Democracy ends in Portugal

A coailiton of left-wing parties won the recent Portuguese election by a narrow majority of 50.7% with a mandate to smash the austerity régine, enforced by the euro currency

The President, Anibal Cavaco Silva, has refused to admit them to government. It is as if Mr. Corbyn had won a general election here and the Queen had refused to send for him to form a government and invited the Conservative leader instead, The President gave his reasons: “In 40 years of democracy, no government in Portugal has ever depended on the support of anti-European forces, that is to say, foces that campaigned to abrogate the Lisbon Treaty, the FIscal Compact, the Growth and Stability Pact, as well as to dismantle monetary union and take Portugal out of the euro….”

I think it was in 1983 that Ken Clarke said “The great thing about Europe is that it makes most of Labour’s policies illegal”. Those policies were not to my liking and for about 2 minutes, I was quite pleased about that – they were too extreme. Then I thought “Wait a minute. I thought we elected MPs to decide these things. Who gave away that power? What’s the point of voting for them if they are powerless? That was the election when Tony Blair got into government on a manifesto promise to leave the EU “which has plundered our resources and destroyed jobs”.

Like President Obama, the President of China, Xi Jinping, has made an unusual intervention in our internal affairs by urging that Britain should stay in the EU. Of course, Sir Edward Heath was a consultant for the Communist Chinese government in his declining years. He defended that government stoutly at the time of the Tien an Men Square massacre.

“But what about democracy, Sir Edward?” asked one reporter.

“How can you have democracy in a country of over a thousand million people?” he snorted.

It seems that the same goes for Sir Edward’s pet project, the EU, with its 500 million people.

 Yours faithfully,

 Edward Spalton

Photo by MSVG