My faith in politicians

So yesterday, I wrote about how I'm not currently sure which party I support in British politics. However, at the moment I'm also losing my faith in politicians both inside and outside of Britain because of the whole Wikileaks' scandal.

I think of Obama, I was very supportive of him in the election because he'd always put himself forward as someone who was very much in support of human rights and justice for the people. He himself condemned what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and said he "condemned all torture".  He's also made many speeches in which he supports democracy, such as the one he made in China. But yet now, when Julian Assange is exposing all of the governments unknown human rights' abuses and countries wrong doings in order to try and make them more accountable and transparent, he seems to be making Sweden pay two women to say that Assange raped them, so that his work is halted and he tries to justify by saying that Assange is "posing a danger", when he clearly isn't. So how much does he really support human rights? Does he just support them when it suits him to do so?

I also think of Hilary Clinton, she also seemed to be very much in support of human rights and justice, and before she dropped out of the election I supported her. But yet I see her doing exactly the same as Obama, she says that Julian Assange is 'sabotaging peaceful relations' between countries. In a way it doesn't surprise me because it was revealed a few months ago that she wanted Britain to cover up CIA torture evidence. But this has made me lose even more respect for her. These are politicians who condemn corrupt countries, where leaders oppress those who try to expose government wrong doings and yet when this happens to them they oppress the person whose exposing their wrong doings. I'm not trying to say that they are as bad as those leaders, because they aren't nearly as bad but the way they are carrying on in this instance is nevertheless hypocritical.


Admittedly in the case of Cameron, he hasn't spoken out quite so much for Human Rights. In fact he was the one who was even threatening to withdraw us from the Human Rights Act if the Conservatives 
were in power. So maybe it's less of a surprise that he's also trying to stop Julian Assange from carrying on with his work.


I also have to admit that in all of this, it is a minority of politicians who are condemning the actions of Assange outright. But what annoys me is, that none of the politicians are speaking out against the way in which Assange is being treated, and that they seem to think it is fine to carry on in this way.


What also annoys me is the way in which all the countries involved in the imprisonment of Assange are just doing it because that's what America wants and America is the financial capital of the world, so they feel they have to, even though they have the Human Rights Act as part of their constitution. But why should someone's rights come second to money?


The way that the politicians are behaving is a disgrace given that we're in the 21st Century.

My political beliefs

At the moment I'm really struggling with my political beliefs. Before the election of this year, I was a Liberal Democrat but since they decided to make higher education more expensive than it already is and pushed through some budget cuts which really do seem rather unfair, I really am having second thoughts about whether I support them.

The problem I'm having is that I don't know how much of it was really their fault because Labour did leave the government with a lot of debt and so they have had to make some harsh budget cuts as a result. However, even they concede that they were actually planning to make budget cuts when they were in coalition talks with Labour and the Conservatives despite the fact that they said they were against the Conservatives making cuts i 2010. Clegg said that he had had a change of heart because other countries in the EU were starting to make budget cuts because they were starting to realise that they also had to cut their debts and so he now thought we needed to take this approach but if this was the case, then why didn't he say this before we all went to the polls? What really annoys me about the fact that he did this, is that he had always tried to make out that the Liberal Democrats were an honest party but in doing that, they hardly seem honest.

Nevertheless, I cannot forget that they have done good things, that might not have happened if the Conservatives had been in a majority government. For instance they stopped the Conservatives giving tax breaks to married couples and withdrawing us from the Human Rights Act. Furthermore, they and the Conservatives have stopped people wanting to do a part time degree from having to pay up front and they have scrapped some of Labour's other ridiculous policies. So I'm left wondering just how much difference there would have been between a Conservative government and the current coalition's government.

But the fact that I'm disillusioned with the Liberal Democrats doesn't mean I support either of the other two predominant parties anymore. I dislike the Conservatives because they support the interests of the rich more than the interests of anyone else, I cannot forgive them for what happened whilst Thatcher was in power and I really cannot stand the views of their more right-wing members.

And although I lend more of my support to Labour than I do to the Conservatives. It doesn't mean I would necessarily support them at the election because I think they sometimes take their issue of equality a bit too far by doing things such as encouraging too many people to go to university in order to bring about "the equality of opportunity", and they try and dictate how governmental organisations should work far too much when half the time they don't even know what they're talking about and I'm very angry that they took us to war with Iraq.

So I'm considering voting for the Green Party but I'm still eager to stop the Conservatives winning in my area (because where I live the Conservatives often win, and they've won every election in that seat since the 1950s, and the only other party who has a chance of winning is the Liberal Democrats), so I'm still trying to work out what would be most worthwhile in the current situation.