Politics

It’s been a long weekend hasn’t it? We went to the polls on Thursday and here we are entering Tuesday and still we have no government. What we do have are several options all of which seem to point to another general election within a year.
The first being a coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats but this may be ideologically stalled from the start. There would be more common ground found between the Liberals and the Labour party but this new Lib-Lab pact wouldn’t have a working majority in the commons and thus wouldn’t establish a strong workable government.
The final option would be a minority Conservative government but this would have the same problems as a Lib-Lab coalition and would be dependent on the other two parties not seeing eye to eye when it tried to push through policy. It would, however, be very susceptible to an undermining block vote of the other two parties should they wish to gang up and hinder it whether that be for ideological or political reasons.
All of a sudden the Liberals have become the strongest players in British politics. They have become the debutants at the ball, making their rounds trying to establish the best match for their ambitions. To put it more coarsely Nick Clegg has spent the weekend wiggling his arse at the two main parties in an attempt to gauge who’s willing to pay more for the pleasure.
Inadvertently Clegg has given us a glimpse at what a proportional representative electoral system would look like. Make no mistake the Liberals have done very badly in this election. Although, in the run up, they came across as the sexy underdogs and although Nick Clegg himself got a boost in the televised debates, they actually lost seats. Despite all the talk of them deposing Labour as the second party they did worse than five years ago under Charles Kennedy, who was probably pissed through most of the election.
Now, five seats down from last week, they hold the keys to number ten. Whoever can charm them the most will establish the next government. This is how proportional representation works. The smaller parties, the parties that never had a prayer of winning the election will dictate its outcome. Some people would have you believe this is democratic.
Others claim this stalemate is the result of a ‘Progressive majority’, a unified and deliberate attempt by centre left voters to keep the Conservatives out of office. As if they conspired to wilfully lose the election and force a ‘Rainbow coalition’ of the left.
So we’re in a rather surreal situation where it’s very possible that Labour and the Liberals will join forces then tout for support from everyone else in the commons, Plaid Cymru, the Scottish Nationalists and that Green party MP, bless her. We would have a multi-coloured coalition and the Conservatives, the party that won the most seats, the party that won the most new seats, the biggest single party in the house would be the opposition.
I fail to see how this would be democratic. Labour lost the election. They lost ninety one seats. Ninety one Labour MP’s lost their jobs. If you imagine a general election as nationwide vote of confidence on a government how else can you read the results as anything other than a massive Labour failure?
Labour polled twenty nine percent of the vote. Michael Foot achieved twenty eight percent in 1983 and has been universally blamed for putting Labour on the opposition benches for the following fourteen years. The difference between that election and this one is in that one the Conservatives got a majority.
The Conservatives gained ninety seven seats and with the final seat being voted on next month they will probably end up with ninety eight gains. Three hundred and seven seats, nineteen seats off the magic majority but although they are the biggest party, although they made all but one of the gains in this election, Plaid Cymru raised their tally from two to three; this does not entitle them to form a government. Even though over ten million people voted for Dave Cameron to be the next Prime minister there is nothing in our constitution to say this has to be the way.
If the Labour party and the Liberal party get their act together the two losing parties will form the next government and even though the country overwhelming voted to send Gordon Brown back to Scotland he will remain our Prime minster until September when the Labour party will poll its members on who they want to head the government.
Am I missing something?
These parties combined only achieved eight seats more than the Conservatives. Two separate players in the election couldn’t get a double figure lead on the largest party. I don’t buy this ‘Progressive majority’ theory. This is no deliberate move by the voting left. This is a quirk of the figures. Where’s the mandate?
All I see is self serving self interest in this. Labour is desperate to hold on to power. Last time they lost power they were out for eighteen years. Losing this one is unthinkable; in 1997 they inherited the strongest economy of any incoming government now the economy is in tatters, there is a real danger of the country going bankrupt. Should they leave office now what would be the chances of the electorate forgiving them anytime soon? As much as they claim that this sorry mess is the result of global factors out of their control they were all to eager to take credit for the bounty of riches that the John Major’s government left them. You can’t have it both ways.
By the same token the Liberal Democrats, for the first time in their history, have sniff of rigging the electoral system in their favour. They, up until now, have been the third party in what is essentially a two party system. Before this election they were bit players, a fringe group of weirdo’s who only ended up on the front pages when there was a rent boy scandal or they throw out their leader for his alcoholism (its worth noting that Charles Kennedy’s problems were overlooked while he was winning them seats and gaining them support and he was only pushed when he started to become a liability). Now they are the unpopular kid who’s turned up at the party with all the cocaine. Everyone one wants to be their friend.
This is their chance to push for electoral reform, their chance to push for a proportional electoral system that would give them more seats at the ballot box. This would be great for Liberal Democrats but pretty shit for everyone else. A proportional system would give us the same problem of the last few days every single election. No party with a working majority and backroom wrangling for days before any government could be established.
Israel uses proportional representation; they have to have an election every couple of years because the governments are so unstable and all the deciding votes are held by fringe religious extremists, which explains why Israel always seems to be in the shit. PR hasn’t fared to well historically. It was backroom compromises that saw Hitler becoming the German chancellor in 1933. He was elected to the roll as part of a coalition.
PR may be fairer but you end up with compromised, unstable governments and you let the nutters in. Under PR we will end up with BNP MP’s.
It is understandable that neither of the two main parties have been in any great hurry to change the voting system. Up until now it has suited them. It’s given them strong, stable power and a mandate to rule and implement their own ideologies.
It’s telling that yesterday Gordon Brown offered the Liberals electoral reform as part of a coalition deal. This offer is an admittance that he knows the party’s over. Before the election neither Brown nor Cameron would have dignified the idea by even mentioning it. All of sudden it has becoming the olive branch that could keep Labour in office. The fact that Brown would offer it is a sign of desperation. The present system elected three strong Labour governments, why give all that up?
Perhaps it’s the fear of another eighteen years in the wilderness; perhaps it’s the fear of being remembered as one of the worse Prime ministers in a century. Perhaps it’s pure narcissism that despite losing the election spectacularly he feels they still have the right to run the country.
In the next few days some kind of deal will be thrashed out between someone or another and our new government will be revealed to us. What that government looks like, at the moment, is anybody’s guess. Democratically and I believe morally the Conservatives should be at the centre of that government. They won the most votes, they won the most seats. They have the mandate to at least give it a shot even if it means going back to the polls later this year. Offering the Liberals a referendum on electoral reform is a nice move. Just because you have a referendum doesn’t mean you have acknowledge its results. Referendums are not binding they are merely a gauge of public opinion.
It seems that a lot of Liberal MP’s will be holding their noses if they are required to work with a Tory administration. One would wonder what would be worse. Working with the Tories or propping up a defunct and rejected Labour government that has failed on all its promises, a Labour government that has dragged us into illegal wars, a Labour government that has totally decimated our civil liberties over the last thirteen years. All things considered the Conservatives might be worth a go.