Last week here in the UK there was a General Election. As it’s every 5 years, thankfully, I’d thought I might as well write a few words on it…
If you went to most sports grounds in the world you’d find thousands of people who each have an opinion on the sport that they were watching. If you went to Fenway Park there’d be thousands who would believe that they are an expert on baseball. At Lambeau Field you’d find 80,000 football experts. Hell, in India you’d find over a billion people that believe they’ve mastered the subject of cricket!… Obviously do we really think all of these individuals truly know it all on their sports?! Do we fuck.
When there’s a General Election on you have that sort of situation turned up to 11. Millions of people who show up once every 5 years to tick a box on a piece of paper truly believe they know what they are taking about. Most have these passionate, unshakable beliefs despite knowing the thick end of fuck all, based on prejudice or just whatever their newspaper tells them.
Winston Churchill once said:
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
Nowadays you only need 30 seconds on Twitter.
The unexpected result was a Conservative Majority. In general the Left’s response has been over-the-top and pretty pathetic. I’ve heard people say that they’re going to emigrate, sleep for 5 years, that Conservative voters should be named & shamed (there’s 11.3 million of them), denounce democracy (as they haven’t had the result they wanted). Whinge moan whine. Then this weekend you had a few hundred young persons with learning difficulties “protest” in Downing Street:
There were a few scuffles with police and a monument to the women of WW2 got vandalised:
To summarise: the UK has a massive amount of debt, and money has to be borrowed to pay for expenses such as paying off the interest on the existing debt. The previous Labour government spent a shit load of money and should shoulder most of the blame. Then you have a bunch of teenagers with iphones protest against “austerity”…
The fallout from this election reminds me of that South Park episode “About Last Night” which was about Obama winning the 2008 US Election. The Obama supporters were euphoric that he had won and were convinced that “Change” was going to arrive and everything would be awesome. The McCain supporters were convinced that it was the end of the world and society would collapse. At the end of the episode people realised that things weren’t as good as what they had hoped, nor were they as bad as what they had feared.
In betting related news, spare a thought for the major gubbing backers of No Overall Majority suffered. Here’s the odds on Betfair prior to the result:
I didn’t put any bets on but if there’s any chance to profit from the shy-Tory phenomena I’ll be taking it.. although it’ll take at least another 5 years!