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I do enjoy Richard Littlejohn's writing style.
From the Daily Mail yesterday.
From the Daily Mail yesterday.
Last night in Iowa in sub-zero temperatures, voters braved snow drifts to cast their preferences for candidates aiming to become the next President of the United States. An estimated 250,000 turned their backs on the new TV season's premiere of The Apprentice, with Donald Trump, to trudge along to 1,750 assorted meeting halls to argue over the relative merits of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee, to name but four.
Over the next couple of months, millions of Americans will take part in caucuses and primaries across the country.
By the time the two candidates who make the final ballot in November emerge they will have been scrutinised, analysed and tested in the gruelling heat of battle, which this time around will have lasted the best part of two years. Every position they have ever taken, every vote they have cast, every syllable they have ever uttered, privately or publicly, will have been examined in microscopic detail.
The American public will know every cough and spit about their business dealings, their tax returns, their medical records and their sexual history. Each candidate will have been subjected to the political version of a colonoscopy. And probably a real colonoscopy, too.
There's a long way to go, but an upset in the smallest states early on can derail even the odds-on favourite, as Hillary Clinton may be about to discover.
So-called European sophisticates like to sneer at the arcane American system, the billion dollar advertising spend and the hoopla of the party conventions. But strip away the quaint town hall meetings and the marching bands and what you're left with is democracy in the raw.
Now compare and contrast it with what passes for democracy in Britain. How many people here would turn out on a freezing night in, say, rural Derbyshire, to attend a political meeting, given the option of EastEnders and a microwaved chicken tikka masala?
The reason Iowans make the effort is they know that their voice, their votes - unlike here - actually make a difference.
Look at how the Americans go about electing their President alongside the grubby stitch-up which put Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Here, there was no "campaign", just a few stage-managed boasting sessions to an audience of handpicked sycophants. He faced no opposition because he put the frighteners on anyone daft enough to stand against him.
Our Prime Minister has never been elected by his own party, by parliament or by the British people. He represents a Scottish seat in an overwhelmingly English parliament and passes laws affecting the English which do not affect his own constituents north of the Border. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have their own versions of self-government, something which Brown stubbornly denies the English.
He signed away Britain's sovereignty to Europe, blatantly breaking a promise to hold a referendum he knew he'd lose, and lied through his newly-capped teeth about the consequences of his actions. He didn't even have the guts to attend the formal signing ceremony.
Even when he had the opportunity to secure a democratic mandate, he chickened out because he didn't trust the people to give the right answer. He was frightened he might lose the job he has always considered to be his birthright.
If Brown could find a way of abolishing elections altogether, believe me he would.
Lord Hailsham once described Britain as an elective dictatorship. Under Brown it's not even elective.
Britain is now governed by a series of placemen, quangos, bureaucracies and unaccountable officials who pay little heed to the will of the people. Most of our laws are made in Brussels by people we didn't elect and can't eject. We don't have plebiscites, we have spurious 'consultations' which are then ignored.
In the U.S., they get to vote for everyone from judges and the local sheriff to the supervisor of schools and the town dog-catcher.
In Britain we are subjected to the obscenity of a full-time politician masquerading as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police taunting the elected members of the London Assembly to sack him if they think they've got the power - secure in the knowledge that they damn well haven't.
In the States, Ian Blair would have been run out of town, probably at gunpoint. And can you imagine anyone in America voting for the Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban?
We gave parliamentary democracy to the world. Labour, under Tony Blair and Brown, has spent the past decade trying to abolish what's left of it here.
The House of Commons is routinely by-passed. The Lords is packed with pliant cronies and party donors, while Tory peers are booted out. They've tinkered with our tried and tested first-past-the-post system through scams such as corrupt party lists to ensure their hegemony.
They'll hold a referendum on something relatively meaningless, such as should a man in a monkey suit become the mayor of Hartlepool, but ruthlessly refuse a vote on our future as a self-governing nation.
Americans simply wouldn't stand for it. Their constitution wouldn't allow it. They have respect for their freedoms and their history. In Brown's Britain, every day is Year Zero and to hell with tradition and propriety. Sadly, we seem to have become inured to it.
Someone like Gordon Brown would never get to be President of the United States. By the time the Iowa caucus had been convened they'd have spotted him as a shifty sociopath with festering contempt for democracy and decency and consigned him to the garbage can - which unlike Britain, gets emptied twice a week, not once a fortnight.
In America, Brown would be lucky to get elected as a dog catcher. Here, he gets to be Prime Minister.
Makes you proud to be British. Happy New Year.
Over the next couple of months, millions of Americans will take part in caucuses and primaries across the country.
By the time the two candidates who make the final ballot in November emerge they will have been scrutinised, analysed and tested in the gruelling heat of battle, which this time around will have lasted the best part of two years. Every position they have ever taken, every vote they have cast, every syllable they have ever uttered, privately or publicly, will have been examined in microscopic detail.
The American public will know every cough and spit about their business dealings, their tax returns, their medical records and their sexual history. Each candidate will have been subjected to the political version of a colonoscopy. And probably a real colonoscopy, too.
There's a long way to go, but an upset in the smallest states early on can derail even the odds-on favourite, as Hillary Clinton may be about to discover.
So-called European sophisticates like to sneer at the arcane American system, the billion dollar advertising spend and the hoopla of the party conventions. But strip away the quaint town hall meetings and the marching bands and what you're left with is democracy in the raw.
Now compare and contrast it with what passes for democracy in Britain. How many people here would turn out on a freezing night in, say, rural Derbyshire, to attend a political meeting, given the option of EastEnders and a microwaved chicken tikka masala?
The reason Iowans make the effort is they know that their voice, their votes - unlike here - actually make a difference.
Look at how the Americans go about electing their President alongside the grubby stitch-up which put Gordon Brown into Downing Street.
Here, there was no "campaign", just a few stage-managed boasting sessions to an audience of handpicked sycophants. He faced no opposition because he put the frighteners on anyone daft enough to stand against him.
Our Prime Minister has never been elected by his own party, by parliament or by the British people. He represents a Scottish seat in an overwhelmingly English parliament and passes laws affecting the English which do not affect his own constituents north of the Border. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have their own versions of self-government, something which Brown stubbornly denies the English.
He signed away Britain's sovereignty to Europe, blatantly breaking a promise to hold a referendum he knew he'd lose, and lied through his newly-capped teeth about the consequences of his actions. He didn't even have the guts to attend the formal signing ceremony.
Even when he had the opportunity to secure a democratic mandate, he chickened out because he didn't trust the people to give the right answer. He was frightened he might lose the job he has always considered to be his birthright.
If Brown could find a way of abolishing elections altogether, believe me he would.
Lord Hailsham once described Britain as an elective dictatorship. Under Brown it's not even elective.
Britain is now governed by a series of placemen, quangos, bureaucracies and unaccountable officials who pay little heed to the will of the people. Most of our laws are made in Brussels by people we didn't elect and can't eject. We don't have plebiscites, we have spurious 'consultations' which are then ignored.
In the U.S., they get to vote for everyone from judges and the local sheriff to the supervisor of schools and the town dog-catcher.
In Britain we are subjected to the obscenity of a full-time politician masquerading as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police taunting the elected members of the London Assembly to sack him if they think they've got the power - secure in the knowledge that they damn well haven't.
In the States, Ian Blair would have been run out of town, probably at gunpoint. And can you imagine anyone in America voting for the Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban?
We gave parliamentary democracy to the world. Labour, under Tony Blair and Brown, has spent the past decade trying to abolish what's left of it here.
The House of Commons is routinely by-passed. The Lords is packed with pliant cronies and party donors, while Tory peers are booted out. They've tinkered with our tried and tested first-past-the-post system through scams such as corrupt party lists to ensure their hegemony.
They'll hold a referendum on something relatively meaningless, such as should a man in a monkey suit become the mayor of Hartlepool, but ruthlessly refuse a vote on our future as a self-governing nation.
Americans simply wouldn't stand for it. Their constitution wouldn't allow it. They have respect for their freedoms and their history. In Brown's Britain, every day is Year Zero and to hell with tradition and propriety. Sadly, we seem to have become inured to it.
Someone like Gordon Brown would never get to be President of the United States. By the time the Iowa caucus had been convened they'd have spotted him as a shifty sociopath with festering contempt for democracy and decency and consigned him to the garbage can - which unlike Britain, gets emptied twice a week, not once a fortnight.
In America, Brown would be lucky to get elected as a dog catcher. Here, he gets to be Prime Minister.
Makes you proud to be British. Happy New Year.
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