Murphy's letter from Edinburgh

 

Where Do We Go Now

We have been told that our Prime Minister Tony Blair will hand power over to Gordon Brown within the next year and that it will be orderly and all will be the way he planned it. Or so he  thinks.

Does the Prime Minister not realise that he has lost the plot and that the people of this country would like to see him go now.  He won the General election last year more by luck than by the need for him be the leader of our country.

I don't know if Tony Blair is the only person to think that he is fireproof.  The rest of the country don't seem to think so and they are eager to see him go now, and not later.  If he carries on the way he is, it will be an undignified departure, and you can be sure that he will leave like Margaret Thatcher who was forced to leave office with tears in her eyes because of what she thought was treachery.

It wasn't treachery, it was because she thought she should stay there forever when everyone else knew she was a lame duck prime minister who had run her course and had become a dictator.  She had stopped listening to the people of this country many years before and had her own agenda which the electorate did not agree with.

And what makes Gordon Brown think that he should be passed off as the new prime minister without the people of the country or any of the electorate having a say in this changeover?  This changeover should be a proper competition with anyone in the Labour party having the right to stand for the position of prime minister.

The way the Labour party are handling it makes it look like a dictator handing over power to his second in command which is not good for the politics of this country, or any other country when we talk of democracy.

If this is a handover of power it should go to the country.  The people of this country should have a say as too who leads the country and not a few party members who think that they know best for the people of this country.  This is British politics at its worst when power can be handed from one person to another without the electorate having any say in it.

We in Scotland have our own elections next year on devolution, and I believe there a few shocks in store for the Labour party up here.  The reality is we have had two Scottish Parliaments here and both have been a coalition government which was not what devolution was supposed to be about.  Especially when it's the same type of coalition that we have had both time.  A Labour pact with the Liberal Democrats both times.  I did not vote for a coalition government  to run Scotland on a permanent basis nor do I expect this to be the case.

It's now time for change within our political system.  A start would be only two terms for any Prime Minster, and clear cut periods in parliament of four year terms only so that the electorate know exactly when an election is going to be held.

We have that in Scotland but not for the whole of the UK, which strikes me as being odd.  It's time for change within the whole system of politics in our country.  The shouts will only get louder, and not before time.

Roll on the Scottish elections so that we can get some idea of how Labour will do, but let's not have another Labour and Liberal Democratic coalition again.

We have had enough of those and it's time for a change.

Written by Andrew Murphy 6 September 2006

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