You Can't Always Get What You Want

...all democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one man or any one small group have too much power for too long a time.

Aldous Huxley, interviewed by Mike Wallace for ABC in 1958.

Here at X Marks The Box we are not politically tribalist, and positively encouraged the "floating voter" to get out there and find someone whose box they could mark last week.

We ascribe to that philosophy, which can annoy many dyed-in-the-wool supporters of one party or another, that a change in government is good for democracy, regardless of your personal opinion of the result. We'd have said the same in 1997.

There's been a lot of tin-tack-spitting and raging over the installation of the Liberal Conservative coalition (much of which presents itself as disapproval of the process of coalition but which may, in fact, just be sour grapes that the Lib Dems went the "wrong" way).

But a first-past-the-post democratic system such as we have - for now - means that a lot of people don't get what they want. That, unfortunately, is life.

Those of us who were children during the 1970s first became aware of governments being in power in a sort of perpetual pendulum move - John O'Farrell describes this vividly in his excellent book Things Can Only Get Better. It was Conservative (Heath), and then Labour (Wilson), and then Conservative again (Thatcher). And then the Conservatives went and upset the apple-cart by winning again. And again. And, er, again... And then Labour did the same thing, winning three times over.

One has sometimes had the impression, over these unusually extended periods of record-length government by one party or the other in the last 31 years, that there's nothing some hardcore party activists would like better than the opposing party/parties simply to implode, or just vanish like the morning dew. All sides need to realise that this simply isn't going to happen any time soon.

And surely a period in opposition does every party good from time to time? The Labour Party could emerge renewed and invigorated under one Miliband brother or the other, and sweep to victory in 2015 with a radical agenda for reform. Who knows?

We'll be keeping an eye on things here.

A link to the Huxley ABC interview is here if anyone is interested.

And we encourage everyone to read the (in places surprising) Coalition Agreement, the full text of which the BBC have put up on their website here. It helps, after all, when being vocally For and Against things, to know exactly what one is For and what one is Against.