UK politics

Now what?

Published on May 8, 2010

So what’s going to happen now there’s a hung parliament in the UK? First, we need to remember the incessant background noise send out through the media from the City:

Of course, the guys in braces who pop up on Sky every five minutes aren’t lowering themselves to support any given party. What they all want is strong government, strong enough to take the necessary measures on the deficit, and they want it soon. Soon, like Monday morning? ventures the tremulous interviewer, as though in the presence of an oracle. Well, perhaps Tuesday afternoon at the latest, says man in braces, chewing his lip, but soon, or the markets will be displeased, as though this displeasure came from De Lawd Above and has nothing to do with him and his confreres.

Once again, this is much like the same pressure seen after the 2000 US presidental elections to get a quick decision, rather than the right decision, but then it was the Republican party itself, now it’s the “financial markets” directly, worrying that if the wrong government gets in they won’t deliver the deep spending cuts they want. Spending cuts that are needed to free up the money that’s needed for the UK government to pay back the billions it had to borrow to save the very same “financial markets” from their own fuckups two years ago. They want their pound of flesh and they need a “strong government”, preferably a dependable Tory one, to deliver it. It would mean that the scenes Johann Hari witnessed in Hammersmith and Fulham will be repeated all over the UK:

She “panicked” when a bill came through saying she had to pay £12.50 for every hour of care she needed. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to do this?’ The more care you need, the higher your bill, so the most disabled people got the highest charges. Everyone was distraught. I had friends who had to choose between having the heating on in winter and paying for their care … I know a 90-year-old woman with macular degeneration who can’t see, and she had to stop her services. There are lots of people who have been left to rot, with nobody checking any more that they’re OK, and I’m sure some of them have ended up in hospital or have died.” One of the council’s senior social services managers seems to have confirmed this, warning in a leaked memo that the charges could place the vulnerable “at risk”.

Debbie co-founded an organisation to fight back – the Hammersmith and Fulham Coalition Against Community Care Cuts – and, after appealing, she finally had her charges cancelled. “But there are a lot of people who can’t appeal,” she says. “You’re talking about very vulnerable people – the very old, the mentally ill, the blind. A lot don’t know how, or would be ruled to have to pay anyway, because the rules are so arbitrary. Now they’re being taken to debt-collection agencies for non-payment. I know an 82-year-old woman who’s never been in debt in her life who is being taken to a debt-collection agency for care she needs just to keep going… They want volunteers to do it instead. But you don’t want to have to ask your friends or a volunteer to pull up your knickers for you.”

That’s why it’s good Gordon Brown has not resigned and should resist the pressure to resign; it makes it that much harder to install a Tory government by coup de main. The weak link is of course Nick Clegg: is he tough enough to stand up to pressure to form a government with the Tories rather than with Labour, tough enough not to be fobbed off with vague promises of electorial reform. If we look at the popular vote more than half the voters voted for left of center parties, so selling a Tory-Liberal coalition as “the will of the voters” is a bit of a cheek, but that seems to be the recieved wisdom the media are parroting. Don’t do it Nick!

Bye-bye Charles! Bye-bye Jackie! Hello Caroline!

Published on May 7, 20101 Comment

Unfortunately Hazel Blears kept her seat, but nice to see both Charles “safety elephant” Clarke and Jackie Smith finally were told to bugger off by their constituencies. Also good to see the Greens win their first seat.

The overall impression seems to be that, despite all the triumphalism, the television debates did not have the impact on the election itself they were predicted to have based on the polls. It became an almost normal two horse race again, with the Lib Dems doing nowhere near as well as “Clegg Mania” was supposed to make them. Currently they’re at 47 seats according to Wikipedia, with 565 of 650 seats declared. Last time they won 62, if the end result is the same, slightly better or even worse then it’s clear that Clegg has failed to deliver the breakthrough the debates seemed to hand him.

And the reason might just be that enough people took a second look at the likely outcome, saw the Tories looming and decided better to vote for the devil they knew. Labour might be bastards, but the Tories seem to be even worse bastards and a Lib Dem victory at the expense of Labour might just have delivered a Liberal-Tory government. Meanwhile the Tory voters the Lib-Dems were chasing refused to be caught it seems, rather having the real ones in power than a surrogate. A wasted opportunity, though the Lib-Dems might still end up holding the balance of power in what now looks like a well and truly hung parliament. They should’ve gone for the left of Labour vote, not chase lefty Tories.

Good to see Caroline Lucas become the first Green MP. Results from Poplar and Limehouse, where George Galloway is standing, aren’t in yet, but it looks like Labour has won that, according to the BBC.

What’s really worrying are the reports of polls closing while there were still voters waiting to vote; that’s a sign of bad organisation.

First let them do no harm

Published on May 6, 2010

More evidence for the fact that getting a hung parliament is the best that could happen in the UK elections. Niall Fergueson is urging the Tories on to crash the economy:

‘There is a very real danger that [things] could now spiral, Greek style, out of all control if foreign confidence in sterling slumps and long-term interest rates rise. Mr Cameron needs to do two things right away. He must instruct George Osborne to wield the axe ruthlessly with the aim of returning to a balanced budget over a credible eight- to ten-year timeframe.

That means not only reversing Labour’s disastrous expansion of public sector spending, but also encouraging business growth with incentives to innovate, invest and work. At the same time, he needs to initiate talks with the IMF in case external support proves to be necessary. In both cases, it is much better to act sooner than later. The mess we are in is the result of 13 squandered years in which an unprincipled government frittered away the achievements of the Thatcher era. We are back not just in 1979, but in 1976, the last time the IMF had to bail Britain out as a consequence of Labour’s economic mismanagement.’

Drastically cutting government spending at a time of economic crisis worked so well in getting the world out of the Depression in the 1930ties, but then this isn’t about economics, but ideology, as Jamie notes. Talking about “the achievements of the Thatcher era”, in which much of the industrial strength of Britain was destroyed so that yuppies could roam free, is a dead giveaway. Hence the need to not let the Tories win this elections is just as great as to let Labour lose: vote tactically, vote hung parliament. First, let them do no harm.

(Crossposted from Prog Gold.)

Nature: the latest excuse to deny Chagos Islanders their home

Published on March 31, 2010

Seven years ago already I first read about what had happened to the Chagos Islanders, kicked out of their home so the US could have their Diego Garcia base there. The inhabitants were a security risk you see. The Ilois, as they call themselves, were therefore dumped in Mauritius, with many of them eventually settling in the UK as well. Over the years and then decades they have always fought for their right to return home, against succesive British governments, both Labour and Tory and in recent years they actually started winning their legal battles. Unfortunately, getting their claims honoured in courts and getting the UK government to do the same is not the same thing… Again, both Labour and Tory governments have done everything to stop or delay their return.

And the latest trick the current government is trying now might be the dirtiest: turning the Islands into a nature reserve:

This week the British government, backed by nine of the world’s largest environment and science bodies, including the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Royal Society, the RSPB and Greenpeace, is expected to signal that the 210,000 sq km area around the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean will become the world’s largest marine reserve. If it does, all fishing, collection of corals and hunting for turtles and other wildlife will be banned across an area twice the size of the British isles.

The Ilois of course protested:

Today, Chagossian supporters accused the government of duplicity. “The British government’s plan for a marine protected area is a grotesquely transparent ruse designed to perpetuate the banning of the people of Mauritius and Chagos from part of their own country,” said Ram Seegobin, of the Mauritian party Lalit de Klas, in a letter to Greenpeace seen by the Guardian. “The conservation groups have fallen into a trap. They are being used by the government to prevent us returning,” said Evenor.

They were backed by Clive Stafford Smith, director of the human rights group Reprieve, who has challenged the UK government on the use of Diego Garcia by the US to render suspected terrorists. “The truth is that no Chagossian has anything like equal rights with even the warty sea slug. There is no sense that the British government will let them go back. The government is not even contemplating equal rights for Chagossians and sea slugs.”

The environmental groups supporting the proposal of course deny they’re part of a greenwash, but it is typical of the divide on the left that they could allow themselves to be used this way. They’ve only looked at their own interests and didn’t consider the islanders until they were forced to.

How to deal with a hung parliament

Published on March 14, 2010

With the coincidence of the upcoming Dutch and UK elections taking place only weeks apart (that is, if the assumption that Brown will call for elections in late May) and the increasing worries about what will happen if neither the Tories nor Labour will be able to form a majority government, now it’s time to give a quick lesson in how to deal with hung parliaments. It is symptomatic of the inward looking world of Westminster politics that a process that’s at the heart of so many European democracies, the forming of coalition governments after election is here described as something to fear, a hung parliament, something outside common political experience. But really, there’s nothing to fear, as long as British politicians for once are able to learn from their neighbours’ experiences.

Here in the Netherlands, elections will always result in a divided parliament, with any party at best able to capture a third of the available seats and the resulting governments needing at least two and often three parties to have a majority. Which means that there are well tried processes for establishing such a government.

It all starts with our dear old queen recieving the various party leaders to learn of their preferences and wishes. Once that’s done she appoints a socalled informateur, whose role is to research the possiblities and impossibilities of potential coalitions. The most likely of the coalitions will be explored further, with the parties negotiating under the formateur’s leadership to come to a preliminary agreement. If everything goes well, the informateur then hands over to a formateur, who forms the actual government and who’ll usually become the prime minister afterwards. The parties divided the government posts, deciding who gets what ministry, with junior ministers (staat secretarissen as trade ins. Should the Christian Democrats get the education ministry, the Social Democrats will probably have a junior minister for schools or something.

The other important fuction of the informateur and formateur is to come to a government agreement (regeerakkoord) between the coalition partners. This is a declaration of principles in which the future government lays out its budgetary priorities, its expectations towards new laws, the problems and challenges it wants to concentrate on and everything else the partners want to have hammered down before they start. This agreement is not legally binding and can often be made obselete by new developments, but it shows the direction in which the government wants to travel and gives it a foundation. It’s when one or more of the parties starts to disregard these agreements that coalition governments get into crisises, as happened with our last government, which fell because the CDA wanted to renegotiate about extending the Dutch presence in Afghanistan and the PvdA would not.

The whole process can be incredibly cumbersome, especially at times when the parties are radicalised and less willing to compromise, as in the mid-seventies. On the whole though it works rather well, producing governments as stable and workable as anything coming out of a first past the post, district system like the UK’s. It just takes a little bit of preparation.