The Real Reason's We Need an October Election

We need a General Election in October, not because of the change in Prime Minister but because of the change in the UK.

In Britain we do not elect the Prime Minister, we elect individual Members of Parliament to represent us and the leader of the party with the most MPs simply becomes Prime Minister by default. There have been plenty of times when the Prime Minister has been in place without an electoral mandate, most recently Gordon Brown and before that John Major from 1990 until the election of 1992.

So, in normal times, a simple change of Prime Minister does not really warrant an election unless there is some constitutional change leading to the people of Britain actually directly electing the Prime Minister.

However these are not normal times.

The country is now split, not by left and right, but by in and out. This split crosses traditional party divides.

The manifestos, visions and ideals that were presented to the electorate in 2015 are now null and void. Now we face a future outside the European Union and this impacts on the lives of all of us.

The British people now need to be able to choose what that future should be. The political parties need to set out how they will negotiate the exit from the EU and what their vision of life outside the EU will be like.

The new Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition must go to the country and explain what they will do to secure the future of the UK, explain how life outside the UK impacts on education, health, social care, employment etc. and what they will do to secure the future of those most in need of help from society. These leaders must go to the people with their vision of a United Kingdom which thrives, their vision of how they will bring British society together.

They must also present their plans for ensuring that leaving the EU doesn’t mean leaving Europe. It is one thing leaving the bureaucracy of the EU system but Britain did not vote to leave wider European cooperation across defence, security, scientific research etc.

The British people must now be given the chance to choose which vision they believe is best for this new future.

On a secondary level we need a General Election so that the electorate can reaffirm or reject their current representative in Parliament. MPs are paid to represent the wishes of the people in their constituency, yet the referendum saw many instances of the MP’s views being completely at odds with the majority of their constituents.

It is only fair that those who wish to continue receiving public money to represent the people of their constituency should ask those people for their support in the post referendum world.

Those are the real reasons we need an October election and it is the duty of those who want to represent us to take their visions of this new Britain to the people and ask us to choose the path to that future. 

Immigration: Heads Buried in Westminster Sand

Cast your minds back to late April 2010, the day Gordon Brown’s microphone was left on following his encounter with Gillian Duffy and, after her reference to Eastern European immigrants, the word he used to describe her.

Fast forward back to today and we discover that nearly a third of people in Britain admit to being race prejudice (compulsory survey warning – the survey only sampled 2,000 people) and this is a significant rise since the all-time low in 2001.

Add to that the somewhat stunning success of UKIP in the recent elections, especially their ‘win’ in the European elections which, frankly, the Labour Party should have won hands down at this point in the electoral cycle and we can see that there is a large portion of the British people who are concerned about immigration in Britain.

An interesting, somewhat ironic, counterpoint to the survey news this morning were the images of immigrant camps and around 800 immigrants being cleared out in Calais, hardly images that will alter the views of those concerned with immigration.

Yet despite this obvious national concern with immigration the Westminster parties seem to treat those concerns somewhat contemptuously or, perhaps more accurately, simply failed to recognise the concerns of a sizable number of the electorate despite the endless warning signs of what is happening.

The Conservatives have been banging on about what they have achieved in terms of immigration yet are totally failing to convince many people of this. Obviously the images of the camps of people waiting to flood into Britain from just across the Channel do not exactly back up their narrative.

The Labour Party appear to have failed to learn the lesson from Gordon Brown’s experience and while they have been focusing on the cost of living issue they have failed to address the reason why many people feel there is a cost of living crisis, which is that to many immigrants have taken British jobs and are pushing down wages in the process. While not inherently true it is a popularly held belief and, as such, needs to be addressed by a party that wants the electorate to put them into Government next year.

Obviously the Liberal Democrats have suffered a killer blow because of this issue. Having been staunchly pro EU the implication is they are pro EU immigration and therefore quite happy with EU immigrants taking British jobs and, unless they take a stance that recognises the concerns of many of the electorate 2015 could be an even worse year for them.

Immigration is a potentially toxic issue which the politicians in Westminster would prefer to go rather than tackle it head on but by burying their heads in the sand they further increase the disillusion with politics in this country. They appear to seek power simply for powers sake rather than power to answer then concerns of the ordinary people who give them power in the first place.

The warning signs of increasing voter concern about immigration have been there since 2010 yet failure to truly address those concerns has resulted in the rise of UKIP which,  in turn, could give the three main parties in Westminster a real headache over the next 12 months.