Remember my prediction that Barack Obama would be plagued by Republicans questioning his right to be President from the moment of his inauguration?
I was taken to task by someone in a comment for the temerity of my suggestion.

However, I have now been borne out not just once, but twice*. And he’s only been President for six months!

*For, apparently [thanks to Almax for alerting me to this – unfortunately Alastair’s (extremely good) blog is restricted to 35 readers] there are folk saying Obama wasn’t born a US citizen and so is an illegal commander-in-chief. They are called Birthers and want to see his birth certificate.

This is part of what Almax wrote:-
“In the land of the cranks free there’s now a certain amount of steam behind a campaign based on the proposition that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore cannot constitutionally be President.

Some Birthers say that Government agents engaged in time-travel shenanigans and recently warped themselves back to ’61 to insert this notice ex post facto.
America? Dontchaluvit?

In the greatest democracy in the world^© it would seem some Americans are not democrats at all. Even with a small d.

There has been much talk of late about the electoral system for the UK Parliament. This will be another round in the ongoing battle to extend and improve the franchise which has been unfolding since before the Great Reform Act of 1832. After that date a series of Representation Of The People Acts gradually allowed more and more men the vote till finally all males aged 21 could. Then after World War 1 women aged 30 were granted the franchise, and when it was realised that the world had not come to an end simply because the fairer sex could vote, women at 21 received it sometime around 1930.

I still remember my grandmother struggling out to vote even though she was an old lady. She did this religiously because she could remember the time when women did not have that right and was determined that she should exercise it whenever possible.

Finally (in the 1970s if my memory serves – I’ve not Wikied any of this so far, it was one of the bits of History I did do at school) the voting age was reduced to 18 for all voters. Gordon Brown has even floated the idea of reducing it to 16!

My younger son likes to take credit for the genesis of this proposal as during the last General Election he was in Kirkcaldy High Street and was accosted by our Labour candidate (you know who) and asked if he was going to be voting for him. He had to reply he was too young and couldn’t vote.

The Chartists were a group who agitated for electoral extension and reform in the mid 1800s with six main demands – all of which were rejected at the time. Yet they prevailed in the end; mostly.

The only one of their demands that has not yet been enacted is Annual Parliaments. This might be one reform now worth considering. By this I (unlike the Chartists) donâ’t mean hold a General Election every single year, but instead have, say, a quarter of the House Of Commons come up for election each year with members sitting for a fixed term of four years. A similar sort of thing used to happen in council elections in my youth when every council ward had three members, each coming up for (re)election every third year. My proposal is not for constituencies to have four members each but for a rolling programme of elections.

Perhaps a new Peoples’ Charter should be set up to agitate for this.

Whether it would alleviate or exacerbate the endemic short-termism that bedevils British government I’m not sure but I think it would lead to a reduction in excess by whoever is in office. Would, for example, we have had the worst extremes of Thatcherism or latterly the Iraq war if a quarter of the House Of Commons had been facing imminent re-election? I suppose there would still need to be the ability to hold a widespread General Election at any time – but only if Parliament voted for one.

Along with a more proportional voting system (STV?) and a smaller upper House – perhaps to be elected on a longer term basis, but not for life and certainly not because your ancestor once happened to be boffed by a king – with a scrutineering role and which would also represent the nations and regions of the UK more evenly this would go a long way to making UK government more accountable. All Members of Parliament, of both Houses, to be subject to some form of dismissal in the event of financial shenanigans or other disqualification (such as being jailed.)

It won’t happen, of course.

The only thing you can say about Hazel Blears is that she jumped before she was pushed.

She was said on the Six O’Clock News last night to have timed her resignation in an attempt to cause as much damage to Gordon Brown as possible. To my mind it has done the opposite. It reveals her as petty, mean-minded and childish.

The fact that she wore a badge which said “Rocking The Boat” to her resignation meeting with Brown only adds to that effect. To me it appeared to be a reference to the recent film about the pirate radio stations of the 1960s rather than to a shipwreck. A rather juvenile gesture at best, and totally undignified.

The government is well rid of such playground antics.

Among the leaflets we received was one from the No To EU party.

At least I think it’s from the No To EU party.

What the leaflet actually says is no²eu – all in lower case! – which I read as no squared, eu; or perhaps n, o squared, eu. Of these, I only recognise N as an SI unit. (Even then it would have to be a capital letter.) The remainder are gibberish.

I suppose it’s meant to be text-speak (no2eu) – which is a less than serious way to communicate with voters I’d have thought – but this mob can’t even get this right as the 2 is superscripted, thereby becoming the mathematical symbol not for the number two but instead the indication that the preceding symbol is to be multiplied by itself (squared.)

So, mathematically, we have no x no x eu, or n x o x o x eu which (expanded) become n x o x n x o x e x u and n x o x o x e x u.

What a glorious example of shooting yourself in the foot. I didn’t bother reading the rest. If they’re not prepared to engage with me as a literate and numerate adult I’m not going to treat them with respect either. I’ll just take the piss.

They do, however, give the lie to Nigel Farrage (whose surname is only its final vowel away from an apt description of the man) of UKIP who said in their PPB that UKIP was the only party standing for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. Well, what do you expect from someone who looks and sounds like a sinister double-glazing salesman?

The Labour and SNP leaflets barely mentioned the EU at all, the Tories only to bash it in derogatory language. The Lib Dem leaflet was the only one that came anywhere near a programme for engagement with the EU.

There was nothing from the Greens. That’s my vote sorted then.

The EU elections party bumf has arrived through the post box.

The BNP one has a Spitfire blazoned it…

The Spitfire was used in a war against your philosophy, you cretins.

And I see the UKIP one has a picture of Winston Churchill, cigar, “V”-sign, trade mark bowler hat and all. This is presumably in order to encourage us to remove ourselves from the EU.

I take it these numpties don’t realise Churchill offered France a union with Britain in 1940.

Tell you what. UKIP if you want to. I’d rather not.

No, it bloody isn’t. Not in a UK parliamentary election, anyway.

Most of the time it’s nearest the post or, more often, quite-a-long-way-from-the-post-actually.

I happened to catch last week’s Question Time on the TV and some punter in the audience was banging on about how it gave us strong government.

Oh, yeah? Like the Major administration, or our present incumbents?

And strong government isn’t necessarily a good thing. A dictatorship is strong government after all. Don’t forget strong government gave us the depredations of Thatcherism.

I wish all politicians, punters, pundits, psephologists and the like would stop using this lazy, misleading description.

Or, better still, the former should give us some form of PR.

Any form of PR would likely be better than the present farrago where MPs and Governments regularly get elected on less than a quarter of the vote, never mind of the total electorate.

What can you say about the Jacqui Smith affair?

One odd thing occurred to me, though.

Bizarrely, most of the coverage I have seen concentrated on the fact the expenses claim had included on it two porn films. But there were other (non porn) films on the same invoice. Why are these more acceptable?

Apparently MPs can claim for cable TV in their “second” home.

For what possible reason?

Internet and telephone I can understand. Arguably MPs need to keep in touch with constituents, their office and the like and these are perfectly reasonable ways to go about it.

But cable TV?

How on Earth does access to cable TV help an MP to do his or her job?….

The Tory governments of the 1950s and early 1960s did not alter the framework that the post-war Labour Governments had erected. During that time, at the 1955 General Election, the Tories in Scotland secured a majority of the total Scottish vote. There was almost no disparity in electoral behaviour across the UK. Slightly earlier, at the time of the abduction of the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey in 1951, the SNP had only 0.7% support.

Yet today the Scottish political landscape has changed utterly. There is a Scottish Parliament – run by the SNP! – and Scottish Tories have great difficulty securing a so-called “first past the post” (a term I detest) seat in Scotland.

So what happened?

By the 1960s the binding force of the Empire had gone, the sense of togetherness engendered by two World Wars, where Britain was in great danger – more so in 1940: though almost as much in WW1, where Churchill said of Admiral Jellicoe, “he was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon” – had slipped away. Deference (“the toffs know how to run things”) was no longer the force it was.

All three of these factors apply equally to England, though.

Was it just that the mere presence of the SNP gave an apparently safe home to voters who could not stomach switching all the way from Tory to Labour? The rise of the SNP – especially in rural areas; Labour dubbed them the Tartan Tories – combined with a resurgence of the Liberals certainly helped erode the Conservative vote.

Thatcher, though, completed the process. She was always a Little Englander; a trait most Scots tend to find unattractive. She also appeared hectoring and strident. Scotland’s macho culture wasn’t going to accede to that. She also tore down that framework I mentioned earlier so that only an emasculated NHS was left.

It is possible Scottish voters became canny at working out which candidate could win and adopted tactical voting as a means of keeping Tories out. In this regard doctorvee gives evidence that the Tory vote in Scotland actually still holds up; but then the Liberal vote also did not die away completely in the UK in the inter- and post-war years, while their representation did.

It could be argued that Scotland is – or was – a conservative (small c) country. It was certainly so when I was growing up. (So many things are different now.) That that conservatism came to be expressed in voting for Labour is not quite an irony. As far as Scotland is concerned, Labour were always conservative. And New Labour never reversed the effects of Thatcher’s policies – because they never tried to.

Despite that there is, though, still the strain in Scotland’s culture that emphasises community. It is exemplified in the phrase, “We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns.” I think it was a sense of this communitarianism that Scots were hankering for in rejecting Thatcherism and, later, despite the old ties, Labour.

A more significant factor in the SNP coming to power, though, was familiarity breeding contempt. After a time voters in the UK seem to get tired of the same old lot in power and hoik them out. And Jack McConnell was hardly inspiring as the face of Scotland. The hoo-has surrounding the cost of the Parliament building and the demise of Henry Mcleish didn’t endear the administration to the public either.

It’s nowhere near time for, “Come in Alex, you’re time’s up,” – folk are not yet fed up with the SNP – but it will come.

It seems the lists of scored off names on the electoral registers used at the polling places for the Glenrothes by-election have gone missing, possibly in Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court.

So; no-one can now check the total votes counted against the numbers who actually turned up to vote.

While it is unlikely that anyone would take the risk of being found out in such an enterprise the loss of the lists is an embarrassment to say the least and opens the possibility of ballot boxes having been stuffed with papers for whom there were no voters. It’s not beyond the bounds of thought to suppose that Fife Labour were so scared of losing that they would do something like this.
But it is Kirkcaldy Sheriff Court we’re talking about here.

Conspiracy or cock-up?

Take your pick.

I saw on John Stewart’s the Daily Show (aired on 23/01/09 in Britain) that American right wingers are after Obama already.

He’d only been President for one day!

Remind me again. Who are the real anti-Americans?