Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

The Liberals revealed their true colours today. It was never so much what was in the national interest as what was in the Liberal party interest.

Thus, whilst clearly the economic issues should have been the most important, there was always the demand for PR which, the Liberals think, will best suit them. If PR did pan out in the way that the Liberals think it will, coalitions will be the order of the day and the power of the Liberal party will rise as dramatically as it has done in the last week. Do they deserve such power. Clearly not, if the negotiations this week are anything to go by.

But, what should David Cameron do now? If I were him, I’d be calling Buckingham Palace tomorrow morning with a proposal. First, Brown would be out: he clearly doesn’t have the support of either the Commons or the country. Next, I would propose myself as the Prime Minister on the understanding that what I would do, within the shortest period administratively feasible, would be to dissolve Parliament and hold another election. Whilst this would ordinarily be a high risk option for him, both Labour and the Liberals are showing how bad they are more and more as the days go by and so the chances of a landslide Conservative victory are rising as each day passes.

Will he do it though? If Labour and the Liberals get together I’d say yes for sure, if not it’s increasingly likely.

At last it has gotten through to Brown that he actually lost the election so he’s now trying to pull out some kind of victory for Labour out of this defeat through his resignation.

The first difference that it seems to have made is that it has opened the door for negotiations with the Liberals. However, the problem is that even if they agreed between them to form a coalition, it wouldn’t be in the majority and therefore is unlikely to be a route to the stable government that we all need at this point. To get that critical majority, there would need to be a number of deals with yet more parties, each with their own agendas. In practical terms, it would be a rather unstable government with so many side-deals needing to be made. On the whole, it seems clear that any parties taking part could easily find themselves totally discredited when it all falls apart.

However, despite all that, the biggest difference it has made is that the ethical position of the Liberal Democrats is brought into question as they now come across as being a party that is simply negotiating for whatever they can get for themselves rather than in the national interest. At the off, Nick Clegg certainly came across as someone who genuinely would act in the national interest. He needs to regain that position.

Will this lame duck Labour government continue to try and hang on regardless? Probably: they’re that deluded.

Proportional representation (PR) voting is seen by some as “the” answer to all the woes of the current first past the post system used in the main UK elections.

However, there’s a bit of a problem with that… there’s no single PR voting scheme. Almost all of the time the proposals for a referendum on PR completely ignore this. For one thing, the referendum wouldn’t be a straight yes/no thing but rather a choice between anything from one to a dozen or more different systems. So many in fact that the referendum would itself need to be run on a PR basis which in turn would raise the problem that if it was PR, then doesn’t that then imply that the elections should be as well?

What is clear is that any PR style system would require the current constituencies to be grouped. Why? Well, if you ran with them as-is then in almost all cases the system would produce results exactly like that of the current system (they’d generally differ in constituencies producing a close-run outcome). Thus, in cities you’d get east, west and central amalgamated with the same three seats returned but each one representing the whole city. That amalgamation aspect is one of the problems as it lessens the representative role of each MP and ties them more to their respective parties. That’s good in some ways as you could have, say, all three main parties elected in a given city and so if you wanted to contact “your” MP you’d have a choice of all three though you’d be much less likely to know them personally.

We’re currently seeing one of the less desirable aspects of PR ie the horse-trading required after an election to establish a coalition. That there would be coalitions of necessity isn’t certain though as it’s quite possible that people would simply vote for only their preferred party. Ironically, despite PR being the preferred option for the Liberal Democrats they might not finish off any better in terms of seats than they do currently. In fact, nobody can really predict what would happen over the longer term and short-term people are quite likely to simply vote only for their first preference which would produce the same result as the system we have now.

What does seem quite clear is that people in general think that there is only one version of PR and that’s simply not the case.

The shifting voting in England (which passed by the rest of the UK) and assorted issues at the polling stations have left everyone with the feeling that they’ve been living through the nightmare that is a third world style election.

Already we have seen the queues of people lining up outside polling stations and being denied their right to vote. Or rather, denied their right or being granted it depending on the whim of the senior election official in the polling station in question. Some allowed everyone in the queue in, then closed the doors and worked their way through those inside even running after the official closing time. Others went to the other extreme and closed the voting boxes at the closing time. Let’s not forget that those making these decisions are part-time and very junior officials at best which would make it even more ridiculous if that were possible. However, those errors weren’t confined to the junior ranks as the senior officials were responsible for not ordering enough voting forms thus a number of polling stations simply ran out and thus voting stopped at that point regardless of the time. Let’s not forget that there wasn’t a massive turnout so this was a very serious error and one that makes it clear that in fact not everyone really has the ability to vote: a 100% turnout couldn’t be handled as they don’t print enough voting forms. Finally, there’s even the prospect of a £750 a head compensation payment for those that couldn’t vote which makes me wonder a) where on early the money to pay 40% of the adult population £750 each would come from (about £12 billion in case you were wondering) and b) have those lawyers proposing such a payout even considered the effect on voter turnout next time around? My bet is that should that £12 billion get paid out, voter turnout next time would be close to zero.

Now we have moved even more into the third world style as the resident dictator (ie Gordon Brown) refuses to give up power regardless of the result of the election whilst the electoral mandate of the majority coalition is, for the moment, ignored. To be fair, it would be something of a problem if he were to step down before there were some obvious successor but it does have a very third world feel to it.

Had there been the posse of international observers present as in “real” third-world elections, they’d be asking some serious questions now… How can it be that polling stations can close when a serious number of people are still queuing outside? How can it be that who gets to vote and who doesn’t in such situations isn’t fully covered by voting rules and is instead at the whim of a junior official? How can it be that a party that has clearly lost can remain in power for an extended period of time?

If this were a third world country, there’d be calls for a rerun of the election and I for one don’t see why that shouldn’t be the case here.

Although it might sound peculiar to outsiders that the Liberal Democrats could possibly think that they could do a deal with either the Conservatives or the Labour party, it makes quite a bit of sense. After all, they’ve spent the last 30 years or so trying to position themselves as the party of the centre so it stands to reason that they’d have something in common with both the other main parties.

At the moment the difference between the two potential contenders is that Gordon Brown (Labour) seems prepared to do anything and everything he can to stay in power regardless of any consequences that there might be later. On the other hand David Cameron seems to have come up with a considered response recognising the areas of common ground whilst not ignoring the areas where there are differences (notably on the timing of debt reduction, on immigration and on voting reform). I suspect in reality we can safely ignore Brown’s pleas from desperation and assume that a coalition will be with the Conservatives.

Of the difficult areas, differences about the timing of debt reduction probably aren’t as big an issue as they might appear. Yes, it’s probably the most important difference but it’s an area where there are so many shades of opinion (and nobody knows the “right” answer) that there’s quite a bit of leeway on the issue if need-be. Immigration was a clear faux-pas on the part of Nick Glegg so it seems likely that any issues on that score would be quietly dropped. Voting reform has for a very long time been the big issue with the Liberals though there’s no really easy answer with it. Their issue is that despite them picking up about 20% of the votes, they generally get about 50 seats and not the 120 or so that 20% equates to. However, to get that 120 the country would need to move to an entirely part-based, national proportional representation system which would have an entirely uncertain outcome and potentially mean that elections counts could take several weeks to produce a result and totally remove the link between a particular MP and their constituency. Thus, a non-national system would be used and that’s unlikely to fully reflect that 20% of votes in terms of seats won. There are so many issues to consider in this that the commission on offer seems the best way to go although in reality it’s quite likely to stay “it’s working fairy well, let’s not try to fix it”.

What about cabinet seats? I could easily see a Liberal Minster for Education, a Liberal Minister for the Environment and perhaps even a Liberal Minister for Health (although that’s a big ministry so they’d likely need to work up to that).

Assuming that’s a runner in some form, it would even be easy to foresee the potential for a more long-term alliance between the two parties although that’s something for four or five years from now.