After last week's electoral count fiasco when Data Research Service's superduper electronic counting machines went into meltdown, producing around 142,000 rejected ballot sheets 3.5% of the Scottish electorate were effectively disenfranchised. To that must be added the thousands of postal ballots that were never received on time.

If this kind of shambles had taken place in a third world country, Blair would have been among the very first to shout Foul and to demand a re-election. But not in Britain. Here the silence from all parties, including the Scottish Nationalists (SNP) with their majority of one over Nu Labor, has been ominous.

True, the SNP leader, Alex Salmond, furiously denounced the election result and demanded an independent inquiry. But, eager to become Scotland's next First Minister, he clearly prefers to live in hope of leading a minority government than to reject the fundamentally flawed electoral process which gave his party a measly 47 seats against the corrupt Nu Labor's 46.

The Greens were the largest group which lost out badly. They had hoped to increase the seven seats they had in the previous parliament at Holyrood to nine. In fact, they ended up with just two. And looking at the manner in which their leader, Robin Harper, has been prepared to compromise his party by leaping into bed with the SNP in a 'loose coalition' it seems that everyone in our small country, still under Whitehall's colonial yoke, has lost out to the unashamed all-round use of political expedience.

I am, by nature, an optimist and see progress to be a tediously slow, one-step-forward-two-steps-back kind of evolutionary process. A thing to be considered against the measure of eternity rather than days, weeks or months. To be an optimist, I believe, it's more realistic to set one's expectations low to avoid short-term disappointments.

And living in the Red Pill Matrix world of the many other millions of Her Britannic Majesty's marginalised and disaffected subjects I am tempted to think that the scorn and contempt in which we are held by the wankers who presume to rule over us is now so great they think they can openly defraud and deny our once-in-a-blue-moon right to have our say at the ballot-box by sabotaging even that.

And it is a measure of the sheer arrogance of our southern rulers that, despite this almighty shambles, the man responsible for having organised it all in the first place, the Scottish Secretary of State, Douglas Alexander, simply refuses to accept he screwed up and should resign. True to his elitist nature, Alexander claims the fault must lie with the people. Along with the lies, venality and colonial racism of Nu Labor (it's not just Blair, it's the whole wretched lot of them) Blair's apparatchiks are not in the habit of admitting to making mistakes or resigning when they have.

So, as no apology is forthcoming, must we be left to believe that no mistakes were made after all? That last week's electoral disaster was intended all along? Alexander's stubborn refusal to heed the several warnings he got that he was backing a flawed electoral system can only suggest that he and his bosses in London were so sure of what they were doing that nothing could persuade them to change course.

Nu Labor has been extremely clever to have deceived the British people over the last ten years with its spin, cynicism and an endless series of lies and distortions. In all of this it has been served well by both the state's sycophantic propaganda machine, the BBC, as well as the rest of the corporate controlled media. In that short period of time its quisling Blair has dragged an unwilling country into more wars than the dreadful Maggie Thatcher ever did and by overturning 800 years of constitutional precedents going back to Magna Carta suceeded in accomplishing what even she dared not attempt.

Perhaps it was foolish for anyone of us to have believed that Her Majesty's 21st Century imperialist rulers in London would have allowed quite so easily the people of Scotland their right to exercise their political will. Perhaps we should have recalled corrupt Britannia's past, her brutal treatment over centuries of the Irish and how, by practising a silent, ongoing coup against democracy not only in Scotland but in England and Wales she keeps alive the abortion that is called the United Kingdom.

Maybe Blair's let's-pretend-at-being-socialists Nu Labor had taken to heart the prediction made by that genuine socialist of old, Scotland's John Maclaine, that Britannia's empire would finally collapse the day that Scotland regained her independence, ending 300 years of imperialistic union. And with that Empire the nuclear colony that Scotland's militarist masters have turned her into.

If what we are now seeing turns out to have been a coup against democracy (and how will we ever know the truth?) surreptitiously planned and intended to look like a cock-up then that must be seen by the rest of the world as proof of how all pretence of freedom and democracy has finally been discarded by our multinational capitalist rulers to be replaced by a planetary, Orwellian dystopia.

Labels: corporate capitalism, drs, new labour, scottish parliamentary election 2007, snp