Election Fever

To all ladies, gentlemen, hooligans, householders, penholders, cigarette-holders, metal moulders, huntsmen, stuntsmen, bankers, bakers, billionaires, baggage-handlers, swindlers, burglars, buglers, bounders, boobies, boozers, snoozers, losers, teachers, preachers, farmers, embalmers, lamas, psychiatrists, pietists, computers, commuters, conspirators, inspirators, ferret fanciers, financiers, romancers, Winnamoppers and Mopaholics - Greetings. And now let us soberly consider the NEWS.

There has been an election.
What?
You didn't notice that we had to draw a cross against one of a series of ludicrous symbols to indicate that we preferred somebody we had never heard of to somebody else we had never heard of?
Tut. Twice tut. Tututut.
Those electors who decided to elect instead of floozing, dozing or eating soggy chips, and weren't cheated out of their voting forms by incompetence or skullduggery, seem to have hopped or fluttered away from the parties they usually support, like fleas from a bee or leaves from a tree, and awarded their grudging encouragement to an unlikely and highly unlikeable gaggle of eurosceptics, eclectic dyspeptics, nearly defunct semi- celebrities and hectic defectives called Something or Other.

This may be due to a suspicion that the European Union is
a) boring,
b) deeply undemocratic,
c) complacently besuited,
d) pervious and corruptible, and,
e) indifferent to anything voters may think, feel, do or decide.

Which gives us sad, sagacious, mutinous, moping or merry fellows something to meditate upon, thus: put on specs, gloom ponderously, fall asleep.

It is my untutored guess that 95% of we voters (whether in fact we are we wee voters, great long gangly voters or wildly obese and balloon-like voters) don't know
a) what powers the Euro Parliament has,
b) what in fact, if anything, it does,
c) what powers the Commission has, and,
d) how it would be possible to prevent the Commission from doing whatever the Commission may decide to do. And,
e) why is that a continual shower of Euro decisions drifts down upon us without our hearing anything about them beforehand, or having opportunity to make any sign of agreement or disagreement with a single one of them? And,
f) how is it that ex-would-be-rocker, rhetorically righteous preacher and Great World Teacher Blair, who 'passionately believes' whatever nonsense he may announce, can toddle off to a meeting of tedious Euro-ministers and sign up to a recently-cobbled- together Constitution which we have never seen, and about which we may have deep and doleful doubts concerning its democratic usefulness? And,
g) Eh?

And why during this sorry election was there no discussion whatever on how to make the Euro-Une drastically more democratic, decisively less corrupt and definitely more interesting? And would we have believed the politicians if there had been?

If all this is so, why don't we do some thinking ourselves, before it's too late? I rest my case, preferably on the large foot of a passing policeman.

JBP. June 2004

Read old page 94s here.