UPDATE: Brown is currently announcing he’s going to see the Queen to resign and to recommend that she ask the leader of the opposition, ie Cameron, to form a government. But still, my post makes some valid points, not least that Nick Robinson should be sacked.
It ain’t over till the Queen lady sings…
The BBC are now performing a complete volte face and promoting a Lib Dem/Conservative coalition to the skies.
The politicoliterati are still trying to turn this negotiating period into a two party adversarial contest (I blame Nick Robinson) – but that’s not what forming a coalition is about.
In the UK a party’s manifesto is its manifesto for government. In the Netherlands manifestoes exist to be melted during post-election negotiations, and fused together.
The process takes time. To do it in a week would be completely impossible in Holland. It cannot be done in days – or rather it can, but then Dutch people would strongly suspect that the job had not been done properly, and that the deal had not been well thought-out.
It’s understandable that the British newspapers are eager for a resolution, but it’s not correct that the UK is without leadership.
There is a caretaker government. The chancellor of the exchequer can continue to take part in discussions of the global economic crisis. Day-to-day decisions will continue to be made.
It’s absolutely normal, from a Dutch perspective, for parties to drive a hard bargain to get as many of their policies as possible into the programme of the new coalition government.
Dutch coalitions usually last for years… though one in 2002 fell after 87 days.
What is less normal is to have a party, like the Liberal Democrats in this case, in a position of so much power that it can make the difference between stable government and chaos. That is because, in the Dutch political system, there are always several coalition possibilities.
There is also less likelihood of a party holding simultaneous negotiations with the two biggest parties – so less scope for allegations of double-crossing.
This whole mess is a ridiculous media-driven one and it’s been talked up by the likes of Nick Robinson in order to fit his own preferred preconceived narrative.
This isn’t democracy, it’s government by media and the rumour mill, and in no way does it reflect the will of the voters.
If this latest rumour turns out to be true, the LibDems will, unsurprisingly, implode in acrimony and worst of all we’ll have a Tory government. The only upside is there’ll be another election along soon when it all falls apart as it’s bound to.
The downside is it’ll again be run under FPTP, and once again the voters will be robbed.
This could be our next PM (or not, as it turned out not long after I posted this – P):
The Prime Minister Of Primrose Hill
Who is David Miliband? Why all this hoohah?
Once you get over the resemblance of The Right Honourable David Wright Miliband MP to Star Trek’s Commander Data he would on the face of it appear to have all the necessary qualities to be a model New Labour leader, not least because of the blood he has on his hands; he voted very strongly for the Iraq war and he voted strongly against investigating the Iraq war, despite his later protestations of ambivalence.
Miliband went straight from Oxford into a thinktank, to becoming a well paid special adviser, to being parachuted into Parliament via a rotten borough safe seat. You see? Perfect. He’s our very own real life Pitt The Very Very Younger.
But this Minister of The Crown, responsible for foreign policy, didn’t even know until corrected by a civil servant that the government whose interests he represents abroad had given a knighthood to Sir Robert Mugabe. See for yourself on BBC’s Question Time:
(Mind you, former Tory minister Douglas Hurd hardly comes off much better, but he is ancient).
Want more? To show how unqualified Miliband is, when he got the job he had to ask the public for advice he’s so bereft of knowledge and ideas.
Today we learn that despite Miliband’s myriad public assurances, the UK has been proved complicit in the dissapearance and torture of people to Diego Garcia. He was duped, he says:
Miliband ‘duped by US’ on rendition
24 minutes ago
David Miliband is facing fresh claims that the US imprisoned terror suspects on British territory.
Campaigners said the Foreign Secretary allowed himself to be “duped by the US on a colossal scale” following new claims of interrogation on Diego Garcia, a UK-controlled island in the Indian Ocean.
A former senior American official told Time magazine that in 2002 and possibly 2003, the US imprisoned and interrogated at least one terrorist suspect on the island.
Mr Miliband has repeatedly denied claims the US has detained terror suspects on British territory.
But the anonymous source, described as a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings, told Time a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said “high-value prisoners” had been held and questioned on the island.
The official also claimed the US may have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia’s territorial waters.
And yet, somewhere here lie a few questions that may deserve to be raised. As Foreign Secretary, for instance, was it right for Mr Miliband to place his private life ahead of his public role in such a high-profile visitation? Would he have delayed the transatlantic trip by just a couple of days had the guest been the head of a less translucently repugnant regime than Saudi Arabia’s? Was he, in other words, using Jacob’s arrival as an excuse to avoid greasing the wheels of arms trading of a kind he might once, in the mythic New Labour era of “ethical foreign policy”, have openly described as stomach-turningly hypocritical?
If so, Mr Miliband sets himself a challenging precedent. Every time one of the world’s unlovelier tyrants pops along, he will have to arrange another adoption. Admittedly this is easier in the US, where babies can be picked up by citizens almost as easily as an automatic rifle from WalMart. Even so, should Assad of Syria reprise his 2002 jaunt, Mr Miliband will need to return to the States to add Abraham (I just love his commitment to the tripartite Jewish patriarchy; those shared values with the Saudis yet again!) to Isaac and Jacob.
He’s “very flattered” to be a gay icon. His blog, mainly devoted to the glories of you guessed it, David Miliband, costs the taxpayers 40K a year. That’s about 50p per visitor. (For contrast this blog’s costs are pretty much nil.)
This is not a man with an overdeveloped sense of modesty. Miliband is New Labour made flesh – well-off, overentitled, underqualified, utterly blind to his own hypocrisy. He’s another who’s convinced himself that his personal ambition is actually zeal for the public good and not just a lust for power for it’s own sake.
But now this glorified work-experience boy, not content with having been promoted way, way above his level of competence, has got the gall to think he can walk into No.10 as PM, as if the imposition of the unelected and useless Gordon Brown wasn’t bad enough already.
The reading public’s uniformly derisive reaction to this notion can be seen in the comments to his flag-planting article in the Guardian this week; the nation, or at least the Guardian reading bits, are as one on Miliband. A representative sample:
alisdaircameron
Jul 29 08, 9:53pm
Davey-wavey, you’re wrong (again).
New Labour doesn’t need to make its case afresh, or present its policies in a new light, with new packaging and sales pitch.
The public actually know your case and your policies perfectly and only too well, and utterly dislike them and your whole apparatus and outlook which fatally combine arrogance, incompetence, authoritarianism and a failure to grasp what goes on in ordinary, real people’s lives.
We’ve listened to your case ad nauseam and understand it, better than you do, and can see it for the tommy-rot it is. Have you listened? No, and no number of rigged ‘consultations’ will change this, as you are all too convinced of your rightness to realise what a catastrophic course you have plotted.
None of your party apparatchiks have done real work, but simply continued your student politics into a career, inflicting your shallow glibs idea experiments on the populace to disastrous effect, and all you can say is 2We are right, the experiment will work this time. It must, because we’re so clver”.
I’m sorry, “the project” has failed, and as it’s run its course it destroyed a once-noble party and completely betrayed all the masses who wanted something other than rehashed Thatcherism. You’ve screwed centre and centre-left politics in the UK for decades.
Go NOW, and thank your lucky stars that there aren’t (yet) baying mobs to string you up from lamp posts.
Quite.
There’s only one thing the nation has to say to Miliband – DO NOT WANT.
• Gordon Brown is going to resign. He wants to stand down as Labour leader before the next Labour conference in the autumn. But he intends to remain as prime minister until then (if he can).
• Nick Clegg has formally opened talks with Labour. Brown said that Clegg rang him recently (presumably after the Lib Dem meeting) to say he would like to have formal talks with a Labour team.
• Brown is proposing a “progressive” government, comprising Labour, the Lib Dems, and presumably the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP and the Alliance. Electoral reform would be a priority.
5.04pm: Brown says he will “facilitate” the discussions with the Lib Dems.
5.03pm: Brown says he has “no desire” to stay in his position longer than is needed. He would be willing to stay in office until the a new government is formed. But the election was a judgment on him. He is going to ask Labour to organise a leadership election, so that a new leader can be in place by the time of the conference. He will play no part in that contest.
5.02pm: He says he has had conversations with people like the head of the IMF about the eurozone crisis.
So we’ll have yet another unelected PM. Cheers then, Cleggy.
This morning’s X- ray shows it’s pleurisy, probably fungal and migrated from the yeast infection in my kidney. That’s the trouble with being immunosuppressed, any stray infective organism sees me and goes “come on guys -FREE FOOD!
Damn it, I haven’t been through all this just to fall to a fungus at the last hurdle. And I suppose better a pleural infection than a heart infection. I do try to be resilient, but still, the bright side is a little hard to find sometimes.
UPDATE Sunday a.m: Just call me Job. The shoulder pain got much worse during the night – it seems I may well have dry pleurisy and/or pericarditis.
Happy, happy, joy, joy.
But never mind, there’s always an upside to everything, and if I hadn’t had to look up pericarditis I’d’ve never come across the amusingly named coxsackie virus..
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Light posting from me today: the reason is that, when I was intensive care post kidney transplant, the medics tried numerous times to put in an arterial line (Considering the damage, they must’ve used a hammer and chisel.)
The practical upshot is that my right hand and arm are numb yet paradoxically incredibly painful at the same time and my shoulder hurts like a very, very hurty thing, and as I have a high tolerance for painkillers, it takes morphine to shut it up.
Yes, I know I should be grateful to still be here and I know too that yet again, they were trying to stop me from dying, but bloody hell, don’t they know I have blogposts to write?
Not that anyone reads them, but I have rage to offload. Especially about the election.
Anyhow, if you don’t read anything else today, read Ben Goldacre’s latest Bad Science piece, “The real political nerds”, on just how crappy the data management of election information by UK gov has been and how intelligent bystanders have taken up the slack. It’s packed with interesting links if you, like me, are a political nerd too.
“Want to look back at how people voted in your local council elections over the past 10 years?†asks Chris: “Tough. Want to compare turnout between different areas, and different periods? No can do. Want an easy way to see how close the election was last time, and how much your vote might make a difference? Forget it.â€
Like so many data problems, all that’s needed is a tiny tweak: all this information is known to someone, somewhere, and it’s all been typed in, several times over, in several places, local websites, newspapers, and so on.
So what the hell have we been paying for all this time?
I’m listening to Any Questions on Radio 4 (click for podcast) atm and someone’s just asked the panel who they think the next Labour leader will be. Several panel members suggested Alan Johnson….
I predict, right here and now, that Alan Johnson will be the next leader of the Labour party. I’m even willing to put a fiver on it, as I did on John Major, and I was right about him too…
….who would this likely new leader be? Harriet Harman? Dawn Primarolo? Cooper herself ? Those cooing martinets of incompetence offend women and men alike. Straw? Iraq – enough said. Hillary Benn? Not unless technocracy gets sexy all of a sudden. One of the Millibands? Surely they can’t’ve finished their work experience already….
You see what I mean. Who’s left that hasn’t pissed everyone off, but Alan Johnson?
Jackie Ashley, recently-turned former Brownite, in The Guardian this morning:
… If the party gets the kind of historic shredding the polls suggest then all bets are off.
…Stopping that kind of meltdown is focusing many minds and explains why Alan Johnson has become such a fashionable figure. He is genuine, genial, moderate and working class. He has spoken loyally without sounding greasy – and without closing the door on his own emergence as a unity candidate leader. Yesterday, defending Hazel Blears, he emphasised her roots as a working-class woman. “Blokes and blokettes, keeping calm and carrying on” would be the message.
What did I tell you? Sometimes even I’m shocked at my own prescience. Anyone willing to stake a fiver against Johnson now?
