Chapter 4: Democracy & PartiesVoting for persons or parties; First past the post or proportional representation; Screaming Lord Sutch; The Teddy for Prime Minister Party; Inability of block party politics to be representative of a country’s people; Screaming Lord Sutch as a TPM party man.
People are vaguely aware of the difference between choosing a person and choosing a party, but are easily confused by the suggestion that the British ‘first past the post’ system elects a person while everybody else’s ‘proportional representation’ system elects a party. And quite right they are too! What the man in the street sees either way is party and party leader. And they know it!Let us look at the position. Finally after standing at every by-election in Great Britain for the past thirty years, Screaming Lord Sutch of the Screaming Lord Sutch Party polls more votes than any other candidate and is elected the parliamentary representative for, let us say, Railway Sidings Constituency. What does he represent? There were ninety eight others each polling one percent of the vote. Lord Sutch decided it was cheaper to buy votes directly than to keep losing his deposit and as a result polled two percent.
Does he represent the four hundred and seventy nine people who elected him? Or does he now represent the twenty five thousand people who bothered to turn out to vote in the election? Or does he represent the forty three thousand who could have turned out if they had wanted to? Or, the fourth possibility, the sixty two thousand people living in the Railways Siding Constituency?
That was the easy part. The Screaming Lord Sutch Party is a technicality. Screaming Lord Sutch is a Party of One. What if he was not, being instead a member of the Teddy for Prime Minister Party? And what if the TPMP had used the proceeds from a string of political aid rock concerts around the country to put in three hundred and fifty TPMP candidates like the honourable member for Railway Sidings?
And what if King Charles did invite Teddy Bear to form a government? Who would Screaming Lord Sutch be representing then? The party which selected him to represent them in the election in the Railway Sidings Constituency? All the people all over the country who became so tired of being unrepresented by their own type of person and being talked down to by Tory barristers or Labour lecturers that they voted Teddy Party? All the people, many too young to vote, who paid twenty five pounds a ticket to attend the rock shows which financed the election victory?
And that is just the beginning. Who is the real brain behind the Teddy Party? Is Queen Diana really going to get the teddy bear and King Charles to upset the apple cart by using the privy council to run the country while the British Parliament is abolished and replaced by a confederation of duchies? And what is Lord Sutch to do? Who is he to represent if the king has a skiing accident and Teddy Power passes to a syndicate of international financiers to whom he owes no allegiance? Who then is paying the piper? Who is writing the piper’s new tunes? And why should he be whistling them? He will probably scream!
But what of sensibly seized Sweden where such eccentric behaviour in such a serious matter as politics would be regarded as quite beyond the pale? Let us no longer speculate upon what the British Isles needs, and turn our attention instead to what Sweden does.