http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gkHwU4DRA8
This I have just watched this squabbling chaos and it begs a few questions.
Is this what happens when a polity shares some commonality with Saudi Arabia, but pretends that it is modern and normal.
The desert Kingdom doesn’t have a written constitution either.
They also have political power in the hereditary principle.
Who gets to kiss Frau Saxe-Coburg Gothe’s elderly hands?
We Irish looked on slightly embarrassed at the Brits, for the first time, having party leaders debates as part of their election. This is all very workaday for this polity.
The Republic of which I am a citizen has a PR type of electoral system we have the Single Transferable Vote system.
We’ve had that in place since, oh, 1922.
Like PR systems around the world it tends to produce coalition governments.
This is the norm in Europe.
The Brits, as I write this, seem to have their knickers in a knot over political negotiations that the rest of the EU takes for granted.
This is the mother of parliaments?
Oh dear.
What we are seeing are the machinations of a ramshackle polity with a folk memory of imperial success.
More than a century and a half on the Chartists still haven’t had their very reasonable democratic demands met.
What the “British people” were offered in terms of changes was a strange choice.
The two opposition party leaders where both Public (i.e very expensive private) school educated, both went to Oxbridge.
Cameron went to Eton and Clegg went to Westminster.
This is England’s birth defect, the class system.
The Celtic fringe doesn’t really figure in any of this.
Gordon Brown was prime Minister for a period in the only way that it was possible for a son of the Fife Manse to be first among equals.
He was appointed rather than elected.
Never again, it seems, will Middle England accept someone who is culturally of the Celtic fringe being in Number 10 Downing Street at the head of the Cabinet table.
The British polity is slowly disaggregating before our eyes.
The Tories have ONE seat in Scotland.
They are seen by most Scots as an English party governing for the benefit of the wealthy in the “Home Counties”.
What you are watching on that link is a political and a media elite in uncharted waters.
I think we, in the rest of the EU, can allow ourselves a little snigger at Perfidious Albion.
Just a little one.
