Are you the change you want to be?

Life is tough at the moment for the purveyors of party politics.  I say purveyors because that is exactly what politics is all about, the selling of ideas and policies to the public.

Why is it tough? In an election year the sad fact is that there are very few who trust or believes them any-more. But we can look at politics in two ways.

The first is the way of the bigger political organisations such as Labour and the Conservatives, where they have a plan, driven mainly by an ideology, but there is always an agenda, most of which will always remain hidden from the electorate….because they don’t trust you to make the ‘right’ decisions.

That agenda is then wrapped up into bit sized chunks and sold as policy, but in the background there is always the knowledge that although there are some of the goodies in the hamper that you don’t like, by voting for the bits you do like, you get the whole hamper, and in the main the policy brands in the hamper are not exchangeable for any other policies. Its the whole hamper or nothing.

That is then complimented by the ideas put out by the smaller parties, the EDP, UKIP, LPUK and in part the BNP.

Here we have a few flagship policies, sometimes single issues, but in the main not enough rounded or costed policies for them to form a government with. They still offer the hamper, with enough key items to attract bargain hunters, but the rest is made up of pick and mix ideas that are still floating around but not yet fully developed or fixed in stone.

And in the middle of all this come the LibDems. A strange party if ever there was one. Policies come and go, move with the wind, a party obsessed with opinion polls from which come policy statements to suit the public opinion of the day. The only policy which I can think has lasted more than 10 years is their quest for PR, a policy which strangely now that it is on offer from the government they are considering turning down.

But the bottom line is no matter which party you look to, it is their idea of what you want, their view of the world which is being sold to you, and it will be their people who will carry it through, irrespective of any views you may have.

So where does this leave the voter and the second way of looking at political parties, because the voter has aspirations, ideals, morals all their own, some are individual, some are collective, but few fit the wares on offer from these political purveyors. So how does the voter get their say on what these parties are offering. Well, basically they don’t.

Should we meekly accept that these parties know best, and vote for the one with the policies that most closely fit our needs or wants even if that means taking on board much of what we do not like, or should we be getting more involved in making that policy shift ourselves.

Take as an example just one item, our relationship with the EU.

On 1st December 2009, the United Kingdom government gave its sovereignty to the new European Union.

There are still those who are still willing to argue and continue to con the public that this is not the case, but as the Lisbon Treaty came into force on that date, it also morphed into a new EU wide treaty, was renamed from the Treaty on the EU (TEU) to the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU. (TFEU). In other words the EU became a functioning sovereign state.

To reinforce this position a new post of President has been created and its first incumbent appointed (appointed not elected) along with a Foreign Representative post with the unelected Baroness Ashton being put into post, who even as I write is assuming the powers over foreign policy and representation that has until now been the exclusive preserve of National Foreign Ministers including our own Foreign Office and diplomatic corps.

So who voted for this? Well in some ways you did. Not in any way directly but it came as part of the hampers that you have been buying from the Labour and Conservative parties for the past 40 years.

No, that’s right, they didn’t tell you it was in the hamper, but you were supposed to have known it was in there, you bought it from them after all, and no, it wasn’t on the label either. But by taking the hamper, you take everything in it, even if they fail to tell you.

And now today, in speech after speech from our politicians the majority of the hamper contents are of Belgian origin, but they quietly switch the labels to say Made in Britain and hope you won’t notice. But we do..

I am not particularly happy with this style of politics, for it has not only taken us into a political union with the EU, but also into wars that the people have vehmently opposed, it has allowed the use of fiscal policies to decimate our economy, agricultural and farming policies that have massacred farming communities, and crucified our civil liberties in the pursuit of a cowed, pliable public whose silence on these matters is taken as assumed consent.

In a democracy politicians are not there to represent the state to the people, they are there to represent the people in parliament and to represent the voice of the people. That respresentation is sadly absent today, as party driven Prime Ministerial rule has slowly taken the place of parliamentary representative government, again, without consent. There lays before us today a huge and unparalleled democratic deficit.

Well its time to make a difference, not the kind of change that we are predictably promised from Political parties, but the difference that the voters want, a voice, a real voice telling the politicians what we want in our relationship with the EU.

The Albion Alliance is that difference, and it is already making a huge difference to the thinking of the major political parties, make no mistake. It is creating enough of a concern to those political parties that their central offices are already coordinating their own candidates responses to the Albion Alliance letters inviting them to sign their Candidates pledge.

Now you can make even more of an impact to that difference, as The Albion Alliance has launched its Voter pledge system, which is now up and running. The first voters have already used it and made their pledges.

You can now indicate to these parties that they will not get your vote unless they listen to you, by promising in a legally binding pledge to give you your voice on an EU referendum.

The Albion Alliance has in a very short space of time had an impact. Now lets make that impact huge. More than anything else, every party fears losing votes, losing its support, so make sure that they know that they will lose your vote, dozens of votes, hundreds, thousands, even millions of votes unless they start listening. You can do this, you can make that difference a reality by signing up to the Voter pledge now.

The Albion Alliance will allow you to be the change you want to be.

Note: You can sign up to the Albion Alliance Voter pledge by visiting the Albion Alliance web page and clicking the appropriate button on the sidebar or you can just use the the link here.