This article by Alistair McConnachie was published originally in the October 2004 issue of Sovereignty.

People are often concerned at elections about whether it's right to vote for smaller parties who are unlikely to form a government, if so doing enables the worse of two evils to be elected.

This is a very important and understandable political concern, which needs to be addressed.

George Monbiot summed up this dilemma, and provided guidance on its resolution, when he commented on the November 2nd chances of the outsider and independent anti-corporate US Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader. The relevance to the British political situation is obvious. He writes:

This is the question which people ask themselves before almost every presidential election: why, when the United States is teeming with brilliant and inspiring people, are its voters so often faced with a choice between two deeply unimpressive men?

I would have thought the answer was pretty obvious: because deeply unimpressive men continue to be elected.

…Only when the Americans choose a man or woman who is prepared to turn the system upside down and reintroduce democracy to the greatest democracy on earth will these exceptional circumstances come to an end. In choosing the bad rather than the terrible in 2004, in other words, Americans will be voting for a similar choice in 2008. Whereupon they will again be told that they'd better vote for the bad, in case the terrible gets in.

Any president who seeks to change this system requires tremendous political courage. He needs to take on the corporations which have bought the elections, and challenge the newspapers and television stations which set the limits of political debate.

…[Ralph Nader] has spent his working life fighting the corporations and being attacked in the media. This month he did something no other US politician has dared to do, and took on the Anti-Defamation League, the organisation which smears opponents of Israeli policy as anti-semites.

He won't be elected in November, of course, but that's not the point. The point is that if you want to change a system, you have to start now, rather than in some endlessly deferred future. And the better Nader does, the faster the campaign for change will grow.

Talking about Ralph Nader: We're impressed by the fact that he's the only Presidential Candidate to address immigration, and the need to control it -- unlike George W. Bush who permits open invasion of his country over its southern border, and unlike the "Green" Party in Scotland, or England and Wales, who both encourage anti-ecological and unsustainable mass immigration into the UK.

And here is Nader in conversation with Pat Buchanan in The American Conservative, 21 June 2004 at, www.amconmag.com/2004_06_21/cover.html He is predicted to receive somewhere around 1% of the vote on 2nd November:

Conservatives are upset about the sovereignty-shredding WTO and NAFTA. I wish they had helped us more when we tried to stop them in Congress because, with a modest conservative push, we would have defeated NAFTA because it was narrowly passed. If there was no NAFTA, there wouldn't have been a WTO. Conservatives are also very upset with a self-styled conservative president who is encouraging the shipment of whole industries and jobs to a despotic Communist regime in China. That is what I mean by the distinction between corporate Republicans and conservative Republicans.

Next, conservatives, contrary to popular belief, believe in law and order against corporate crime, fraud, and abuse, and they are not satisfied that the Bush administration has done enough.

Conservatives are also upset about the Patriot Act, which they view as big government, privacy-invading, snooping, and excessive surveillance. They are not inaccurate in that respect…And conservatives are aghast that a born-again Christian president has done nothing about rampant corporate pornography and violence directed to children and separating children from their parents and undermining parental authority.

If you add all of those up, you should have a conservative rebellion against the giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being named George W. Bush.