Friday 8 May 2015

UK Election Meltdown 2015 a result of historic coffee and muffin disagreement (UPDATED)

Danny Alexander (looks and sounds like a Gilbert and Sullivan character - became Chief Secretary to the Treasury)
and  Ed Balls (looks and sounds like a character from Revenge of the Pink Panther - became Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer)
who couldn't get on over coffee during the failed Labour/Liberal Coalition negotiations in 2010, have now both lost their seats in last nights election meltdown.

The background is all in here, Film4's COALITION

2010 - After Britain's first televised leadership debate all sides rush to agree with new political star Nick Clegg, who goes onto lead his minority Liberal Democrat party into the hung parliament after the 2010 election. The Liberal Democrats, a more fresh faced and naive bunch of political meerkats you'll never find, reject the chance to form a government with natural left of centre allies Labour and instead form a government with the Conservatives, mainly because Danny Alexander and Ed Balls didn't get on during negotiations over coffee and muffins.
(Coalition is great UK political drama that bears comparison with HBO's RECOUNT and GAME CHANGE, I particularly liked Mark Gatiss as Prince of Darkness spin doctor Peter Mandelsson.)

Since the events depicted in Coalition the hard nosed Conservatives and their friends in the media have rammed through a very conservative agenda and generally have played the Lib Dems like a fiddle.

Meanwhile the equally amateurish Labour Party have been gutted by support for Scottish nationalists, perhaps because they are led by a man who managed to exceed expectations in the campaign only because the expectations were so rock bottom.

"The Right Wing Press destroyed Ed Milliband!" they will say
The Labour Party needs to take a very long hard look at it's selection process, as in this case the Progressive cause has been led for the last five years by a man who makes Micheal Foot look like John F Kennedy. Whatever Labour party workshop of work-shy policy wonks and self serving trade unionists engineered a leadership election where the choice was between two equally clueless looking brothers (the other Miliband is just as convincing) needs to take a long hard look at themselves.

This is The Guardian's Charlie Brooker on 'inherently comic' Ed Milliband

"The other week he was pictured in Elle magazine wearing the Fawcett Society’s “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirt. Last Sunday the Mail claimed those T-shirts are stitched together in a Mauritian sweatshop by women earning 62p an hour. - A T-shirt. He can’t even wear a T-shirt without somehow condemning both himself and any surrounding witnesses to ridicule. What’s going to trip him up next? A doorknob?"

(Ed subsequently tripped leaving the stage after one of the televised leadership debates).

Dear Labour Party
for the rest of the UK politics is not a joke, it is not a hobby, it is not a passtime to brag about in North London dinner parties. Globalisation has taken a vast number of good jobs (for men and women) from this country and likely they won't be coming back. The only future I can see from here is a repeat of the 1870s - minus Scotland.
Look at this picture, one of a series of endless media disasters, taken from the incident alluded to by Charlie Brooker above - does this look like the face of Austerity Britain to you? Or a pair of dozy career politicians advised by dimwits living on Planet London?

Update :
It appears Clegg and Milliband will now resign as a result of yesterdays events.
I type this in the once rock solid Liberal seat of North Devon - Jeremy Thorpe's seat for most of the  Cretaceous Period and since - which is now solid Conservative after unseating Nick Harvey after 23 years in 70% turnout. UKIP vote seems to have collapsed, perhaps as a result of the SNP panic.

Will historians draw a parallel between Netanyahu's recent scare tactics in the Israeli election with that of Cameron's threat of the Scottish Nationalists here? Is 2015 the year of the scare? Will this be a feature of the US election?

To the surprise I'm sure of absolutely no-one in the rest of the UK, Labour has been quite successful in London. Elsewhere we have Scottish nationalists in total control of Scotland and English nationalists in control of nearly everywhere else.
Interesting times ahead.

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