Post Election blues ... now pick ourselves up quickly and act

I didn't post until now, as in my sleep-deprived and emotional state I might have just said "aaaaaaaaaagh".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not an automatic anti-Conservative - the party and/or Cameron have done some good things - gay marriage, and at least containing the deficit (though not as much as they say, and the national debt is still increasing as is the interest we pay on it, and they are not doing it fairly).  They also have some really dodgy policies like selling off more council/association housing stock when we have nothing like enough social housing capability.  Don't get me started on privatisation of public services with inadequate public governance.

The next 6 months are crucial - we have to be on our toes, especially as all the Opposition parties, due to what I see as selfish, cowardly actions, are now effectively leaderless and focused inward on themselves.  It falls to the active electorate to provide checks and balances, swiftly and loudly, especially to defend the elderly, the vulnerable and the disabled.

There are many channels for this, including 38degrees and VoteforPolicies that I support. The latter are planning to track adherence to the manifesto, and as the Tories have a slim majority it's their manifesto that will be monitored.  There are a myriad of other channels large and small for expressing opinions to and exerting pressure upon our elected representatives - remember, as a nation this is what we have done, it's a democracy, we did this, we elected a Conservative government - and ideally this myriad channels would somehow come together and be immensely more powerful through acting in a coordinated way. That won't happen, not least because we also have a myriad of opinions and suggestions and so will never speak with one voice.

All democracy is skewed in favour of those who can be bothered to be involved.  What result might we have got if the one-third of the electorate who didn't vote had instead made it to the polling booth or postbox?  Unfathomable, yet certainly more representative.  What result if we had voted for a version of PR?  Again unfathomable, yet certainly deeply in the constitutional legitimacy coalition space that was being predicted just 24 hours ago ( a long time in politics, apparently - and also in media analysis).

What should the active few seek to do?  Overturn or block policies that are clearly bad? That's not very democratic, having a tiny minority alter things that a wafer-thin majority of two-thirds of the electorate on a first-past-the-post system using historical random constituencies have voted for ... if any of them read the manifesto.  Despite my attempted irony there, I do think that small pressure groups focused on policy change are undemocratic.  

Instead the role of the active few, their focus and priority, should be to expose first the policies, as many of them are hidden away under mounds of innocuous fluffy verbiage. Then expose all the information relating to those policies, in terms of background, analysis, experience elsewhere, risks, possible outcomes and side-effects - drag all of this, blinking, into the sunlight.  Then facilitate discussion thereupon on the widest possible basis.  Whereupon the elected representatives will have no choice but to do the generally accepted best, or least worst, thing if they want to be loved and one day re-elected.  And they do, they really do.  That, my friends and others, will be the least-flawed version of democracy in action.