learnt that many people did not believe it. A former LibDem leader, Paddy Ashdown, declared the exit poll to be nonsensical and promised to eat his hat in public if he was proved wrong. By 3 o'clock in the early hours it was obvious that the swing to the Conservatives was too sharp and LibDems were being slaughtered, in Scotland by Nicola Sturgeon's Scottish Nationalists and in England by the Conservatives. I had had enough and I decided to go back to bed. I do not know if Paddy Ashdown publicly ate his hat as he had promised to do!

With hindsight I can see with more clarity what had happened. Thanks to Blairite manoeuvrings, the differences between the Conservatives and New Labour had largely disappeared. The position in the UK had become similar to that of the USA, where the two major political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, both enjoy the financial support of Wall Street and giant multinationals. With the departure of Blair there was an Old Labour backlash in the Labour Party which cast doubts on Ed Miliband's loyalty to the City of London and Big Business. The mainstream media, mostly owned by the super-rich/large conglomerates, and the perfidious BBC, began a process of disparagement against Labour. The spectre of a coalition government between Labour and Scottish Nationalists, who were presented as being interested only in Scottish independence with scant regard for the rest of the Union, was kept constantly before the English electorate. Brainwashed by this constant bombardment, the voters went out and cast their vote for the Conservative Party.

It is obvious that unless the Labour Party sells its soul to the devil Blair-like it will never receive the support of mainstream media or funding from large multinationals. The dice are loaded in favour of the Tories and the game of democracy is conducted on uneven playing fields. This dishonest system is further exacerbated by the "First Past the Post" method of selecting the winning candidate in each constituency irrespective of the proportion of votes received. Thus, we have a majority Conservative government which is supported by less than a quarter of the total electorate or a little more than one-third of those who actually voted. Without a complete overhaul of the mainstream media, and the sources of funding for political parties, the elections are an exercise in dishonestly brainwashing the electorate.

David Cameron's New Government

 

Mr Austerity

Sadly, there is little new about the new government. Cameron lost no time following his victory to re-confirm his closest cronies in their old posts. "The Witch" returns to the Home Office, "Mr Austerity" marches back as the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Israeli stooge Philip Hammond stays at the Foreign Office. So what is on the horizon?

* Expect stricter surveillance by the State as the "Snoopers' Charter" becomes law, and citizens' rights are watered down

* The sufferings of ordinary people will increase as the discredited austerity bites deeper and re-distributes wealth to the financial elite

* The US/NATO/Israeli adventurism abroad will continue to lay waste foreign countries and decimate their populations

The irony is that the electorate has willingly voted for this hellish scenario because it cannot escape from the conditioning, the brainwashing that hired journalists working for the media conglomerates constantly subject it to. Unless we grasp this basic truth and try to free our minds and our lives from such mental and spiritual oppression by discarding mainstream media in favour of independent/alternative media we shall remain entrapped in a fascist state.


LATER ADDITION (13 May 2015)

I published my post-mortem on the British General Election on 10 May. The following day Global Research published "UK Election Aftermath" which sets out in stark detail what to expect from the new government over the next 5 years. The full article is re-produced below.

UK Election Aftermath: Cameron to Continue Waging War on Working People

By Colin Todhunter

Global Research, May 11, 2015

Region: Europe

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Today in the UK, people are waking up to their first week of a five-year rule under a Conservative majority government. It’s been the first time the Tories have managed to form such a government since 1992. Only 37 percent of those who bothered to vote actually voted Conservative. In fact, the current administration is in government with 24 percent of support from all those who were eligible to vote.

Under the UK’s ‘first past the post system’, the Scottish Nationalist party gained 56 seats with 4.8 percent of votes cast. The Greens gained one seat with a share of 3.8 percent. Under a system of proportional representation, the Greens would now have 25 seats in the new parliament. With the current system, a party could theoretically gain the most number of seats nationally but fail to gain a single seat. This is the nature of the ‘democratic’ voting system in the UK.

What the UK now has in store is five years of an ideologically driven administration that will push through its welfare-cutting, pro-privatisation policies wrapped up in talk of a need for austerity and presided over by a millionaire-dominated cabinet which represents the interests of the richest echelons of global capital.

Out of those who voted Tory, a good deal comprised people of relatively modest means: people who will have been led to believe that ordinary people’s interests equate with the ‘national interest’ as defined by Tory politicians. These are people who for some strange reason believe that more privatisation, more deregulation, more austerity, more inequality, more concentration of wealth and more attacks on the public sector will be good for them as individuals and good for the economy.

The acceptance of this ideology is not just down to Tory methods of persuasion but is also due to its perpetuation by the corporate mainstream media and the other main political parties, which have fully embraced neoliberalism. However, many people feel that the Tories can be best trusted to see through such things, unlike Labour (Tory-lite) or the Liberal Democrats who might mismanage, waver or may not be quite as committed to the neoliberal cause. As a party by the rich, for the rich of and of the rich, they may have a point.

What we can now expect to see is the attempted completion of a project that had begun under Thatcher in the eighties: the complete subservience of ordinary working people to the needs of powerful corporations, the tax-evading corporate dole-scrounging super rich and the neoliberal agenda they have imposed on people. And key to securing this is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

The European Commission tries to sell TTIP by claiming that the agreement will increase GDP by one percent and will entail massive job creation. These claims are not supported even by its own studies, which predict a growth rate of just 0.01 percent GDP over the next ten years and the potential loss of jobs in several sectors. Corporations are lobbying EU-US trade negotiators to use the deal to weaken food safety and restrictions on GM food and agriculture as well as labour, health and environmental standards, among other things. Through certain regulatory and investor trade dispute stipulations, the outcome would entail the by passing of any existing democratic processes in order to push through the ultimate corporate power grab.

This proposed trade agreement (and others like it being negotiated across the world) is based on a firm belief in ‘the market’ (a euphemism for subsidies for the rich, cronyism, rigged markets and cartels) and the intense ideological dislike of state intervention and state provision of goods and services. The economic doctrine that underpins this belief attempts to convince people that they can prosper by having austerity imposed on them and by submitting to neo-liberalism and ‘free’ trade: a smokescreen the financial-corporate elites hide behind while continuing to enrich themselves.

Current negotiations over ‘free’ trade agreements have little to do with free trade. They are more concerned with loosening regulatory barriers and bypassing any current democratic processes that hinder their profits. These deals could allow large corporations to destroy competition, enforce privatisations and secure lucrative government procurement markets and siphon off wealth to the detriment of smaller, locally based firms and producers. We see this from TTIP, to the US-India Knowledge Agreement on Agriculture, CETA, TPP and beyond.

Cameron: handmaiden to the rich

Whether based in New York, London, Berlin or Delhi, the planet’s super rich and their corporations comprise a global elite whose members have to varying extents been incorporated into the Anglo-US system of trade and finance. For them, the ability to ‘do business’ (exploit labour – or automate – and make profits) is what matters, not national identity or the capacity to empathise with an ordinary working person that was born on the same land mass and who will lose their livelihood.

Notions of the ‘national interest’ that governments churn out are merely rhetorical devices to be used to rally the masses. And notions of being ‘against the national interest’ are used to curtail of destroy dissent, as we currently see happening with Greenpeace in India.

In order ‘to do business’, government machinery has been corrupted and bent to serve their ends. In turn, organisations that were intended to be ‘by’ and ‘for’ ordinary working people to challenge capital have been successfully infiltrated and dealt with.

The global takeover of agriculture by powerful agribusiness, the selling off and privatisation of assets built with public toil and money and secretive corporate-driven trade agreements represent a massive corporate heist of wealth and power across the world.

Whether it concerns rich oligarchs in the US or India’s billionaire business men, corporate profits and personal gain trump any notion of the ‘national interest’. 300,000 dead farmers in India who killed themselves or the ranks of the unemployed in Spain or Greece are regarded as mere ‘collateral damage’ in what is ultimately a war on working people and the environment itself.

Looting economies for personal gain is disguised as ‘free trade’. Austerity is sold as ‘growth’. Massive profits is ‘wealth creation’. Ecological degradation is ‘progress’. From Obama in the US to Cameron in the UK or Modi in India, their neoliberal agenda betrays them as handmaidens to the rich.

In Britain expect to see militarism, brutality and imperialism continuing to be sold under the banner of ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘democracy’. Expect more cronyism, an increasingly wider revolving door to facilitate the flow between private interests and government, more insidious lobbying by big business and a continued free for all in the corrupt City of London.

Some 11,334,000 voted Conservative in the UK last Thursday. The other 53 million in the country now face having deal with the outcome for the next five years.

Democracy Today - in Pakistan, the USA and the UK

PAKISTAN

The latest news from Pakistan is that Pakistan’s National Assembly and the four Provincial Assemblies will be dissolved on 10 February and a caretaker government will be installed for a brief period while the Election Commission of Pakistan will vet candidates contesting the forthcoming  elections (probably to be held in May). On the face of it this sounds very good news until you scratch the surface to see what lies underneath.

Fakhruddin G Ibrahim

The Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), is an eighty four years old retired judge, who is respected for his honesty and integrity. Great. But will he have the energy to look into all the scandals and wheeling and dealing which, by all accounts, have been going on for years and will grow worse during the election campaign? It seems to me that an alert and energetic Chief Election Commissioner is an important  

requirement because the other four election commissioners do not enjoy quite as good a reputation as the CEC Mr Fakhruddin Ibrahim. Judging from his images on the internet, however, he does look in robust health.

Pakistan’s National Assembly and the Provincial Assemblies are bursting with dishonest people who are experts at manufacturing fake academic degrees, paying no tax and submitting no tax returns, engaging in criminal activities ranging from raiding the national treasury and washing it clean through money laundering, siphoning off funds from state enterprises, dealing in illegal drugs and, believe it or not, ripping off people performing the Haj to Makkah. If anyone stands in their way they will stop at nothing, including murder. Many of these law breakers – the term “legislators” ceased to apply to them long ago – hold dual nationality, mostly American or British. They owe their rise to power to the governments of the USA and the UK, which were instrumental in getting the discredited dictator Musharraf to sign a presidential decree, the so-called National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), which pardoned all the criminals and the murderers (Bhutto, Zardari, the Sharifs, and hundreds of others) and allowed them to keep their illegally acquired wealth. These people are nothing but traitors to Pakistan, their first allegiance is to the governments of the USA and the UK.

A popular and outspoken Pakistani journalist, Hassan Nisar, has been exposing the financial crimes of Pakistan’s rulers in his regular columns for the Urdu newspaper Dunya. He has quoted extensively from Raymond Baker’s book “Capitalism’s Achilles Heel : Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System” which gives, among other things, the details of the wealth amassed by Bhutto, Zardari and the Sharif family. The book can be read/downloaded here:

 http://www.e-reading-lib.org/bookreader.php/135381/Capitalism%2560s_Achilles_heel.pdf

Imran Khan

The all-important question today is: will Pakistanis be able to have a free and fair election or will it again be manipulated by the governments of the USA and the UK? The criminals that were put in power in Pakistan as a result of foreign manipulation show neither shame nor remorse for their crimes. Currently they are distributing millions of rupees to buy off voters and supporters. The one consolation for Pakistanis is that the most popular politician today is Imran Khan, an honest and upright politician, who holds just the Pakistani nationality and whose loyalty to his country is beyond suspicion. For obvious reasons, these qualities do not endear him to the king makers sitting in remote Washington and London.

The foreign powers may try to manipulate elections by offering covert support to discredited political figures of the past. Among them could be Musharraf and, possibly, Tahirul Qadri, a sort of religious priest-cum-politician who acquired Canadian citizenship some years ago. Last month he suddenly descended on Pakistan and held a "long march" from Lahore to Islamabad, which shook the coalition of crooks that rules Pakistan. He has now announced holding a series of rallies all over Pakistan, starting from 15 February. On the face of it the things he says are quite sensible - what is not clear is where he is getting the funding to cover his very high costs. Are there sinister motives behind his sudden emergence close to the elections?

USA

Business and politics have become interwoven in the United States.  To run a political campaign the presidential candidate needs to be stupendously rich or he/she requires rich backers. The campaign itself is little more that a mud slinging contest in which the truth is the chief casualty. So far as the electorate is concerned the primary issue is economic – the people want to be well off and they don’t care what their government does to make their material lives tolerable.

Over the years the US administrations have progressively adopted foreign policies where the legitimate interests and aspirations of non-Americans are ignored. An American government has no qualms giving support to the most heinous dictators, and suppressing people's struggle for freedom and true democracy (in Pakistan’s case, when the USA’s support for a dictator became untenable the US administration managed to give the country a false democracy). This can be more clearly seen if we look at recent history.

Without going as far back as Vietnam, let’s use a reference point of 9/11. The most powerful weapon in the hands of US administration today is that of propaganda and veiled threats. It was these that persuaded people to accept that a fugitive living in backward Afghanistan could launch a sophisticated operation such as the four-pronged attack on mainland USA. No open trial of murderers behind that atrocity ever took place. The remains of the destroyed aircraft were quickly removed and they simply vanished. Many lies were repeated ad infinitum until the world came to accept those lies as truth. The sheer volume of propaganda hid from the world the offer of the government of Afghanistan to hand over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country for a fair trial.

The presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan is both immoral and illegal. The intense propaganda about 'Taliban' hides the fact that the Pashtun Afghanis are also fighting against foreign occupiers of their land. The USA has now as good as lost the war and is preparing for negotiation with the despised Taliban before it withdraws its troops next year.

Then there was Iraq and the Great Lie of WMD (weapons of mass destruction). Saddam Hussein, who was a dear friend while he was dropping napalm on his own people, had become a foe because he had grown too big for his boots and needed to be put in his place. Both in Afghanistan and Iraq the underlying reasons for the savage destruction of human lives was the greed and madness of power-crazed Americans in high places, and their collusion with corrupt politicians. The “democracy” we have today is incapable of producing honest and fearless leaders. The best it can do is serve up second and third rate politicians such as Obama and Bush in USA, and Cameron and Blair in the UK. These unprincipled politicians cling to power, living in constant fear of the electorate. 

The blood-thirsty western governments have not learnt from their experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Pakistan the illegal attacks by USA’s pilot-less drones have killed thousands of innocent people and the western governments appear hell-bent on teaching Pakistan and Iran lessons for not being entirely submissive. Apparently, the civilian Pakistani government accepts instructions from Washington but the military is less submissive – see   Wkileaks revelations 

UK

As in the USA the democracy here has given us a string of greasy politicians. The signs are that the current Prime Minister, David Cameron, is just as adept at fraudulent political manoeuvrings as Tony Blair was. This is very well covered in an excellent article that appeared in The Guardian last week. Glenn Greenwald lays bare the loathsome support that the western governments extend to various evil regimes in the world. Here is the link to the article - there is little need for me to add anything further:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/31/cameron-galloway-saudis-bahrain-dictators?INTCMP=SRCH 

The British General Election, 6 May 2010

Why I welcome a hung Parliament


Election time in the UK can be a bit of a surreal experience for Pakistanis with entitlement to vote in British elections. A part of the problem is the difficulty of identifying with the politics of a country where they are constantly being suspected of being “extremists” or, worse, “terrorists”.  For Pakistanis, a feeling of unease in this unfriendly environment is inevitable, and the desire to see their grossly twisted image changed is correspondingly very strong. A first step in that direction would be a change in the unfair policies of successive British administrations.

The injustice of British policies towards Muslims in general, and towards Pakistanis in particular, can be grasped by considering the steps that successive British governments have taken in relation to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which the British government played a key role, was preceded by a long campaign of disinformation and deliberate deception by Labour Party’s Tony Blair, he of the “Bush’s poodle” fame. Eventually, the  Conservative Party was persuaded to back his controversial decision to line up some 45,000 British troops behind the USA’s 250,000-strong invasion force. It was left to the  Liberal Democrats, the third largest political grouping in the UK, to oppose Blair’s ingratiating support of the USA’s power crazed neoconservatives in the Republican government, hell bent on controlling the oil and gas of the Middle East, and the political governments of that region. It is a sad fact that there exist politicians in the West who consider the destruction of Iraq, and the mass murder of Iraqis, a price worth paying for the control they now exercise over Iraq.

Subsequently, the British government decided to contribute troops to Afghanistan to assist the Americans in their occupation of that country. The lame excuse on this occasion was that the security of British citizens was at risk if such military action were not taken. No attempt has been made to offer credible evidence to the British public in support of this dubious theory, which has resulted in the hell of Iraq being re-created in Afghanistan. Many people believe that the government’s actions have actually resulted in antagonising the Muslim world and increasing the risk of attack on British citizens. The suspected underlying reasons for invading Afghanistan - the control of natural resources of Central Asia - have almost become irrelevant as new realities and new facts are created as a result of Afghan resistance to foreign occupation. The military action in Afghanistan is backed by the Conservatives and also, unfortunately, by the Liberal Democrats. However, the latter’s policy is to reach a political settlement with moderate elements in the Afghan Resistance against foreign occupation, which would enable British troops to be brought back home. The two major political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, favour continued presence of British troops in Afghanistan until “victory” is achieved.

Bogged down in Afghanistan, and unable to see a way out, the policy makers in the USA administration came up with a brilliant idea: extend the war into Pakistan and get the Pakistan Army to perform much of their dirty work on the ground while missiles are rained down on Pakistanis sympathetic to Afghan Resistance. The missiles are fired from unmanned aerial vehicles, the so-called UAVs or “drones”, remotely operated by Americans living in safety hundreds or, possibly, thousands of miles away, playing a deadly computer game with living human beings. The USA has been able to implement its inhuman policies in Pakistan because, with useful support from the British government, it has been able to set up a false façade of “legitimate government” in Pakistan, headed by corrupt and immoral military and civilian rulers such as Musharraf and Zardari.

On the face of it Pakistan is being gradually reduced to the same fate as has been visited upon Iraq and Afghanistan. There is, however, a crucial difference: Pakistan is a nuclear state and the conspiring western powers need to tread with caution. In addition, Pakistan’s independent Judiciary and the Media constitute a big hurdle in the way of the conspiring western powers. Nonetheless, the immensely powerful USA/British propaganda machine, backed up with malicious Indian propaganda, has succeeded in blackening the image of Pakistan. This has reduced people of Pakistan origin living in the UK to issuing pathetic apologies for the real and imagined sins of commission and omission that the American-British propaganda has charged the Pakistani nation with.

As one originating from Pakistan, I detest the policies of the Conservative and Labour parties towards Muslim countries and towards Pakistan. Since 2001 more than 3 million Muslims are estimated to have been killed by the policies and inhuman actions of western politicians. The Holocaust, Hitler’s purge of the Jews in the nineteen forties, is said to have claimed 6 million lives. As Muslim deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan  relentlessly climb towards that  figure, there appears to be deathly silence as this crime against humanity is played out on the world stage as a piece of macabre theatre.

As a helpless witness of this gory episode in human history I, as a so-called British Pakistani, cast my vote in this month’s  British General Election in favour of Liberal Democrats. This, in my opinion, is one political party which is still recognisably human, its features not yet distorted by the insane desire for power. Thankfully, the election has resulted in a balanced Parliament – which the political pundits call “hung Parliament” – where no single political party enjoys an absolute majority.  As the party with the largest number of seats in the House of Commons, the Conservative Party will need the support of Liberal Democrats if it is to form the next government. It is an official policy of Liberal Democrats to improve the current unfair electoral system, which can result in a party with little more than one-third of the electoral vote ending up with a large majority in the House of Commons. Currently, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are deep in negotiations to work out a deal under which the latter will support a government headed by the Conservative leader, David Cameron, as Prime Minister. It is too early to say how the negotiations will pan out. However, I would be very surprised if the Liberal Democrats agreed to water down too much their demand for a system of proportional representation in Parliament, under which the composition of members in the House of Commons would be a fair reflection of the share of votes claimed by the various parties in a general election.

TAILPIECE
The current ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system heavily favours the two largest political parties, Labour and the Conservatives. The party forming the government may only have the support of a little over a third of the electorate but it can end up with a disproportionately large number of members in the House of Commons. This enables an essentially minority government to ride roughshod over the opinions of large sections of the population.

Let me illustrate this by means of some statistics relating to this month’s general election. The House of Commons in the British Parliament has 650 seats. The number of seats won by each of the three largest political parties, and the share of the electoral vote, were as follows:

Conservatives : 307 seats (47% of the 650 seats); 36% of votes cast.

Labour :  258 seats (40% of the 650 seats); 29% of votes cast.

Liberal Democrats: 57 seats (9% of the 650 seats); 23% of votes cast.

Because of their financial muscle and slick organisations, the two largest political parties have won a much higher percentage of parliamentary seats compared to their share of the electoral vote. The Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, won only 9% of seats in Parliament while their share of the total vote was 23%. Little wonder that the Liberal Democrats favour a system of Proportional Representation in Parliament, which would give them substantially more members in Parliament than they do under the current “winner takes all” system. Not surprisingly, Labour and the Conservatives are not keen on the idea of a change in electoral voting to a PR system.