Victory at – or Over – the Polls?by
Sean Corrigan
According to my calculations, in celebrating his third triumph, RobespiBlaire managed to garner 36.3% of the 61.2% eligible who voted – or 9.3 million votes; equivalent to a bare 22% of the electorate (so a 2:7 against "approval" rating) and amounting to under 16% of the total populace. Surely, none can doubt that such a display of democracy at its finest will shame all those Third World mobsters who are the object of our scorn and the target of our covert operations!! Given that Labour has increased public sector payrolls since 1997 by a cool one million, to take the balance to over 7.4 million (and not counting all the hordes of extra corporatist "contractors" who now make a living by doing the Treasury's bidding) – it certainly looks as though a good number of the ingrates who are somehow in his pocket through work, much less those dependent upon him for benefits (such as the 11 million pensioners), could not stomach the prospect of voting again for this hysterical charlatan. However, assuming the rump of 23 undeclared seats is distributed pro rata, this slimmest of "mandates" will nonetheless prove to be enough to secure him 56.7% of the seats in the Commons and, thus, 100% of the dictatorial royal prerogative we in Britain endure thereby. It should also be noted that, thanks to assiduous gerrymandering during its stay in office (coupled with the effects of the first-past-the-post system), it took only around 25,400 votes to give Labour a seat, versus 41,900 for the Tories, 90,500 for the Lib Dems, and 168,800 for the "Other" parties. For the marginalists among us, Labour's 795,000 votes beyond the Tory total were enough to give it up to 163 more seats, or 1 whole seat for every 4,900 in the surplus (less than 0.01% of the population per pro) – even worse than the 11,682 per seat they needed at the margin vis-à-vis the Lib Dems.
Did somebody say "One man, one vote"? May 9, 2005 Sean Corrigan [send him mail] is an investment analyst in Switzerland. Copyright © 2005 LewRockwell.com |
Though
we are now stretching the logic, if not the maths itself, this means
that just 216,000 marginal crosses on the ballot paper in favour
of Labour, rather than Tory, effectively decided the election – well within the margin for error, or fraud among the c.6.5 million
postal votes (of which between one-third and one-half are still
unaccounted for) issued, for the first time in a national election,
under a system which a High Court judge recently thundered would
"put a banana republic to shame"!