The Judge RANTS!
Date: 02/05/24
Not Encouraging
"Don't vote, it only encourages them"
(Classic graffito)
There was one of them election things happening today.
I know there was; I got a letter a week or two back to tell me. It was all official and everything.
Despite the kind invitation, however, I did not vote.
There are three reasons why, the first being specific to this occasion, and the other two of more general application.
Firstly, this is an election for what is called - to my mind, rather misleadingly - a 'Police and Crime Commissioner'. I say 'misleadingly' because the job title implies to those of us who care for precision in language - or 'pernickety pedants', as the untutored often call us - that the winning candidate will be responsible for commissioning crime on their patch. Given that the winner will be a party political hack, with all the ethical stoutness of that breed, perhaps it is I who have misunderstood.
It is my firm belief that the administration of the police should not under any circumstances be left in the hands of politicians. Indeed, the only previous time that I voted in such an election in 2012, I simply wrote, "Don't politicise the police - police the politicians" on my ballot paper. Pols are pols and, as such, are subject to priorities which over-ride operational good sense with the need to be seen to be Doing Something, irrespective of the sense or lack thereof in the Something which is deemed desirable to be Done. It's all part of the attempt to replace real democracy with a superficial simulacrum of same, and I will not connive with such a deception.
The second reason for my principled abstention is contained in this section of the Poll Card Letter I was sent:
This is one of the elections which is now governed by the infamous Elections Act of 2022, which made an 'acceptable' form of ID mandatory for participation in most elections. The fact that ID documents held overwhelmingly by the elderly and the well-provisioned (such as driving licences, passports, and suchlike luxuries) were deemed sufficient to grant the privilege of voting, whereas student ID cards - to give just one example out of many - are deliberately excluded, lays bare the intent of the Act to disenfranchise young people (along with those who hold neither passport nor driving licence; the disabled, the poor, etc.) because of the unfortunate tendency of those demographics not to vote Conservative. The excuse about the measures - the most severe obstacle placed in the way of the right to vote in the history of Universal Suffrage in this territory - being necessary to combat voting fraud was itself far more fraudulent, given that there were only two convictions for voter fraud in the entire period from 2010 to 2018. It was a 'solution' to a non-existant 'problem'.
(Another convenient proviso of the Act is in allowing 'British' citizens to vote even if they have not lived here for fifteen years or more, thus enabling those who are not subject to laws passed in that neo-Gothic theme park called 'Westminster' being able to influence the composition of the legislature. The 'ex-pats' (i.e., immigrants to other people's countries) and other gammons rejoiced suitably, and will doubtless show their appreciation in the way they cast their ballots).
Now as it happens, I do have an item of ID which is included in the charmed circle of State-permitted identity; my bus pass, which I finally gained a little under two years ago. But I object so much to having to validate myself to the Authorities (or, rather, the Powers; see Chesterton for the essential difference between the one and the other) a second time when the polling card alone was perfectly sufficient for the forty-odd years of my voting life to date that that glorious cussedness which I am very glad to say has been a feature of my character in the years since I reached middle-age and stopped caring what others think kicked in and prevents me from bowing to the knowt of piddling conformity.
Besides which, as I said, the election itself on this occasion is utterly meaningless.
The third reason for my voluntary withdrawal from partaking of what the more gullible and/or dishonest of our superior people insist on calling 'democracy' is far more broad-ranging, and it comes in three aspects:
Complaint number one is the complete dishonesty of politicians in this decayed and decadent Empire. It's true that even in previous times, the popular standing of pols rated very slightly above estate agents and some considerable way below prostitutes in terms of public trust (politicians - acting for once in response to public perceptions - have subsequently evolved into a combination of the two, so many of them being an amalgam of landlord and whore). But the peccadilloes of earlier generations seem like amusing gaffes when compared to the utter shamelessness of our contemporary rulers. In bygone ages, the slightest whiff of impropriety was enough to force a politician (of whatever rank or tendency) to relieve themselves of their public responsibilities as a result of their own ligering sense of moral procedure. Their successors - when caught with their hands in the biscuit barrel or the netherwear of an 'assistant' - merely relieve themselves in the faces of the public, safe in the knowledge that 'chums' (however defined) will form the wagons in a circle to protect them, and that friendly news media (however defined) will instead turn on those who have exposed the corruption.
(Books have been written - and many more will no doubt join them - on the rank dishonesty of the UKanian media and their malign effect on politics in particular and on public life in general. The British daily press - now so revolting that even Australians feel unclean after reading it - is now not so much merely 'yellow' as it is 'burnt ochre' under the sovereignty of King Rupert and his imitators).
In short, of moral sense in our self-acclaimed rulers there is none. Anything may be gotten away with if the 'optics' are right and - even if they aren't - helpful hands at the keyboards can be relied upon to fill the channels of public communication with so much shit and feathers that the whole matter may successfully be obscured.
The second grouse - which follows inexorably on from the first - is the woeful lack of any meaningful choice in elections. In the same way that Greater England has determinedly imitated the worst aspects of American culture, it has also ingested the poison of the major parties, i.e., the only ones which can gain a majority under the current arrangements (see below), being essentially merely two wings of the same party, most particularly in terms of economic policy. The Gospel according to Saint Milton of Chicago, having been pushed to the apex of policy formulation under the swivelling eyes of the likes of Thatcher, Joseph and Ridley, has hardened into a set of secular dogmata planted so deep in the political and public soul that even the most mere and half-hearted attempt to deviate from the One True Way is treated as a heresy so vile that the response must be the latter-day equivalent not merely of the witch-hunt (with a media pack which has arrogated to itself the status of latter-day Matthew Hopkinses), but of an entire Inquisition, where the verdict and punishment are determined beforehand because the ideology - or rather, the theology - can never be wrong or be seen to be wrong.
That the results of such monocularity have been catastrophic in an economic sense for all bar a favoured few are, of course, a given; we see the consequences all around us. But the effects on political discourse have been equally devastating, as they have removed any possiblity of addressing the manifold distresses of our society in any way other than trying minor variations on the same hurdy-gurdy theme whilst expecting them to work, or to be at least convincing to enough of the public that they will pass the casual inspection which is all most people will give them. And the fact that any politician who publicly espouses a change of the actual tune will be ruthlessly rogered into marginal or even invisible status by whatever means those holding the reins of power (or the microphones) deem necessary means that politics in UKania has devolved into a sewer; one, moreover, permanently obstructed by fatballs in the shape of the politicians themselves and their donors.
There Is No Alternative. There Is To Be No Alternative.
And this brings me on to the last reason for my abstention, not only in this election but in all others hereafter.
When the very electoral system itself is designed to so wilfully skew the outcomes to favour one of only two monolithic power groups; and when those two groups have become so ideologically aligned that a Venn diagram of them would look like a near-total solar eclipse; and when all other options are all but closed off; then casting a ballot takes on the air of an offering at a religious shrine, in that one may believe (with varying degrees of fervour) that one will get something worthwhile for one's devotions, despite all historical evidence standing to the contrary.
I used to be one of the pious faithful. I subscribed to the sentiment expressed by Robert A. Heinlein's fantasy alter ego Lazarus Long:
"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."
Now, this may be sound enough advice - and I long considered it to be such - in a political landscape where there are substantive differences between the menus on offer. But when the only choice one has is between indistinguishable bowls of grey slop, then the exercise rather loses its point.
I also used to believe that if you didn't vote, you forfeited all right to complain at the result; after all, you had - at least in theory - a chance to influence the outcome, and if you didn't take it, then more fool you. But the game is rigged, the table is tilted, and four-fifths of votes cast don't mean a damn. I have therefore committed apostasy and have decided to follow the guidance of a sharper philosopher and prophet than Heinlein, namely the great George Carlin. Here is his take on the matter, and this will be the rule I intend to follow from hereon in:
In short, there comes a point where a system - any system - becomes so dishonest, so terminally corrupted (and, in addition to what I've already described, one could add the gerrymandering of electoral boundaries and the suborning of the supposedly-independent Electoral Commission to direct political control) that even participating in it becomes complicity with that corruption. To me, that point has now been passed, and I will not be a party (political or otherwise) to it.
The rest of you may carry on enjoying your illusion of power as you please, of course.
