A conservative straight choice
It’s exciting to find the name-sake of our website thestraightchoice.org, proving all those LibDems were right when they complained about our choice for name of this website, and affirmed that “A Straight Choice” is a perfectly normal saying used in elections.
In this case, nobody in the Conservative Party is insinuating that either Gordon Brown or Ben Jeffreys is anything other than straight.
What they are instead suggesting is that the good people of Cheadle Constituency (whose collection of leaflets so far is here) have a “Straight Choice” between Gordon Brown and Ben Jeffreys.
But Gordon Brown isn’t actually standing in the Cheadle constituency. Instead there is a sitting LibDem MP Mark Hunter with a majority of 3657, as he explains on the corner of his leaflet.
That puts Ben, who has “always wanted to be a Conservative MP”, in a race with LibDem MP who is probably considerably more popular than Gordon Brown. So it’s best not to mention him in the blizzard of leaflets.
We don’t know the hidden negotiations. But a LibDem MP is not part of a Labour majority, so Ben is trying to argue against the desirability of a no-overall-control Parliament with the LibDems in the balance. The LibDems can then choose to form a coalition with the Labour, or with the Conservative block. But they’re not going to tell anyone in advance — and they probably don’t even know themselves, because it depends on which side offers them the best deal.
In political terms, this is known as horse-trading. One of the trades could be that the Labour Party needs to get a new leader. Who knows? The powers that be are concerned enough that they have arranged for an 18 day window, as well as professional mediation, to get the coalition settled.
In any case, what does it mean for the voters? For sure, a junior MP whose vote the Conservative Party can take for granted is going to be less able to bring home the bacon than a member of smallish LibDem Parliamentary block that holds the balance of power and set its price.
If Ben does win, it will take many years for him to work up through the ranks of the party to have anything close to the level of influence of a LibDem MP in a hung parliament — assuming that the Conservative Party remains in power for long enough.
This whole election is frightening game of poker where the players don’t even know what’s on their cards.
It’s going to get fevered in the coming weeks. You mark my words.
‘Frightening’ isn’t the word I’d choose, ‘manipulative’ or ‘ of low cunning’ more like. The result is a feeling of ‘disgust’, a profound reluctance to take part in horse-trading dressed up as ‘election’; and another nail in the coffin of democracy in Britain plc. LibDem’s have been using the horse-trading approach to voting in Stockport/Cheadle for some time. Perhaps inevitably so because they are neither here nor there and because the First Past The Post system encourages this sort of scam. I’m sure the time is nigh when voters are offered glass beads and trinkets and that time may be closer than we think.