Your decision. Your country. Your future.
Thursday 29 April 2010 at 07:28 As they warm up for the Leaders' Debate, perhaps we ought to try and rise above the hysteria of these last days of the General Election and analyse what is at stake.
Conservative New Labour
New Labour has sold itself, paradoxically, as the conservative option, the safe pair of hands that will see the country through the difficult period ahead.
The political reality is that it is selling itself to its historic coalition on a much more cynical platform - "when the reckoning comes, we will protect our own against the vengeful wolves of the opposition".
Labour's polling is pretty appalling but it would wrong to count them out yet as a political party. There will be blood-letting if and when they lose but if these are no longer national elections in which two parties slug it out across a united nation they may become so again.
The United Kingdom has, over the last decade, broken down into a number of overlapping networks competing for the spoils of government - small nations, regions, providers of various services to the people and their camp followers.
New Labour should be able to hold the line against its rivals unless its own coalition suddenly decides that the Liberal Democrats represent a stronger line of defence than a victorious Conservative Party. This belief may or may not emerge over the next week and that scares New Labour to its very core.
Conservative Defensiveness
The Conservatives, meanwhile, have had a mountain to climb precisely because they lost, under Thatcher, any credibility that they once had in key parts of the nation - most notably Scotland (displaced by the SNP) and in many urban centres (displaced by the Liberal Democrats).
For several years, the informed political Press has coldly and clinically assumed that the weight of the FPTP system would pile up votes for the Tories in the Southern half of Britain without ever giving them the landslide that brought Tony Blair to power in 1997.
Worse, the Tories' drive to the centre has alienated some of their own Right which has drifted (on European, taxation and immigration issues) to UKIP, the BNP and other small English nationalist groups.
The 'theory' was that the Conservatives could afford to alienate the 'nasty' elements in their own ranks because some of them (BNP) were also pulling votes out of New Labour. The price was worth paying to win over wobbly social democrats and keep the Liberal Democrats in their box.
The Conservative game had to be to get a sufficient if small majority to use the resources of the State to 'fix' the system (much as New Labour had done in its favour) and then call another election to consolidate a new long term coalition, presumably of former Blairites. So far so simple.
The Surge
The Liberal Democrat surge (which as we write was showing signs of abating and may either abate completely or gain a new lease of life tonight) has thrown a spanner into the tweedledum-tweedledee assumptions of British politics.
It is not just that the public is faced with the prospect of a 'hung' Parliament with disproportionate power for small parties - and aren't Plaid Cymru playing this up, no doubt fuelling English rage as they do so?
Nor that State servants and the usual suspects in the Atlantic system who pull many of the strings on both sides of the establishment divide are suddenly faced with an undreamt-of and disturbing scenario.
It is that the grand master plans of both 'parties of State' (an advisable term) are in disarray. Destroying Clegg tonight - or, better, having him destroy himself - is in the interests of both for entirely different reasons.
The point to understand is that the Liberal Democrat surge may be taking most votes from floaters and the New Labour libertarians but it is also taking the votes that the Tories needed to offset their losses to their Right.
The Tories have shifted on Europe, immigration and tax only to win this liberal vote. Now (disaster!), these disillusioned centrists are moving out of New Labour, yes, but not into the Tories. In a worst case scenario, Tory candidates might now be squeezed from both Right and Left.
Nightmare Scenarios
Meanwhile, the structure of British politics really does create a nightmare scenario where New Labour remains the largest party in seats but on the lowest national vote of all three.
Why is this dangerous? Because it threatens to blow wide open the tensions within British politics after the election in a way that could cause serious domestic civil disturbance. This needs explanation.
If New Labour is the largest party and can cobble together a Government, then it will be at the centre of the programme of cuts. It will have even more incentive to buy its way into office again in a second election through rewarding its base (public sector and regional) at the expense of the majority.
Liberal Democrat Clegg headed this option off at the pass by giving us all to understand that he would not support a Brown Administration under such circumstances but he was vague enough not to put out of court a different New Labour Administration that gave him at least a referendum on electoral reform.
The game is not power for fun but power to use the resources of the State to give your people what they want. The Liberal Democrats are only different from the other two parties in being driven not by economic struggle over resources but process - i.e. how communities can decide that struggle.
This is why the Labservative and State establishments fear them. An end to FPTP removes over night the buggins turn system where one side or another of the economic system takes hold of the State and adversarially grabs what it can while it can - until the electorate tires and shifts to the other side.
The State's Perspective
The State has a different perspective. Proportional representation ends 'leadership' which really means its ability to come to historic and periodic compromises with the two main parties' top dogs to manage the spoils in the 'national' interest (including the institutional interest of the Crown).
One of the instinctive drives behind the current revolt is an awareness that this system has broken down further under each political cycle. The State protects itself but only by cutting deals with its political masters that make the national interest into a sectional interest.
As time passes, the numbers excluded or bullied (the real meaning of the anger against regulation and 'political correctness') grows proportionate to the beneficiaries even if the numbers of direct beneficiaries (state employees under New Labour, for example) grows.
If PR becomes established, small fluid parties will periodically have a say in the spoils (much as Plaid Cymru is overtly saying that the English can get lost because it will steer more resources to Cardiff). 'Perestroika' will lead to 'glasnost' and so to the destruction of the old system.
On the down side for us all, it is likely to drive the country towards the sort of party kleptocracy that is standard fare in the Liberal Democrats' much beloved European Union. They see no problem with this but the Crown as a power machine does. The fate of Belgium beckons.
On the up side, this new system will stop State adventurism. The chances of a 'strong leader' lying their way to a major foreign war on the back of the Whip's Office become a great deal slimmer and mega-projects that suit business but disrupt communities become less certain.
What Is At Stake
The Liberal Democrat 'surge' was based on an intangible - a general rage in that part of the population that had not been included within the 'spoils' system of the two main parties and had been taken for granted. It ran its own life, oblivious of what insiders always knew - the system was rotten to the core.
This community really does want reform even if it might be naive about what liberal democratic European-style reform may actually mean in practice. What is clear to it is that the old politics cannot be trusted - pygmies run a system that was designed by giants for giants.
So, there is a great deal at stake in the Debate that has just started and in which we take little interest except in regard to its results. The performance is much less interesting than the take at the box office. The mass of the population might have an entertaining evening but the cash goes elsewhere.
If you think Clegg did well and the electorate agrees, then we are in for an exciting and stormy time. If he has any ability, he will trade his short burst of time in the FPTP sun for a referendum on electoral reform on terms that can exploit the momentum that he has created.
If he can win that referendum, the debates around it will create a very new European-style democracy that will mark the final end of the United Kingdom as an empire, a process that was started ideologically by the magician John Dee at the court of Queen Elizabeth.
If he fails to win that referendum (these are the stakes), the Liberal Democrats are probably dead in the water as a political force since it is only process that binds them together.
We cannot predict what would happen next but politics would take its course as new tweedledum-tweedledee coalitions of which one might well be a new progressive pro-European centre-left party.
And If Clegg Crashes Tonight?
But what if he crashes tonight? It is unlikely that he will lose all his 'surge' but much of the vote will slip back to the main parties, maybe a great deal of the marginal increase will go if each disillusioned faction of the other party fears the tweedledum-ism of the other.
Having detached themselves from tribal loyalty to New Labour, the tendency (we believe) is to cross the water into the Conservatives if Cameron does not come across as an old-style Tory on Europe, immigration or tax tonight - but the arrival of Blair as campaigner may cause others to wobble home.
In other words, the next seven days may be the most tense in British politics since the troubles of the 1970s. Much is at stake - not only for the nature of British democracy in the coming decades but for the national ability to hold the line if Spain goes down and the UK is next in line for a sovereign crash.
Do we have a recommendation on a vote? As private citizens, yes, but As It Happens is studiously non-partisan. We just try to point out the trajectories of decision-making.
The question comes down to this - do you have a stake in the existing system or do you not? If you do, you will, no doubt, vote for either Tweedledum or Tweedledee - though petty Celtic nationalists still have much to play for at home.
If you do not, you may be tempted to throw your vote away on protest or to drive the Liberal Democrat surge to a bloodless but very edgy revolution. Your decision. Your country. Your future.
Reader Comments (3)
Power to the People !
No not the cry of Wolfie Smith, the Che Guevara of Tooting, in Citizen Smith.
But the headline of an article by Andreas Whittam Smith in the Independent :
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/andreas-whittam-smith/power-to-the-people-the-leaders-of-britains-political-parties-underestimate-us-at-their-peril-1957202.html
" A recent poll suggested that 25 per cent of potential Lib Dem voters admitted they knew little or nothing about the party's plans for Britain. But they do know something else: the present political establishment is unworthy of their support."
In the Bromley & Chislehurst constituency we don't do revolution - but we do remember what Edmund Burke said:
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Time to put Policy to one side and vote on Character.
Comrades, Power to the People !
Yes, Ric, there is often a tipping point where the risks of 'revolution' are put aside in frustration or anger at existing conditions.
At this point (April 30th), it is hard to know just how many have been 'tipped over' and many others, especially of a conservative disposition, are likely to draw back from the edge yet sometimes a certain momentum takes over and we go into a period of great change.
What I get from reaction to last night's debate is that Clegg was unable to seize the moment and that everything remains in the air. None of us knows what will happen next but best betting remains a weak or minority Tory Government that has (like the Tory Party in the 1830s) to make major liberal reforms under conditions of continuing popular discontent.
As for Labour, it has a remarkable ability to survive crushing defeats (and one seems likely in terms of popular vote) but the Tory Party, under cover of reform, could crush its regional, public sector and trades union coalition through quick and aggressive legislative changes in surprisingly short order if it had the political will.
In the long run, thanks to the 'surge', Tory strategists might well prefer a weak Labour Party competing with a stronger Liberal Democrat Party (since the activists often really do 'hate' each other on the ground) to a new centre-left Party with a popular mandate based on radical reform.
Tipping Points - Speak for England !
On 2 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke in a Commons debate and said that he was not declaring war on Germany immediately for having invaded Poland.
This greatly angered Leo Amery, a fellow Conservative, but a long term opponent of appeasement, and was felt by many present to be out of touch with the temper of the British people.
As Labour Party leader Clement Attlee was absent, Arthur Greenwood stood up in his place and announced that he was speaking for Labour.
Amery called out to him across the floor, 'Speak for England, Arthur!'
Greenwood proceeded to denounce Chamberlain's remarks, to the applause of his colleagues
The following day Chamberlain declared war on Germany
Who will "Speak for England" in the remaining days of this Campaign ?
Power to the People !