Adrians Election Analysis
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- Created on Friday, 30 April 2010 11:51
We at DDYC haven't got a clue about elections or politics - so we asked a very respectable Rev to help us out... Unfortunately the respectable Rev pulled out, so we asked Adrian Dorrian instead...
Thursday May the 6th is all about an ‘x’. That one little letter that will make all the difference to someone’s life…and potentially make all the difference to our future as a nation. And it seems that there’s never been a more important time to choose wisely – it’s still wide open, the nation is split over their favourite and so one tiny ‘x’ could mean the difference between elation and despair…
No I’m not talking about the latest season of Britain’s Got Talent, but rather the General Election which will take place next week, on Thursday 6th May. Thanks to the televised debates, the Liberal Democrats, who have traditionally been the lonely bridesmaid party of modern British Politics, are polling alongside their Labour and Conservative rivals. Because of the first-past-the-post system in Westminster elections (the person with the most votes in each constituency gets elected, which makes it possible to command an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons without receiving a majority of the votes) it is unlikely that we will have a Lib Dem Prime Minister on May 7th but there is a more realistic chance than ever of a hung parliament – one in which no single party has over half the seats.
A hung parliament would mean one of two things – either a coalition government made up of two or more parties (and not necessarily the largest single party if the margins are close) or else a minority government, where the leader of the largest single party is appointed Prime Minister and asked by the Queen to form a government, but in which the Prime Minister would have no guarantees of getting any of his votes passed.
But, if you listen to some of our local politicians, the potential for a hung parliament makes this general election one of the most important in recent years in Northern Ireland too. Although voters on this side of the Irish Sea don’t have a choice between Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat (the Ulster Unionists have formed an election pact with the Conservative Party and any of their elected candidates will be part of the Conservative grouping at Westminster, but according to the BBC website only two of the 17 Unionist and Conservative candidates standing are members of the Tory Party rather than the Ulster Unionists) and although an awful lot of day to day decision making as far as Northern Ireland is concerned now rests with the Stormont Government, there is the suggestion that if the margin is tight in a hung parliament then the 18 MPs Northern Ireland returns to Westminster may well hold the balance of power and therefore be in a position to bargain more aggressively for the benefit of the province.
So who should a Christian in Northern Ireland vote for? Religion has often played a bigger part in Northern Ireland politics than London politics (although did you notice a very real religious question coming up in the TV debate last week?) , even in the broadest sense it is often generalised that most Unionist voters are Protestant and most Nationalist voters are Catholic. It may also be generalised that the DUP has in the past been the party that has been most overtly religious – the founder and longtime leader of the party, Ian Paisley Snr, was simultaneously the head of a Christian denomination in Northern Ireland. But that party’s religious platform has taken something of a battering recently because of scandals associated with Iris Robinson, who had been very public and very controversial in sharing her religious beliefs, while the Party Leader and First Minister Peter Robinson is embroiled in financial scandal.
But issues where there are obvious moral issues at stake aren’t always front and centre. We read a lot about representation at Westminster, about expenses scandals, about sectarian decision making (some parties have withdrawn candidates in favour of other Unionist or Nationalist candidates, which is being called sectarian in some quarters) but of the six major parties contesting the breadth of the province, only one manifesto has an explicit policy position on abortion, an issue that will face Northern Ireland in the lifetime of the next parliament.
Of course I was never going to come even close to telling you how to vote in this article, but here’s my suggestion if you are old enough to vote: don’t go with the status quo of your family or the local sitting candidate because it’s easy. Look at the party websites. Look at the manifestos. Contact your candidates and ask them about the things that matter to you. And cast your vote the way you think best. Because if the next parliament will allow our representatives to be more demanding of the big parties in Westminster, then we must be more demanding of our local politicians!
