Dear Chief Secretary to the Treasury,
I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left.
Signed, Liam Byrne

(Outgoing Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury. May 2010)
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Monday, 10 May 2010

Taking lessons from Brussels

Last week we had a general election.

The results of that election were as follows (BBC):-
Conservative - 306 seats / 10,706,647 votes / 36.1%

Labour - 258 seats / 8,604,358 votes / 29.0%

Liberal Democrat - 57 seats / 6,827,938 votes / 23.0%

Democratic Unionist Party - 8 seats / 168,216 votes / 0.6%

Scottish National Party - 6 seats / 491,386 votes / 1.7%

Sinn Fein - 5 seats / 171,942 votes / 0.6%

Social Democratic & Labour Party - 3 seats / 110,970 votes / 0.4%

Plaid Cymru - 3 seats / 165,394 votes / 0.6%

Alliance Party - 1 / seats 42,762 votes / 0.1%

Green - 1 seats / 285,616 votes / 1.0%

Total votes cast = 29,653,638
The permanent resident Prime Minister - whose political party came second - has been telling the electorate that we really voted for Labour. To make sure he gets his message across he's getting an awful lot of help from the apolitical BBC, his chums Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, and newly elected Jack Dromey. Other chums of his, including Billy Bragg, helpfully organised a 'surprise' protest demonstration on Saturday, just to push the message home.

All these people are happy to use their analytical skills to crunch the voting statistics to tell us that, if we didn't vote Conservative, we were really voting for a continuing Labour Government.

The resident Prime Minister has told us that he has to stay as Prime Minister, and has to carry on living at that lovely Number 10 Downing Street because it's his duty. He has to do all this for us voters because he, and he alone, knows what's best for Britain.

To help him along, and make sure he gets all his new laws passed easily, he is putting together an alliance of all the other parties - all of whom were elected by people who pretended to deliberately choose not to vote for a Labour candidate - and he's going to call it a "Progressive Alliance".

Mr Brown had already told that nice Mr Clegg about the finer details of this alliance in some meetings - Mr Clegg was sworn to secrecy, he was told not to tell anybody they'd been talking and, being the good sound fellow and independent thinker that he is, Mr Clegg did exactly as he was told.

Once Mr Brown has got his pretty coloured alliance working - (this is a friendly alliance of all those parties whose voters didn't really vote for them) - Mr Brown has said he will resign, and let somebody else lead the Labour Party. He says this will be before the Labour conference in the autumn. And he will, because he always keeps his promises and, as the Anglo Saxon Chronicler points out
... you dont have to be the leader of a party to be Prime Minister. (it's just a convention, not law)
Mr Brown says he's made his announcement early because he's still got lots of work to do to help Britain become the country of his dreams, so before he resigns he will pass legislation to change the electoral system - because he knows that's exactly what we, the electorate, really want. We want a different way of electing our MPs because the boring old system we've got doesn't work very well. We don't like it because it lets too many of the wrong sort of people win too many seats at Westminster, which is such a silly thing to happen.

Doing this is much more important than hmm, let's see. It's more important than sorting out the recession, the economy, or the downward free-fall of sterling. It's more important than sorting out unemployment. It's more important than doing something about all those pesky illegal immigrants (that can now slip into Dover because all the Immigration staff have been moved somewhere else). It's more important than tweaking our lovely education system to make sure even more school leavers are barely literate and numerate. The thing that's most important, the most pressing need for Britain just now is ... a nice new electoral system.

Once we have a the lovely electoral system Mr Brown chooses for us, he might let us have another general election - and then we'll be sure to vote the way we were intended to last week, and we'll elect the right people for all the right constituencies. Except these people won't be 'right' they'll be very far 'left', they'll be his chums.

Maybe Mr Brown was taking note of what happened when the naughty people of Ireland voted against signing the Lisbon Treaty? Brussels made them vote again, and the Irish then said it was a lovely treaty, they said they'd obviously made a terrible mistake the last time they voted.

It would have been quite interesting to see how many times the Irish might have had to vote if they had kept on saying, "No!" Would they, too, have had a nice new voting system?
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