If you wanted a really stupid way to run a country, you’d return the same party to power again and again, never mind how effective they are.
And if that trusty arrangement began to wobble, you’d make sure to complain about how the legs have suddenly become uneven.
Members of that usually incumbent party would whine bitterly about a ‘one-party state’. While forgetting that they are perfectly happy when they’re the singular party in question.
And if you were a member of an opportunistic gate-crashing party – a racist, xenophobic, shit-stirring outfit, for example – your devotees might suddenly notice the unfairness of first-past-the-post voting. Seemingly unaware that left-wing people have been moaning on about that for years.
And if you were a disgruntled member of the party that always wins, or a dim disciple of the shit-stirring messiah, you’d take to social media to bitch on and on about your seemingly unassailable opponent.
The client newspapers and their obedient columnists would start to work overtime – almost certainly for the first time in their cossetted lives – to bash out unhinged columns on the theme of what is about to happen. A handy shorthand to encapsulate these rants would be ‘it’s not fair’, with a side order of ‘we’re all doomed, doomed, I say’.
Should you be the sort of fool who kicks around the fetid alleyways of X/Twitter – or Ex-Twitter, as it’s not what it was – you may well have noticed a preponderance of moaning from ‘the other side’.
In case you don’t know, X/Twitter works by having two feeds, ‘For You’ and ‘Following’. The first is a general news feed, while the second supposedly contains people you follow, or those who follow you.
Since Elon Musk took over, the For You feed should really be renamed ‘For You If You’re A Frothing Right-Wing Nutjob’. Dear Lord, the endless sour quibbles and bitter ranting served up on there by Musk’s algorithms is quite something. And that’s the ‘healthy’ end of the scale: the other end doesn’t bear mentioning.
You might well wonder why a sensible person would look at that feed. And you’d be right. The only defence is, have you seen the arrant, twisted, arse-over-tit nonsense these people spout.
It’s also a way of seeing how ‘the other side’ think – if indeed thinking is what they do.
As you can see from the top of this blog, the Daily Usual Suspect has been clutching its pearls and then scattering them about the room in a fit of vapours.
Apparently we’re heading for a ‘one-party socialist state’ – that’s if the opinion polls consistently giving Labour a clear lead are to be believed.
To which you can only reply, have you seen Sir Keir Starmer, as he doesn’t seem that much of a socialist.
The Daily Usual Suspect’s Famously Rubbish Columnist has got in on this act, too.
Boris Johnson tweeted about his never knowingly readable column: ‘If Labour wins big, the Commons will be crammed with Palestinian-flag waving Corbynistas – and it won’t just be the rich getting soaked, it’ll be everyone. Voting Tory is the ONLY way to stop Starmergeddon.’
You can just see him sniggering over that immature neologism. A 60-year-old former prime minister reduced to sixth-form sniping. Then again, he’s been doing that his whole life.
And if there is a massive Labour victory, Johnson will have helped bring that about. He secured an 80-seat majority in 2019 – an impressive achievement demolished with the swinging balls of his own self-destructive boorishness (this sixth-form sniping can be quite addictive).
So, yes, if you wanted a really stupid way to run a country, you’d return the same party to power again and again.
It would be good if we could avoid that this time. Give the other side a chance. Maybe they’ll do a better job. Maybe we’ll hardly notice the difference.
But all this talk of a ‘one-party socialist state’ is just the self-serving blather of people who think only they should run things.
I have some doubts about Starmer but will happily park those in the hope that he wins. The present lot really don’t deserve another day in power.