The people VS. a rigged UK election

[Peter Dow]

I have intervened against the rigging of this election, not so much intervened "in" the election. I am not pretending all is free and fair amongst the candidates or those who might want to be candidates or otherwise participate in a free and fair election.

The UK broadcasters have their favourite parties and candidates and no-one else gets much of a hearing.

Clegg, Cameron & Brown

I don't need to download the Lib-Dem manifesto to know it is yet another right-wing royalist manifesto which defends Queen Elizabeth as head of state followed by Prince Charles becoming King when Elizabeth dies. In that respect it is the same as the Labour and Conservative manifestos.

I'd like the people to win the contest between

• the people VS. a rigged election

and the only way the people can win in a rigged election is if the election itself loses by being exposed and understood as rigged by the UK to conserve the status quo, and therefore the election results ought to be taken with several tanker loads of salt and generally disrespected as rigged and undemocratic.

Iraq, Afghanistan & Clegg the appeaser conservative royalist

Clegg's opposition to liberal democracy in Afghanistan is not as obvious as his opposition to liberal democracy in Iraq admittedly.

Not like with Iraq when Clegg's opposition to the liberation of Iraq and liberal democracy for the Iraqi people was naked opposition, as was the naked opposition of the Stop the War Coalition, who seemed content to leave the dictator Saddam Hussein calling the shots and to resist moves to establish Iraqi liberal democracy.

With Iraq, Clegg and StWC were nakedly anti-liberal democracy and anti-social. They were 100% for appeasing Saddam. Not one whiff of Winston Churchill conservatism there.

StWC are not so happy with Clegg over Afghanistan though.

Speaking out
However, none of the major parties is promising to pull troops out if they get into government and only the Scottish National Party – confined to one part of the UK – is calling for an honest reappraisal of the operation. The Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, last week made much of his record of "speaking out pretty forcefully" on Afghanistan.

But his manifesto commits the party to being "critical supporters of the Afghanistan mission'', albeit with a pledge to match the military surge to a strategy of tackling corruption and winning over moderate Taliban.

The Lib Dem defence spokesman, Nick Harvey, yesterday conceded that anti-war voters have few choices. "If they are against the whole principle of being involved [in Afghanistan], they'll struggle to find anyone putting that case," he said. For opponents of the war, the lack of differentiation between the three main parties and their failure to embrace the Afghan question during the first two weeks of the election campaign amounts to a "conspiracy of silence" to suppress debate.

Well there is no conspiracy of silence about the anti-social, anti-democratic and anti-liberal Stop the War Coalition here. The StWC are the enemy and I'm never silent about the enemy.

Note the duplicity of Clegg, Brown and Cameron over Afghanistan: whilst fighting the Taliban with one hand (British forces in Afghanistan) they seem to support the Taliban with the other hand, as supporters of the UK monarchy, allying themselves with the Arab monarchies, who with their vast oil sales receipts, are pampered customers of UK plc but who also allow a portion of this oil wealth to seep into funding support for Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their war against western-style liberal democracy which threatens the absolute Arab monarchies.

StWC want withdrawal of UK/British/US/NATO forces from Afghanistan which would allow the Taliban license to execute liberated women, denying education for women and the other anti-social horrors of ultra-conservative religious or monarchist rule in Afghanistan. StWC must want a defeat for liberal democracy to be seen everywhere in the Middle East and throughout the world.

So the StWC are blatant opponents of liberal democracy in Afghanistan whereas with Clegg, Brown and Cameron it is a mixed and confused message, much more like Winston Churchill's mixed conservative message of fighting Hitler yet supporting a UK monarchy which did much by appeasement to allow the rise of Hitler.

UK royalists are mostly not so much conspiracy fiends as short-sighted reckless twits and in a similar way to the captain did not mean to sink the Titanic, these twits probably do not mean to have a for-and-against policy as regards the Taliban either, not while British forces are exchanging fire with them and stepping on their improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan anyway.

Other points

• The BNP should have been banned
• The Conservatives cannot be trusted with the welfare state

[Midas]

What evidence do you have that there'll be a rigged election? Or perhaps, from reading through your post in detail, you simply mean that you don't like certain people/parties or the fact that they have different policies to those you'd support - isn't that called freedom of choice?

[Balthazar]

So the StWC are blatant opponents of liberal democracy in Afghanistan

Steady on! StWC people I know take a slightly more nuanced view:

(a) the absurdity of seeking to impose, with guns, bombs and torture, a centralised liberal democratic state on a tribal society with a long and honourable tradition of resisting foreign armies;

(b) extreme suspicion when right-wingers, who've never before given a damn about women's rights, or have a record of attacking them, suddenly get all dewy-eyed about Afghan women.

UK royalists are mostly not so much conspiracy fiends as short-sighted reckless twits

LOL - correct! But where would Britain be without upper class twits, and their middle and working class lackeys, braying about the Royal Family?

[Robin Edward Putland]

"Not like with Iraq when Clegg's opposition to the liberation of Iraq and liberal democracy for the Iraqi people was naked opposition, as was the naked opposition of the Stop the War Coalition, who seemed content to leave the dictator Saddam Hussein calling the shots and to resist moves to establish Iraqi liberal democracy," Peter Dow.

That is why I supported the war. However its not Great to see complete incompitence or deliberate neglect of both hearts and minds and post war reconstruction, from the start of the war. Its been done in other countries such as Germany and Indoneisia. That obviously doesn't make a Liberal Democray.

I do like Tony Benn's proposal to get rid of the institution of the crown and make the parliment answerable to the people and not itself.

Banning the BNP would gain them support and is un democratical, but they are abhorant.

[Robin Edward Putland]

Also the refuseal to release letters from George Bush to Tony Blair isn't the greatest sign of honour intetions for the war, niether is the fact that Tony Blair is now on the pay role of an oil company in Iraq.