The Rev'd Thomas Malthus
thought he was good at his sums
but he wasn't, and it his chums
in the then-new Conservative Party
who later became the chumps
for following his mathematics,
amid the Corn Laws crisis
whilst trying to 'buck the market'
in the value of land and basic food
for their backers' personal gain.
The 2020 Conservatives are
The Party for Wealth and Private Ownership.
For their all being wealthy enough
to all be highly privately educated
they will divide those poorer than them
between the worthy-whose labour
directly benefits the party or it's donors.
and the unworthy poor-who the wealthy
talk about, as if the were all scroungers
for whom the last use the rich
have is to use them as scapegoats.
But in this age of universal franchise*
the poor still have one thing that the Tories
will always need-their votes in general elections.
Malthus would have had a heart attack
at the idea of the universal franchise.
But he would have felt a lot better
when he saw how well voting intentions
could be massaged into submission,
for that ring of political certainty.
*In the UK this has been in operation since 1928,
Whilst there have been parliaments in England since the year 1259,
Scotland since the year 1326,and Ireland since 1297, and whilst
the English parliament became the UK wide parliament in 1707,
with the Irish Parliament liquidating itself in 1800 and joining
the UK parliament, the history of the constituents of all four countries
being enfranchised to vote in a representative to represent them
at the high table of government has a much slower record of reform.
In 1780 only 2 % of men in England and Scotland had the right
to vote, and constituencies were severely unbalanced,
These parliaments were places where feudal economic values
and social systems were hammered into shape and made to work
by whoever was most military minded.
Only with the third reform act in 1870 was every male householder
added to list of voters, and that still left out men who were names
were not on the deeds of the houses they owned, or women,
and the secrecy of the ballot box was not enacted until 1872.
Even in the twentieth century the British were slow to catch up,
female heads of households got the vote, in 1918, women over 21
got the vote in in 1928, MP's were paid a wage for the first time
in 1937, allowing poorer people to get elected to represent
people like them in their constituencies for the first time.
