Yorkshire should celebrate independent gains at the general election - Yorkshire Post Letters

The recent 2024 General Election has been one of the strangest elections in living memory.

Jumping off the starting blocks at the beginning of his campaign with a surprise deluge which rained on former PM Rishi Sunak's parade, he was soaked outside Number 10 Downing Street, which was then followed by gaffe after gaffe and electoral calamity after calamity in the weeks before polling day, including a gambling scandal; Sunak's Conservative Party campaign was an embarrassment and his party deserved to be cut down to size.

However, that didn't mean that Sir Keir Starmer and his party of sycophants deserved to win a majority of seats with their peculiar Ming Vase strategy failing to offer the public a clear vision for the future, with seemingly endless lists of vapidity, platitudes, word salad and political spin instead of delivering concrete promises and ambitions to inspire the people.

Indeed, never have I seen as negative, uninspiring, unprincipled and dullarded an election campaign as that which was run and executed by Labour.

It seems the British public do agree with me. Starmer’s Labour Party received but 1/3rd of the total vote share, yet due to our fixed system of a democracy, they were gifted 2/3rds of Westminster's seats.

‘British democracy’ so-called, or at least the ideal of it, does not exist in a fair, free and proportional manner and the necessity of total electoral reform has never been clearer nor more urgent than at our current moment.

There is however a beacon of light which appears upon the horizon - a growing public electoral rejection of all London-based political parties and a lean towards strong, independent, non-party political representation.

Exactly 60,783 Yorkshire people voted independent and put their faith in a better kind of politics, one not ruled by party machinery and whipping systems flagellating spineless party backbenchers into voting for what elites want.

60,783 Yorkshire people voted on July 4, for genuinely positively driven, kind, hopeful and popular independent candidates from all of our different yet connected Yorkshire communities.

Such as the proven Yorkshire champion Keith Tordoff MBE in Skipton & Ripon.

The young, energetic, and inspiring Councillor Muhammed Ali Islam in Bradford West, a 21 year old underdog who built a popular grassroots campaign which smashed 11,017 votes, just a finger from beating Labour robot Naz Shah.

And finally, I tip my hat to Yorkshire's very own incumbent independent Iqbal Mohamed MP, who caused a major shock defeat to the two big parties of London by freeing Batley and Dewsbury from the Labour-Tory dominium which has destroyed Batley and Dewsbury and hurt all of the places we call Home over many, many decades.

We should be proud that Yorkshire has a growing independent streak and I hope that the rest of Yorkshire follows the examples set by our best ones by continuing to reject the southern English political parties and their greedy grasp over Yorkshire in every future election.

Please, my fellow citizens and Yorkshire folk - do not buy what the political parties are selling. They are trying everything in their power to pull wool over your eyes.