Last Gasp for Democracy -

Time for a UKIP/Veritas/English Democrat Pact

If, as is widely expected and reported, a General Election is indeed announced today by Britain's lying, authoritarian and deeply distrusted Prime Minister, Tony Blair - then a huge responsoibility for the future of democracy in Britain will fall upon the shoulders of the UKIP leadership, Robert Kilroy-Silk and Robin Tilbrook of the English Democrat party. (Possibly also IMO, other nationalist or EU withdrawalist parties and/or independent candidates in Scotland and Wales).

An electoral pact, prohibiting EU withdrawalist candidates from these parties from standing against one another in the coming election is the very least that the British electorate should be expected to be offered from protest parties whose driving principle is supposedly the reversal of the anti-democratic forces now at work in our society.

As short-lived Chief of Staff to Robert Kilroy-Silk and within days of the formation of the Veritas Party, I attended a meeting of the committee of broadcasters responsible for allocating Party Political Braodcasts during the coming election campaign. I was informed by the BBC employee Chairing this group, that even were Veritas to field a candidate in every constituency for the Westminster Parliament the maximum broadcasts we would be allocated would be ONE!

The judge reporting on the Labour Party postal ballot election rigging in Birmingham stated yesterday - the episode would "disgrace a banana republic" (read the full Daily Telegraph report from this link), this seems to me another case for a similar attack.

WHAT CAN BE SAID OF THE DEMOCRATIC CREDENTIALS OF A COUNTRY WHERE THE EMPLOYEE OF A PUBLIC CORPORATION - FUNDED BY A COMPULSORY AND UNIVERSAL LEVY - WHOSE VERY FUTURE IS KNOWN TO LIE ENTIRELY IN THE HANDS OF THE GOVERNMENT ELECTED IN THIS COMING ELECTION - CAN SO MANIPULATE THE ENTIRE POLITICAL PARTY BROADCASTING DURING AN ELECTION CAMPAIGN - SO ARBITRARILY AND WITHOUT ANY APPARENT RIGHT OF APPEAL, DETERMINE THAT A NEW FORCE IN BRITISH POLITICS (EVEN IF FIELDING THE SAME NUMBER OF CANDIDATES AS THE MAIN PARTIES) WILL ONLY BE ALLOWED A SMALL FRACTION OF THE BROADCASTS ALLOCATED TO THE MAIN PARTIES?

What might one of the international election monitoring organisations make of the BBC's proposed allocation of this most crucial electoral resource?

Will such grave concerns be aired and fully discussed in the election campaign? Certainly not if the smaller protest parties fight mainly themselves.

There is, however, a quirk in the strange mish mash of rules and precedent that the BBC relies upon to justify its PPB policy, one that would allow three independent parties forming an electoral pact to be granted one broadcast each. Thus a UKIP/Veritas/English Democrat electoral pact could result in three national Party Political Broadcasts. That alone, in this TV dominated time of democratic crisis, should be sufficient to get those party's leaders around a table today!