Engineering The Vote

Despite the title this article does not concern the ongoing elections saga throughout Zimbabwe in which President Robert Mugabe may attempt to rig the result in a desperate effort to cling onto power for another consecutive term.

No, unfortunately this post once again concerns the Conservative MEP selections and the continuing discontent being voiced by party members over its rules and procedure.

This dissatisfaction has rumbled on for over a year since the central party hierarchy proclaimed that incumbent MEPs would automatically top any selection list and the top ranking woman in any vote would automatically receive preferential treatment.

Since the selection count on Friday the Conservative party has bowed to pressure and publicly released the figures by which candidates were ranked and selected. The results show that despite a number of women receiving fewer votes than their equivalent male candidates, they were still ranked more highly in the final process. Unfair? Yes. Unexpected? No.

Yet, in a few regions female candidates such as Jacqueline Foster and Anthea McIntyre topped their respective ballots on their own merit without it would seem any required or unwanted intervention. These results therefore prove that women, regardless of their gender, can outperform male candidates in a vote if they are deserving.

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Full South West Result

The result for the South West MEP Selections is as follows: 1) Giles Chichester MEP, 2) Julie Girling, 3) Ashley Fox, 4) Michael Dolley, 5) Don Collier and 6) Zehra Zaidi.

It looks as though my prediction of the final vote was almost completely wrong. Oh well, what do I know? Results from the other EU electoral regions around Britain can be found at ConservativeHome in a running update.

Despite changes in the number of MEPs the South West elects (and I use the term ‘elects’ very loosely) being reduced from seven to six, it is almost guaranteed that Giles Chichester and Julie Girling will be elected in 2009 to serve as MEPs in Brussels. However, Ashley Fox’s expenses paid first class ticket on the Euro-star is not quite so assured.

At the European elections in 2004, UKIP increased their share of the vote by 12% when compared with the result from 1999. With an ever growing mood of discontent directed towards our own self-serving Government, Parliament and the European Union, there is every chance that UKIP will poll even more strongly at the next EU elections in 2009.

Nick Webb has reminded me that depending upon overall turnout and how well other parties such as the Greens and UKIP poll, it may only take as little as an increase of 600 votes per Parliamentary constituency within the South West to win a third Conservative MEP. In the current political climate this is of course more than achievable.

European Selection Results

Well, today is that terribly exciting day when we finally learn which of our MEP candidates will probably be heading off on the gravy train to Brussels at the next EU elections in 2009.

Much like the European Union itself, the party list system which is used to elect MEPs is incredibly undemocratic. In effect political parties rather than the electorate have almost total control over who is selected and elected.

For example, despite Giles Chichester being a sycophantic pro-EU MEP whose views are out of line with the majority of Conservative party members in the South West and indeed the electorate – unless he had chosen to step down or resign then there is no way for party members under the current rules to remove him from office or the list, and the British electorate in the South West certainly has absolutely no say either.

Then there is the scandal of how the party has chosen to enforce the elevation of the highest ranking women in the selections vote to the top of their list behind any incumbent MEP. In the South West this means that if the membership voted for the two female candidates Zehra Zaidi and Julie Girling to come in last, then regardless of the result the higher ranking of the two women would automatically be placed second behind the incumbent Giles Chichester.

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Behind The Scenes

We have by now all seen grainy, shaky footage of the violence that has erupted in Tibet within the past week. Yet, as with so many events observed by us at distance, there is far more to this than first meets the eye.

During his recent column in The Sunday Telegraph, Christopher Booker highlighted how our Government (the EU Commission) has become involved in actively colluding with the Chinese authorities to deny aid relief in Tibet. Booker tells us:

On the country’s northern edge, six months of snow and record low temperatures have created a catastrophe in the Chinese province of Chingai. According to China’s official news agency, 500,000 animals have died and three million people face starvation. When a similar if much smaller crisis 10 years ago hit Ladakh, in northern Kashmir, thousands of lives were saved by the expert intervention of a British charity, ApTibet, working with the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Relief Committee.

It should be noted at this point that we have seen extraordinarily low temperatures across the globe this winter ranging from blizzards in Texas to snow carpeting Jerusalem, Damascus and Amman – all of which Christopher Booker has actually reported on in previous weeks. However, as Booker observed at the time, this has gone ‘virtually unreported in Britain’. This of course strongly and vividly contrasts with reporting from the BBC and many other British news agencies which persist in predicting global warming disaster and catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.

Once again regarding Tibet, one would have thought that right now the charity work carried out by ApTibet would be vital and much appreciated by the international community. Not so in the European Union. Booker continues by informing us that:

Two years ago, after China and Europe became ‘strategic partners’ under an agreement signed by Tony Blair, the EU’s acting president, in December 2005, the Commission suspended ApTibet’s operations because of its link to the Dalai Lama. Since then, it has done all it can to close the charity down…

The whole Booker column is well worth reading, as he describes the way in which the European Union has attempted to bankrupt ApTibet by suspending outstanding contracts with the agency and calling for immediate repayment of funds that it had readily given before the 2005 Blair agreement with China. Booker ends by commenting that:

Doubtless in Beijing, the EU’s ‘strategic partners’ are happy. Meanwhile, its troops are again shooting at Tibetans in the streets of Lhasa, while to the north, three million people are starving, without any hope of assistance from the outside world.

Of little surprise is the fact that you just don’t hear about this on the BBC or indeed from any other British news outlet. Research and analysis would be required to reach these conclusions – something that modern media is none too fond of; that, and it doesn’t fit the ‘official’ narrative of events.