Irish general election - by Richard... Saturday, February 26, 2011

Irish general election - by Richard... Saturday, February 26, 2011

Polling for the Irish general election was yesterday, only you would be extremely hard put to pick that up from the terminally parochial British media, which has barely mentioned the campaign.

With 566 candidates contesting 165 seats, turnout is believed to relatively high, close to 70 percent against 62 percent in the 2007 election.

The first results are expected early on Saturday afternoon and we'll keep an eye on the results, expanding this post with details and comments as they come in.

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The joys of democracy - by Richard... Friday, February 25, 2011

I had an entertaining few hours yesterday discussing diverse issues with an MP. Nevertheless, it troubled me to find him displaying the usual naïvity of the elected official, in extolling the virtues of the "democratic" system of elections which had brought him to office.

In the cut and thrust of the discussion, I cannot quite recall how we came to be rehearsing this precise issue, but it may have emerged after the said MP had raised the idea of elected judges – elections being his idea of ensuring that officials were "accountable". Unless I am thoroughly mistaken, he seemed to have some vague nation that the process of election confers accountability, and was a superior form of achieving this desired state.

Remarkably, our man seemed unconscious of the irony that that the electoral system, of which he had been the beneficiary and of which merits he was extolling, had delivered the Cleggeron administration. This is the very same which has so exercised The Daily Mail that it today handed over its front page to the headline: "Makes you proud to be British".

And just in case some of its readers don't do irony, the message is hammered home with Richard Littlejohn likening the performance of the Cleggeron duo to something out of a Carry-On film. The real irony, though, is that "British" is the last thing a tranzie like Clegg would want to be thought of.

Nevertheless, the only thing one can hope for is that very few people are surprised. It should have dawned on just about everybody by now that PR spiv Cameron and his golden-boy Cleggy are not very good at politics and even less good at anything which resembles competent administration. Thus, that they should be guilty of "shamefully mishandling" the Libyan evacuation mission is only to be expected.

The sad thing, of course, is that the Euroslime Dave was elected leader by the Tory Party, in what was said to be the most democratic contest in its history. Through this we end up with a man pretending to be prime minister, heading a party that was not voted to power, who is neither accountable nor democratic, and who is supremely incompetent.

One might recall incidentally, that the 1940 Churchill was in a similar position, heading an unpopular coalition government, presiding over an emasculated parliament. However, Churchill had some advantages. Rather than Miliband, he had Hitler as an enemy – by which comparison even the British government looked benign - and he enjoyed rigorous media censorship which allowed him to keep his more egregious errors out of the press.

Neither that nor this period was any great advertisement for democracy. But then, as Churchill once said, it is the least worst system – even if during the period of his greatest fame, he almost completely abolished it and ruled with greater powers (on paper) than even Hitler.

Maybe though, if he was right, we ought to try it some time – because, elections or not – what we have is not even close. On the other hand, that is just as well. Any system which throws up the Cleggerons as our rulers has to be all bad.

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Déjà vu all over again - by Richard...

"Cuts will put lives at risk", warn forces chiefs. Which, I suppose, makes a change from "Cuts 'cost lives of soldiers'" says former chief of the defence staff.

The one, of course, is today – life under the Cleggerons. The other link is from The Times on 4 March 2010, when the target was Gordon Brown - said General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, who led the Armed Forces from 1997 to 2001, to The Times: "Not fully funding the Army in the way they had asked ... undoubtedly cost the lives of soldiers. He [Brown] should be asked why he was so unsympathetic towards defence and so sympathetic to other departments."

It hasn't even taken a year. I wonder how long it will be before someone actually admits that the military were better off before the Cleggerons took over – something which will tell us quite how bad things have now become. But did anyone really think you couldn't get worse than Gordon?

Welcome back to the real world.

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Steel yourself - by Richard...

The Corus Teesside Cast Products site in Redcar has been sold, ending an unhappy chapter in the history of a plant which was opened by the Queen and ended up being owned by Tata Steel.

They have now disposed of the business in a deal which is said to value it at $469 million dollars (£291 million) – another sign that the world has gone barking mad, when Arianna Huffington's little empire was recently sold for $315 million.

Corus has been bought by SSI, Thailand's largest steel maker, and we have Cleggeron Business Secretary Vince Cable, nicely off the hook, saying the deal will help to secure 700 jobs at the plant. That remains to be seen, but it does at least look as if there will be steelmaking from the site again – until the next little drama, whatever that might be.

Then, as they say, you need to steel yourself for the bad news ... ?