The non-Anglophiles and non-political-junkies among my strip’s fans might not get the full impact of this week’s storyline, so I thought I’d expound upon it a bit.
For those who don’t know, the UK held a general election this past week. No one liked the ruling Labour party, no one completely trusted the opposition Conservative party, and no way was the election system the UK has about to allow an alternative to actually get a number of seats that represented their support among the population.
Wanting to talk about this, but knowing no one would get it, I decided to do something I rarely do. I dipped into the realm of satire and tried to come up with parallels my readers might appreciate. Since I’ve gone meta a lot lately in the strip, it made sense to do it once more.
(Click on the strips to get a larger view.) The seat numbers (at least for the first three) are exactly the same as were tallied by (respectively) the Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats (“LibDems”). The number I gave Frog Applause were actually those won by Sinn Fein (who will not swear allegiance to the Queen and thus will never be allowed to sit in Parliament) and the one I gave to In The Sticks represents the first seat won in the UK by the Green Party, mainly because it will piss off that asshole Nathan Cooper to be associated with the Greens.
One pundit I heard basically said that there were no winners in the UK’s election, and that the voters essentially rejected all of the major parties. Even the LibDems, whose poll numbers were soaring after the Leaders’ Debates, wound up losing ground. The Conservatives won the largest percentage of the vote and the largest number of seats, but nowhere near what had been projected and not enough for an effective ruling majority.
Which sets the scene for the second strip in the series:
If you replace “Peanuts” with “The Conservatives,” “Garfield” with “Labour” and “Sparky died” with “Michael Hague stepped down” the statements are still true.
So now the two top vote getters have to fight to form a coalition, giving a lot of power to the guy who came in third. This sets the stage for the next several strips. Enjoy.
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