Hard core politics

All my contributions to your newspaper hardly ever engage in what I call hard core politics, that is the art of slagging off one political party for the benefit of the other.

Accordingly, I avoid showing my bias towards any political party. However, in the light of the Labour Party's intended action to disenfranchise more than 1,650 voters from the European Party presents me with the opportunity to slag off both major political parties.

It strikes me that out of the 1,650 voters on the MLP's list there statistically must be a proportion of Labour voters so that the party is cutting its nose to spite its face. No amount of so-called expert analysis, namely that the MLP has identified these 1,650 voters as diehard Nationalists, can do away with statistical incidence.

The same criticism in another sphere of politics can also be levelled at the Nationalist Party which may account for the fact that it ran scared of the hunting lobby by its anodyne legislation on hunting and by introducing 18-year-olds to the delights of shooting birds out of the sky.

The Nationalist government decided to pander to the 11,000-member hunting lobby without taking into account that given the pattern of voting in this country approximately half of that figure comprises Nationalist voters. If their researchers knew that, one then has to ask what is the likely voting spread denoting losses from Nationalist to Labour had the Nationalist government the courage to act positively in accordance with the wishes of the majority over hunting. The Nationalists decided to act safe and thus shown themselves to be weak and ineffective.

The MLP lost its chance to show the country that it too is fed up with confrontational politics. The foolish action it took has instead shown it to be as bad as the Nationalists in provoking the opprobrium of the nation.