How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, by The Lib Dems
Up until yesterday, I was willing to brave out the hard times because I had a belief that the core tenets of the Liberal Democrat party were still in place. Transparency and honesty are cornerstones of any liberal device, but it seems like that party, much like Labour and the Tories, only support honesty and transparency when it's in their interests to do so.
At the General Election in 2010, the Liberal Democrats ran on the mandate of an in/out referendum on the European Union. I knew they would support the 'in' campaign, but they did offer this referendum. To back up this position, they had an official campaign for the in/out referendum on their campaigns site.
The more tech-savvy of you will notice that this link directs to the Archive.org record of the page. This is because after I spread the URL on Twitter, the party decided to simply delete the campaign page with no formal explanation. This happened on the 21st or 22nd October 2011. In my mind, this is certainly a betrayal of transparency.
The Issue With The ‘Consensus’ Concept
I just found this reply to this post on democracy I wrote a while ago, and I'd like to address some of the concepts and suggestions proposed within the post briefly.
When I challenge majority democracy, many people leap to this idea that the issue is that the arbitrary number of people who must agree with the policy is simply too low. If we move to 50%, 80% or 99% then we will have a far better set of rules, but the 'consensus' model is fundamentally flawed from the start.
Thinking About Democracy
Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted, I've been caught up in things, but one of the subjects I keep coming up across recently is the idea that democracy is somehow a sacred concept. Many libertarians believe in consensus politics, and I tend to differ from them on this particular front, so I figured I could do a post about it.
First of all, to clarify, I'm in no way saying that democracy is a bad concept, or even not the best system of government, what I'm going to propose is that the way in which we have made the concept of a 'democratic society' so sacred is dangerous to the concept of liberty and individual freedom.
I fully expect this blog post to be controversial, because democracy is a very touchy subject for many people, and has been enshrined in our language as an inherently 'good' thing, but I'm hoping to show that it isn't automatically the case.
‘No’ Wins & Democracy Loses… For Now
Well, it looks like our worst fears have come true. The 'No' vote is romping home to a greater than 2:1 ratio victory, and we're probably going to be stuck with Tory and Labour votes counting for between four and infinite times as much as other votes for another twenty years.
| Party | No of Votes | No of Seats | Seats per Vote | Vote Value |
| Conservatives | 10,703,754 | 306 | 0.000028588 | 0.95 |
| Labour | 8,609,527 | 258 | 0.000029967 | 1 |
| Liberal Democrat | 6,836,824 | 57 | 0.000008337 | 0.28 |
| UK Independence | 920,334 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Green Party | 285,616 | 1 | 0.000003501 | 0.12 |
| BNP | 563,743 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
By standardising a Labour vote to a value of 1 (multiply 'seats per vote' by 33370), we are easily able to compare the values of votes for each of the leading six UK-wide parties.
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