Foreign Perspectives

It was a little wobbly this morning but at last Labour did the right thing and abandoned any thoughts of attempting to prolong their lame duck government. Most surprising was last night when John Reid came out and said directly that it simply wouldn’t be right for the Labour party to even think of some cobbled together coalition. It was into this morning though before the various spin doctors admitted that withdrawal was the only democratic thing to do.

This evening the new Conservative led government is in place or at least the Prime Minister is as he has yet to appoint his Ministers. That has the effect that he’s in full charge of the country this evening, albeit will a full complement of civil servants to keep a handle on it all. Changes in government are the only time when the UK is effectively run presidential style and it’s generally for a very brief period.

One final issue not yet resolved is the approval of the coalition by the Liberal Democrats which should happen later this evening all being well. Should all not be well and they reject it, we still have a government but a minority one.

At the changeover there were all the usual thank you gestures from both Brown and David Cameron. Not that anyone really believes them, of course.

Somehow I feel that this is nearing the end game.

Yesterday it became clear that Clegg doesn’t have enough from the Conservatives to suit him. The turning point on that seems to be a Liberal requirement to have proportional representation used in UK elections. On offer from the Conservatives was a referendum on the issue which does seem to be the correct approach. At the same time Labour came up with a guarantee to implement the change. Bearing in mind that this change is supposedly going to result in continual coalitions it’s clear that the current Labour government are only offering this as a last ditch way of staying in power.

Will David Cameron take the chance of ditching the Liberals and running with a minority government today? Probably not though I’d say he and his team are thinking of doing it very soon.

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.