The rich teaching the poor to be poor

 Subject: The rich teaching the poor to be poor.



The rich teaching the poor to be poor. This in essence is the future for many as the glory days of equality and democratisation give way to nationalism, neo-capitalism and diminishing returns for the poor.

The upliftment of the uneducated to become educated,of the under nourished to be properly nourished, of the people to be securely housed and protected by laws which covered all citizens equally. These were the aims of the 1947 Labour government under Clement Attlee and amazingly they progressed a long way down that path but the insidious pressure of the rich and their influential Market forces has chipped way since practicing a devious divide and rule policy with an outrageous, disingenuous, press to fill the minds of people with rubbish and culminating in the rise of a populist showman, Boris Johnson who manipulated Brexit through Parliament much to his everlasting shame.

The tragedy is that we have to put so much faith in the democratic system which is clearly undemocratic when it comes to using the ‘First Past the Post’ method of eliciting a winner which deviates from a ballot for the total number of votes in the country , each persons vote counting the same value instead by pooling the votes into regional, city and rural weighting, it relies on selected boundaries to encompass the voter. A small rural pool of voters elects its parliamentary representative and is equal to a much larger constituency, in a city where many thousand make up the ballot for their MP.

We in fact practice a country wide party voting system which elects a minority to rule over the majority. Even given the crushing defeat inflicted by the Conservative Party over their main opposition the Labour Party in the 2019 election, the Conservatives only held 43% of the countries vote but gained an extra 48 seats in Parliament with a tiny 1.2% increase in the vote share.

All votes are clearly not of the same value when it comes to winning a seat.

For instance it took the SNP 28,000 votes to win a parliamentary seat whilst it took 800,000 votes for the Green Party to win one. 600,000 votes for the Brexit Party didn’t win them one seat and Labour had to gain 50,000 votes to win a seat whilst the Tory’s elected an MP on only 38,000 votes. This is clearly not equitable democracy.

Only marginal seats matter, the so called swing seats and as a result parties and politicians concentrate on these marginal seats sometimes offering all kinds of enticements, ie more public spending (our version of pork-barrel politics much favoured in the USA). In the First Past the Post system each person is represented by an MP but for the majority of people, that MP doesn’t represent their views.

This severing the link between a ruling party and the populous demolishes the understanding people have when encouraged to vote and their scepticism towards politics and politicians stems from this anomaly in representation and is at the heart of our lack of faith in the political system.

Proportional Representation where a wider spectrum of candidates and political opinion is on offer on the ballot paper and you have to rate them first preference, second preference, third preference and so on which then provides an amalgam of choices from each voter which elicit a more rounded view of he or she’s political persuasion. In this method its  more likely this quartet of political view points represents a view across the nation from which the extremes are removed and a more reasonable voice can be heard in parliamentary debate as the MP raising issues and voting for an amendments is likely to include many of your issues and is closer to being judged democratically more representative.  

The current farce where an unpopular party with increasingly unpopular policies simply railroads the vote through the voting lobby by the use of the parliamentary whip (another antidemocratic tactic). Is it any wonder we feel increasingly powerless.

The disadvantage for the main parties is the diminution of their power  as they have to seek consensus with other political views. This watering down of power is seen by some as an emasculation of power but we have seen enough over the last decade of the misuse of power by an increasingly unrepresentative government which has driven us ever closer to bankruptcy.