This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 02/06/09
Choose It Or Lose It
's OK, I'm still here.
A burst of nice weather, combined with other projects and dealing with a personal issue which I might go public with later have kept me away for a couple of weeks. That, and there being nothing I wanted to say on anything.
I just wanted to remind you that there are elections coming up this Thursday (4 June). You might have missed them if I hadn't pointed it out.
The important point I wanted to make is not that they are elections to the European Parliament, and not that they give you the opportunity to avenge yourselves on the political establishment, but that you have the right to vote.
OK, I concede that that includes the right not to vote, but that should only be done as a calculated decision reached after a lot of thought, rather than out of a feeling either of "a pox on them all" or just "I can't be arsed".
There has been a lot of talk from the liberal bien-pensants such as the regular columnists in the Guardian about the danger of those knobheads in the Brutish Nazi Party getting elected. Well, if enough people vote for them, I don't have a problem with them getting seats. That's democracy, however cracked.
I do think, however, that the threat has been talked up rather too much, and for the wrong reasons. Given that so much noise on the issue has come from senior members of the governing party, I don't think it unreasonable to claim that the spectre of the BNP is being used as a scare tactic in order to frighten the gullible back into voting for an organisation which is a crumbling, venal, amoral wreck.
For the BNP to get even one MEP would be unfortunate, but in the same way that the election of one councillor in one London borough a decade and a half ago was treated as if the fall of civilisation was imminent, it won't bring the end of the world.
I can't see them getting more than one, though. In any case, as those who have temporarily fallen under the spell of these Hitler-worshipping retards in past elections at council level could testify, once in office they are too isolated, too clueless, just too fucking dumb to do any lasting damage.
Besides which, I still have a lingering (some would say naïve) faith in the intelligence of my fellow voters that they will not take seriously any party whose leader - despite the trappings of a private education, Cambridge degree (lower second) and smart suiting - can come out with remarks and scribblings like these:
"I have reached the conclusion that the 'extermination' tale [the Holocaust] is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter day witch-hysteria."
"It's well known that the chimneys from the gas chambers at Auschwitz are fake, built after the war ended."
"[W]e affirm that non-Whites have no place here at all and will not rest until every last one has left our land."
A man, moreover, who pals around with Italian and Austrian fascists and the Ku Klux Klan.
And just think...some people describe them as the 'respectable' face of violent bigotry.
As for their soul brothers in that circus of irrelevance called UKIP (whom someone marvellously described today as "The BNP for people who shop at M&S"), well they'll probably get most of their MEPs re-elected. At least, those who haven't been disowned, left in high dudgeon at being passed over for the leadership, or charged with/convicted of fraud. I suppose we have to see it as a success for democracy that even these nineteenth-hole bores and refugees from the Monday Club can get elected, but it leaves a rather sour taste in the mouth all the same.
One way of minimising the chance of either of these groupuscules getting elected is simply to go out and vote. Under the proportional representation system in use for the European elections, a party needs to pass a certain percentage to get a seat. That means that the lower the turnout, the easier it will be for them.
So if you want to stop either the Führer's Favourite Fuckwits or the Golf Club Bunker Boys getting in, then vote!
Or, as Robert A Heinlein - an author with whom I'm proud to say I disagree on many things - said, and was actually right for once:
"If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong."
And if you don't vote, then I'm sorry but you forfeit any right to whinge about the result. 
