Personal Blogs

This blog was mainly for blogging about economics, the subject that drew me to study with the OU. However, I'm going to digress a little today and write about politics instead. That's OK, because I'm currently studying module DD101, "Introduction to the social sciences", which is quite a wide ranging course with a bit of politics thrown in as well.

And besides, it's my blog, so I can write what I like.

So, politics. I feel thoroughly depressed by the result of yesterday's Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election, which was won by the Labour candidate. My dismay at this result has nothing to do with any party politics, and I don't wish to make any comment here about which party is better qualified to sort out the economic mess that the country is in and run the country generally.

No, what I find depressing is that the voters in this by-election didn't seem to care about the events leading to the by-election. Just a reminder for anyone who missed it, the seat was won in May by the Labour candidate Phil Woolas, on the back of producing election literature that contained some disgraceful lies about his opponents. The literature was held to be illegal by an election court, and he was stripped of his seat as a result.

Pretty disgraceful behaviour, isn't it?

A rational electorate would be disgusted with that sort of behaviour. They would want to punish the people responsible. But not so the people of Oldham East and Saddleworth. They voted for another Labour candidate, as if none of this had ever happened.

Now, you might argue that the illegal leaflets were entirely down to Phil Woolas, and the new candidate was entirely innocent. To which I would say: bollocks. The illegal leaflets were hardly a secret. They had thousands of the bloody things printed. Everyone in the local Labour party must have seen them. And what did they do to stop them? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

The entire Labour party in the Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency were surely just as responsible for the leaflets as Woolas. Woolas was held individually responsible by the court and was the person who was stripped of his seat, but to claim that the leaflets were the act of one rogue individual is deeply disingenuous.

But the voters of Oldham East and Saddleworth didn't seem to care about this. They were perfectly happy to vote in their thousands for a party that were proven liars.

Perhaps there should be no surprise here. When all the revelations about MPs' expenses were published in 2009, I thought that this could be a real game-changer in politics. I thought the electorate would want to punish the politicians responsible for betraying their trust and cheating like a bunch of common criminals. I thought that the general election in May last year would see huge numbers of candidates from smaller parties and independent candidates, untainted by the expenses scandal, returned to Parliament.

But no. We saw the 3 main parties, who had so utterly betrayed the trust of the electorate, returned to Parliament to carry on where they left off.

I find all this incredibly depressing. It seems that the majority of voters are unaffected by these issues, and presumably vote unthinkingly for the party they have always voted for.

This sends a clear message to politicians: "You, the politicians, can lie, cheat, and generally betray our trust as much as you like, and we, the utterly supine bunch of sheep that pass for an electorate, will just let you get on with it."

An Old & Sad day for politics indeed.