Starmer's Christmas present? Exactly 1 lb of Democratic flesh - and not a Portia in sight
I thought we had already had a national bite at this Democratic Abolition Tart. Indeed, I had assumed we had agreed it would be taken off the menu. But No.
The fearless PM, ever keen to make “The Difficult Decisions” (with our money), sent out one of his thought-provoking missives to various wonks, civil servants and do-nowts, who work in one of the 63-at-risk-from-Reform Councils, asking them if they wanted to delay the May elections on the grounds of it all being a bit too difficult. However, written in a special socialist code in between the lines, the message said, “If you want to keep your pension and a job and continue to live in clover doing sweet FA, then delay the elections until we have a chance of the Tories and Reform splitting their own vote.”
Indeed, Alison McGovern’s statement on Local Government Reorganisation admitted that the councils that may postpone elections have already started making preparations for them, but also suggested that the government is struggling to meet any named deadline! “This is a complex process, and we will make decisions based on the evidence provided.”
Thus has our democracy been “realigned” or, as Sir Humphrey and Whitehall think of it, Losing the Lawn Mower.
You make a considerable noise, express your deep sympathy, deal with it loudly, and then kick it so deep into the long grass, you can’t even see it amongst all the other victims of the Post office, or the Grooming Gangs, or the NHS Blood Scandal or the appalling defence procumrement, or the aid for Ukraine, or the new defence kit or the …. or the ….
All democracies run by dictators suffer from administrative bandwidth constraints and the “complexities of regional boundary harmonisation.” We only have to look at the Sudetenland and Crimea to understand some of those issues. Stopping elections before anything goes awry is probably a terribly pragmatic approach.
The principle behind delay is, of course, simple. This GDP harvest has been terrible, and whilst Starmer knows that all the people who told him they understood farming or orchards or cereals actually only have a Geography degree from Durham and a Master’s in Sociopathic Trans-dance interpretation. None of them has a clue about Economics (or mixed metaphors) - in other words, they don’t know how to make things grow. BUT next year or the year after, Ed Millipede “… has promised me that our bills will be 30% lower than yesterday, and the number of people leaving Britain to live in Botswana will actually be higher than when Cecil Rhodes discovered Gold, making illegal immigration look tiny, which means our figures will be brilliant.” Hah, No More Reform, and they have eradicated the threat to Democracy by eliminating the one thing Reform needed!
Democracy!
Starmer’s having this little conversation in his head:
