Skip to main content
What makes a real vote?

The sort of people whose intemperance, silliness, and general badness helped me to leave the Labour Party, which was painful for me, have been in general going on about democracy and its defence in recent days.

The intemperate and increasingly demented likes of Luke Akehurst and the (personally unelected) Mary Honeyball MEP have posited that liberties must be lost, eternal war fought with Islamic nutcases, and the fundamental duties of the state sold off whilst we are all on our knees to a deeply flawed environmental proto-religion.

They have also asserted their secular kudos to represent the oikos, so to speak, from the basis of their 'election' and this apparently gives them the right to justify the collapse of international law, late abortion, the exclusion of Catholics from office, 42 days detention without charge, and any one of their other positions.

So, let's have another look at a perennial theme of this blog; how many voters, as a percentage of the whole who had a vote, actually gave western leaders their mandate?

Here is a list.

Nicolas Sarkozy got 53% of the votes of 83.7% of people who voted. So his mandate is based on the votes of 44.36% of his electorate.

George Bush, first time around, got 47.87% of 60% of the citizen population, which is 28.72% of the citizen population. In his second election, Mr Bush received 50.7% of 56.7% of the voting age population. That translates to 28.75%

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's Labour Party in the 2005 general election got 35.3% of 61.3%; a share equivalent to 21.64% of the electorate.

In Canada, Stephen Harper's Conservatives got 36.27% of a 64% turnout. That translates to 23.21% of the electorate.

In New Zealand, Helen Clark's Labour Party got 41.1% of 81%, which is 33.29% of the electorate.

In Australia, Kevin Rudd secured 43.38% of a nominal 100%, since voting there is compulsory.

So, let's just rank this sample of big western countries, and I know the list is not complete:

Sarkozy : 44.36% of the people
Rudd : 43.38% of the people
Clark : 33.29% of the people
Bush 04 : 28.75% of the people
Harper : 23.21% of the people
Blair/Brown 21.64% of the people

It's not rocket science. None of the usual suspects in the 'dynamic' 'modernizing' world of privatising, globalising intolerant secularism got anywhere near half the votes of their people, and nearly eighty percent of the British did not vote for their government when they could have done. Yet all are comfortably in power.

What now is the difference between an election and an opinion poll in these places?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Congressional Healthcare Bill in America I spent a good deal of this morning and yesterday reading over the proposed American healthcare bill (or at least, a compound version; there appear to be five doing the rounds). I don't want to blog on the details of it immediately. It's also a bill, which may well stall in the Senate or be overtaken by events, and which could yet be critically amended. It is the product of Congress, not the administration per se, and the lawyers have not yet got at it. I had some instant worries about it though. In no particular order, I'll list them; Firstly, it can't allow individuals to choose their doctor and treatment in the long run; instead, it will practically formalise the role of doctors as salaried employees of large medical groups. Sarah Palin is onto something with the idea that this will then allow essentially ideological or non-medical outlooks on, say, euthanasia, abortion, transgender issues, or non-emergency treatments of c...
6 comments
Read more
William Orpen There are four major Christian traditions, which are of course Catholic, Orthodox, Armenian and Coptic. Some sects and cults also exist, like the Moonies or Anglicanism. Yet in some bizarre way this weekend, protestant contributions to something other than the seizure of churches have been making their way into my consciousness. I suppose that the first indication of this trend was a reflection in an old copy of Gibbon that he actually became cultured because of Calvinism. Packed off to Switzerland because he went Catholic at an otherwise boring Oxford, Gibbon fell in love with Suzanne Cuchod, and with Greek because of instruction from a Calvinist mentor. It's an odd thing--I keep coming across indications of Calvinists who could have fun, though they doubtless thought that they would pay for it later, and whose political intelligence was second to none. Althusius springs to mind, for instance. But then what am I thinking, I thought to myself? I've sat on balconi...
11 comments
Read more
Damon Buffini I'm not quite sure what to make of this story. Damon Buffini, a multi-millionaire in the City, and a very accomplished man, seems to have heard staff he regarded as lazy and ungrateful at the upper levels of management complaining about restaurants. He subsequently forced them all to eat two-day old Big Macs whilst reminding them of how lucky they are. It's nice to know that Saturn--in the form of a sort of globalisation guevara--could force his children to eat rather than devouring them, as in Goya's painting. How broken do people have to be not to walk out, though? I guess from his point of view, if they had any spine they'd be in business on their own. The whole thing is horribly fascinating.
Post a Comment
Read more