I'm a bad person

[ajva]

My disappointment at the unexpectedly poor showing of the LibDems last night is, frankly, massively outweighed by my sheer Puckish delight at the chaos resulting from this particularly numerically "balanced" hung parliament we've got. I managed to stay up until 0520 (sadly missing the Brighton Pavilion declaration, but my first action on waking up about noon was to fire up the iMac to check out what had happened there). And as an election geek, I had a night of rapture, as every single bloody result was completely different. Incredible. And, if you're someone with no clear party allegiance like me, really rather fun. So much fun that my alcohol intake was actually rather moderate, so enchanted was I by what was going on. A bit like when you go to see a film that grabs you so much that you sort of forget about your popcorn.

I bet there are suddenly lots of Conservatives astonished by the fact Clegg is talking to the Tories, so certain were many of them that he was what they might call "loony left" in disguise. And, I have to say - committed democrat (with a small 'd') I am - despite my natural aversion to Conservative politics, I was pleased to see that Clegg stuck with his campaign promise to firstly favour the party that had attracted the most votes/seats. If he'd done anything else, he wouldn't have been worthy of the 'democrat' bit of his party name, in my view.

Comments

[alextiefling.livejournal.com]

I am a socialist, more than half way from 20 to 40, and would gladly pay more taxes - especially if that was more progressive income taxes rather than flat/regressive taxes like VAT. But my point was that there's more to political life than the question of wealth redistribution. The present discussion is very much about electoral reform and styles of government, and trying to shoehorn it into a linear narrative about socialism vs capitalism is a mistake.

I've just got back from the protest in Smith Square. There were (reportedly - I didn't count that many) about a thousand people waving placards calling for electoral reform, and a handful of people with a huge anti-capitalism banner. They just couldn't seem to understand that this demo was important, but was not about their pet subject. They were being extremely annoying, and were aggravating and alienating the majority of the protesters. Eventually, they were asked to move their clearly separate demonstration elsewhere. I've done anti-capitalist demos in the past, and I'll probably do them again in the future, but this wasn't one. It really is more complicated that that.