I was originally planning to publish a short summary of the various parties' positions with some brief comments from me to pick out key issues. However, I now feel this would just be a waste of time and effort as, for me, there is one issue that overrides all others - and it is not Brexit. As we get close to the day of the General Election, and the campaigning period comes to an end, it seems that we have to accept that this has not been the election where honest and accurate information has been provided to the voters to help them make their decisions. It seems that, once again, misinformation, inaccuracies, and lies have been widely used to help misrepresent the facts - to make things seem better for the misrepresenting party, or worse for the opponents. It appears to me that the Conservatives have been much worse than the other parties, and though I am biased against the Conservatives (remember, we are all biased one way or another) a report on the BBC website published by the "Coalition for Reform in Political Advertising" seems to agree with me. It looked at every paid-for Facebook advertisement from the three main UK-wide parties run over the first four days of December, and found that 88% of the Conservative ads featured claims that were not correct or not entirely correct, whereas it could not find any misleading claims in Labour's ads. Nevertheless, this is not just a Conservative Party issue - the fact checking services have certainly found errors in all the parties' adverts, answers to questions, statements, manifestos, and other communications. It is a real shame that such an important decision will now be decided without most people having the correct information - this is frighteningly similar to what happened with the Brexit Referendum. How can we vote for the candidates if we can't trust what they are saying?
If the polls can be trusted, it is still looking like the Conservatives are going to win this Thursday's General Election, and probably do so with a significant majority of seats in the House of Commons. Unfortunately, this would mean that they will be able to proceed with the implementation of their proposed policies without any real checks and balances from the House of Commons, so we would have to hope that the House of Lords takes its duties seriously and ensures that the Government does not get away with too much. One of the most worrying parts of the Conservative Manifesto is the section titled "Protect our Democracy". Following on from Boris Johnson's persistent claims that Parliament has been undemocratic in restricting his attempts to implement Brexit, he is now going to use this to justify changes to the UK constitution to give more power to Government, and restrict the power of Parliament. Firstly, Boris Johnson is wrong - this is not undemocratic, this is how our Parliament has always worked, and what he wants is getting close to dictatorship. Secondly, I have always felt that it is a very bad sign when the party in power starts to make changes to the constitution that serve to keep it in power longer. I surely do not need to give examples. Time will tell if the changes proposed by the Conservatives are of such a nature; but it is interesting that they have also included in their manifesto statements about sticking with "First Past the Post" and not extending the vote to 16- and 17-year olds, two things that are not being changed so had no real need to be in the manifesto, both of which if they were changed would probably lessen the Conservative hold on government.
If you are voting Conservative in order to "get Brexit done", please make sure you are happy with all of the other policies they are proposing in their manifesto. If they are given the opportunity to implement their proposed constitution changes, it will be too late then for you to change your mind. Our only saving grace may be that the Conservatives have a terrible record of delivering on their manifesto promises.
Gerontios
Make A Comment
Comments (0)