I usually post these articles on Facebook on Saturday evenings. Articles dealing with political issues usually attract a great deal of comment. Those which criticize the Government are usually overwhelmed by criticisms of the views that I express. I do not normally respond because I write for public consumption and I am content to allow the public, at least the Facebook public, to express their critical views, without my intervention. Last week, however, I decided to change course for that one occasion, just to see what would happen. The result is that the defence of the Government against my criticisms, which were further explained, became more entrenched. My explanations of the differences between the Cabinet and Government were blithely ignored. My argument that the Cabinet has to resign was denied and countered by the constitutional provision that the Government has the right to stay in office until elections are held, even though the distinction between the two could not have been made clearer.
In most democratic countries where there are regular expressions of the popular will in elections, electorates traditionally vote in a recognizable pattern. However, there is usually a large swing vote and for various reasons, the traditional voting pattern is upended. This is happening today in Germany, where the social democrats have declined for a high of 40 percent support of the electorate to 20 percent today. This is also happening in many European countries, where there is a surge of political parties supporting white nationalist causes. While the fracturing of the traditional voting patterns is occurring in parts of Europe, there is an unusual popularity of the left in the United States and the United Kingdom that has not been experienced before, at least in the US. This lends credibility to the argument that the core problem is the growing inequality between the rich one percent and the rest of society, whose incomes have barely risen over decades since the start of the neoliberal era in the early 1970s. The appeal of the left in the US and the UK is due to their defining the inequality and offering solutions. The right wing see the problems differently. In the UK, it is immigration from Europe and the threat from asylum seekers which has led to Brexit. In the US, its asylum from South America.
