Imagine that you are getting to the end of a not very good meal at your local restaurant. The dessert menu has arrived and you see that only ice cream is still available. Worse still there are only three flavours, vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. You have tried all of them before and found some fault with each. However you are still hungry so you decide to choose, somewhat peversily, your least favourite flavour, strawberry, in the hope that this time it might be more appealing.
As your ice cream arrives you notice that another table of three is getting quite different flavours, passion fruit and mango, mint chocolate chip and rum and raisin. You complain to the waiter who tells you that he has decided to offer only the three largest sellers as this makes his job easier. To get the others you have to know to ask.
You would quite rightly be upset and probably make a complaint. But this sort of thing is happening all the time at election hustings up and down the country. Only the three largest parties are allowed on the panel and the smaller parties have to make do with submitting their responses in written form for later publication in the hope that some voters may read them.
The silly thing is that with the planned televised debates you are going to hear what these three main parties think. Even worse is the fact that these are the parties who have run parliament for decades and are the primary architects of the mess we are in. Limiting the panel in this way ensures that the innovative solutions that the smaller parties are espousing may not see the light of day. It is also constraining the democratic process in a way that will increase the likelihood of an adverse outcome for the country.
People are likely to vote for what they hear, or not vote at all. Worse still if there is a hung parliament it will consist of the three larger parties fighting it out to get their old fashioned and out of date ideas accepted. Any negotiation is likely to be along the lines of “You accept this stale policy of ours and we will accept one of your stale policies”. Melding one stale idea with another has little chance of creating one new idea. Or to put it another way. If you have one thousand monkeys typing stale ideas out for a million years the chance they will create one new idea is small.
It will be as though you complained to the waiter and all he could offer as compensation was Neapolitan ice cream with layers of vanilla-chocolate-strawberry. The fact that you like not one of the flavours makes no difference.
Now you might remark that as the English Democrats Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Stevenage that I would say all of that wouldn’t I? But the fact remains that the English Democrats party does have an important contribution to make. First we are an English nationalist party in the same way that the SNP are a Scottish nationalist party or Plaid Cymru are a Welsh nationalist party. We will put England first just as the SNP puts Scotland first and Plaid puts Wales first. The English Democrats are the only party that is committed to putting England first. English voters might welcome such voting option as election day approaches and the demands for yet more money by the SNP and Plaid become yet more strident.
Secondly we are the only party with a well thought through but radical alternative to the current constitutional settlement. Our plans have matured over the last eight years and are not a knee-jerk reaction to current problems. So have the rest of the policies in our Manifesto
Thirdly we are not that small anyway. In the 2009 European elections over 280,000 people in England voted for the English Democrats – compare this to around 321,000 for the SNP and 127,000 for Plaid. We will soon be the largest nationalist party in the UK. We plan to field over 100 candidates in the Parliamentary election, much more than the SNP or Plaid. The Alliance for Democracy, of which the English Democrats are a founding member, plans to field 300 or more candidates.
We are in a critical election period. A recent survey said that 38% of the population wanted a hung parliament. It is quite possible that as the election date gets closer this proportion will increase. But do voters know what they wish for? A hung parliament of the three main parties plus the nationalist parties of Scotland and Wales will lead to an unprincipled grab for yet more English taxpayers money for the already over-paid Scots and Welsh. The three main parties will eagerly connive in this, driven as they are by ego and bombast rather than a true love of country. They have already shown themselves happy to sell the English down the road in order to get an opportunity to implement their already degraded ideas. They will not stop at this. For the English it will be a bit like a vanilla-chocolate-strawberry Neapolitan ice cream with an added extra – a layer of strong mustard!
The results of this will not be pretty. A severe reaction by the English leading to civil unrest, riots and mayhem by a nation that has already signalled that it has had enough is an almost certain outcome of this scenario.
And all for the want of not allowing the voter to see the full range of ideas and parties open to them. How sad can you get?