Yesterday I saw several people on Twitter insisting the GE shouldn’t be postponed – but no one suggesting it should be. Then I tuned in to Stephen Nolan’s show on Radio 5 and heard Professor Anthony Glees offering just this proposal (from about 1:18):
He gave a range of related reasons for this, deploying eccentric reasoning to back up his bizarre suggestion.
- The country is divided
- we’ve had a lot of elections recently
- people are ‘punch drunk’ and need to reflect further on what the parties are offering them.
- The jihadis in our midst want to disrupt high profile sites – and a polling station would be a prime target.
He concluded by asking for a ‘period of reflection’.
The country isn’t going to get any less divided if the election is postponed. There has been rather a flurry of elections, including referendums, over the last few years, but a postponement won’t alter that fact. Also, if anything, the greater exposure to the issues means that electors should be more than usually well equipped to understand the different parties’ policies. Jihadis aren’t going to be less able and willing to disrupt polling in July or August than in June.
Glees seemed unwilling to engage with Stephen Nolan’s predictable and fully reasonable riposte that postponing the election amounted to allowing terrorists to interfere in our democracy.
I wondered what made Glees, a Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham, and Director of its Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies, respond to the recent Islamist terrorist attacks in this way – he seems very much an outlier on this issue.
