Ciaran’s Omnipurpose Blog

This warming soup is a big favourite in the house and with friends. I took about 4 litres of it to a dinner party for 6 as a starter and the guests got to third helpings by the time the soup was all gone. Like most soups, it’s incredibly simple to make. This recipe serves 4.

Ingredients

• 350g broccoli
• 400ml  vegetable stock
• 25g butter
• 1 onion, chopped
• 50g Stilton, crumbled, or to taste
• 100ml creme fraiche
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• pinch freshly grated nutmeg

Method

• Chop the broccoli into chunks, florets and stalks.
• Steam the broccoli in a pan until tender.
• Whilst the broccoli is steaming, fry the onion in the butter for about a minute
• Shove the broccoli, stock, onion, Stilton into a blender and blend until lumpy
• Add the creme fraiche. Blend again until smooth
• Transfer the soup to a saucepan and simmer.
• Add nutmeg and pepper to taste

I was rushing through Hampton to visit my parents yesterday and saw this reminder to make haste slowly:

I think the poor cat (it looked like a Burmese) had just used up the last of its nine lives. The driver did her best. It must have been a real shock. She picked up the cat in a blanket and drove away, presumably to a vet.

Right now, the mainstream press supports the Conservatives, with the exception of the Guardian, Independent and Mirror. Alongside talk radio and TV, there’s much talk of the scandal of having an unelected Prime Minister in power. Even since Gordon Brown moved into Number 10 in 2007, this has been a common refrain.

It’s an even bigger issue now that Brown has offered to step aside. the argument runs something like this:

• Gordon Brown was unelected in 2007, which questions the legitimacy of this leadership.
• We’ve just had an election – Gordon Brown lost and should go in favour of David Cameron.
• Anything less than a Cameron government would be a coup.
• Gordon Brown has offered to stand down to allow a deal to happen: If there were a Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition, then it would be led by an unelected Prime Minister.

 To which the counterarguments are:

• That’s the system we’ve got – within the rules of the system, there’s no problem with his legitimacy.
• We’ve just had a parliamentary election. We’ve elected MPs to Parliament to form a government. This was not a presidential election. David Cameron hasn’t won a mandate either.
• Cameron does not have a mandate to govern on his own. He has 36% of the popular vote. He doesn’t have enough seats. Somebody has to make a deal and form a government within the rules of the system. The horse-trading going on is within the rules of our system.
• Unelected Prime Ministers are nothing new. There’s quite a history of them:
  • 2007 Gordon Brown Labour
  • 1990 John Major Conservative
  • 1976 James Callaghan Labour
  • 1963 Sir Alec Douglas-Home Conservative
  • 1957 Harold Macmillan Conservative
  • 1955 Sir Anthony Eden Conservative
  • 1940 Winston Churchill Conservative
  • 1937 Neville Chamberlain Conservative
  • 1923 Stanley Baldwin Conservative
  • 1916 David Lloyd George Liberal
  • 1908 Herbert H. Asquith Liberal
  • 1905 Henry Campbell-Bannerman Liberal
  • 1902 Arthur Balfour Conservative

Everyone is playing by the rules of the system. Personally speaking, I’m more than happy to see this happen because it now looks as though we’ll get electoral reform whatever happens. Perhaps sooner or later we’ll reform the system and it will be fairer.

29.6 million people voted in the General Election. That’s approximately 65% of the electorate.

Of those 29.6 million, 10.5 million voted for the Conservatives. That’s 35% of those who voted.

Under our First Past the Post system, which disproportionately awards seats for share of the vote, the Conservatives still do not have a majority of seats and therefore cannot immediately form a government.

This means that there is currently no alternative to the incumbent government. If Gordon Brown were to ask permission from the Queen to quit, she’d refuse: as yet, there is no alternative government.

So Brown is not “Squatting” in Downing Street as the squalid Murdoch Press alleges.

Under our system, there were no winners. It’s up to the parties now to take the mandates they have been given and represent them as best they can by arguing over the implementation of policy in a new government, making a deal and getting on with running the country. This process is now underway:

Clegg, true to his word, has offered the party with the most votes a first crack at forming a government. That party is the Conservative party. With a coalition, their combined votes would equate to about 58% of those 29 million and 363 seats.

However, if the talks finally fail, then under our current system, the Labour party has every right to try to form a government with the Liberal Democrats.

Of the 29.6 million who voted, 15 million voted for Labour or the Liberal Democrats. That’s 51% and 315 seats – still not enough to form a government, but possible still with assistance from other small parties.

If this situation were to arise, this new coalition would still be comprised of parties and MPs that people had voted for. Under our First Past the Post system, all parties are currently playing the game fairly.

The British people have had a chance to elect the Conservatives with a workable majority and have decided not to. We’ll have our next say in 4 to 5 years. That’s the system. If we don’t like it, we can change it.

The only party to have consistently offered this is the Liberal Democrats. The party to have most consistently opposed it is the Conservatives. It’s telling that once Brown offered to step aside yesterday afternoon, the Conservatives were more amenable to agreeing to a referendum on voting reform. They’re desperate for power and will make promises to get it.

Will they keep those promises?

As for this nonsensical whining about our “unelected Prime Minister”, that’s for another post.

If our newspapers were more indpendent and less in the pockets of the ruling interests, then this would be on the front pages today.

Early results indicate a hung parliament is in the offing and it’s going to be an interesting few days. This is probably the best result for you and me, regardless of your political opinion. This is because your political opinion may start to actually count for something, regardless of whether you’re a Conservative voter in a safe Labour seat, a Labour voter in a safe Conservative constituency or a Liberal Democrat voter in, well, anywhere! A hung parliament will throw open the haggling for a reform of the voting system, something the two biggest parties have fiercely resisted.

And it’s not hard to see why: looking at the figures from results as of this morning, it’s a pretty shocking state of affairs:

What’s wrong with this picture? How can it possibly be justifiable for 23% of the electorate to have their voices translated into just shy of 9% of the seats in Parliament? This isn’t about partisan politics. Regardless of your voting proclivities, people will only come back to voting and engagement with politics if they think their vote will actually make a difference.

Parliament may well be hung: there is hope for real change.

Cameron isn’t the real change candidate, but you can still make a difference today.

Sure, he’s talking a lot about change. Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are banging the “Change” drum after 13 years of a Labour government that has made some terrible decisions (The wars, PFI, ID cards) and some very progressive ones (Minimum Wage, poverty reduction, great investment in public services, gay rights).

I feel, and perhaps many others feel the same, somewhat disconnected from the political process. You have a chance every 4 or 5 years (depending on the whim of the incumbent government) to cast a vote for another 4 or 5 years of management by ideologically very similar parties. “They’re all the same” is a common refrain. And yet, the truly radical parties such as the Greens (with whom I feel I have a lot of sympathy) and the BNP or UKIP (with whom I don’t!) are shut out completely.

People don’t feel connected because parliament does not represent them. Case in point, in 2005:

• Labour took 35 per cent of the vote and got 55 per cent of the seats
• The Conservatives won 32 per cent of the vote and only 30 per cent of the seats
• The Liberal Democrats took 22 per cent of the vote and only 10 per cent of the seats.

We need electoral reform and we need it badly. It’s unfair, it allows an abuse of power and it encourages voter apathy. How democratic is a democracy that votes in a near dictatorship every 4 or 5 years.

The only party of the three that offers a referendum on voting reform is the Liberal Democrats. However, because the system is currently so very wrong, you’re going to need to vote tactically. Simply voting Liberal Democrat might split the left wing vote (which has historically worked against the general British population’s interests) and bring in Cameron, who promises only to reform the electoral system to suit himself, not you. (Source)

Work towards a Hung Parliament. Vote for a Change. Find out how here: http://www.voteforachange.co.uk/