Analysing The Cameron-Clegg Statement

The UK Coalition's Programme for Government is the first Manifesto in democratic British political history published after the voters have had their say. No one is too exercised by this. All understand that it is no mean feat to combine the programmes of two competing parties and then present it as a credible whole.

Yes, of course you can see the joins in places but Cameron and Clegg's two page Foreword to the Programme is an impressive political achievement. This is not the mere cobbling together of a bunch of kleptocrats in the standard European manner but the fusion of two ideologies into a greater whole.

How long it will stick is another matter but the contrast with New Labour's Stalinist imposition of its values on its internal Coalition in 1996 is stark.

We have elsewhere suggested that this very English 'soft' revolution should be seen not as a shift from the Right to the Left (though it has elements of this) but as a shift of power between two very different personality types - from the authoritarian to the libertarian.

This is expressed primarily in terms of radical anti-statism - against big government, centralisation and top-down control - but there is a libertarian wing on the Left, pushed aside by history, that would share this perspective while authoritarian Conservatives are clearly uncomfortable with it.

The code to the nature of the new Coalition lies in its rubric: free, fair and responsible:

• Free - the libertarian impulse that can combine economic libertarians of the Right, social libertarians of the centre and political libertarians of the left
• Fair - that very English sense of fair play that can be coded as both compassionate conservatism and the social liberal, perhaps social democrat, views of a Vince Cable
• Responsible - the implicit duties mantra of the still feudal Tory Right and of those renegades from a failed progressivism like Frank Field and Will Hutton

All these factions (if perhaps with far less enthusiasm on the Social Democrat Centre and Tory Right) can live with a radical model of decentralisation of power and increased individual freedom and responsibility (where you may put your emphasis to taste).

The cheeky use of 'progressive' to describe the Coalition was widely noted in the media and we look at this at the end of our posting but there are some dodgy elements in the Programme (we are looking at the big picture here and not the detail) that we cannot let pass.

The inability to unravel the country from its post-imperial destiny represents the inability of this coalition to detach itself both from the Atlantic project and from 'Ashdownism' i.e. using taxpayers' money to ride around the world quixotically righting wrongs. We have covered this weakness already.

The most interesting aspect of the Programme could easily be missed in the rhetoric. The Coalition has linked power to innovation in a way that we all once thought the prerogative of the intellectual Left, the sort of post-Fordist Marxist crew who gave thinking ballast to Blair before office.

Only, this time around, the politicians have got it more right than the intellectuals of yore but only because the evidence for radical shifts in power is there for all to see in the immensely rapid rise of the internet and of social networks and citizen choice on its back.

The quintessential New Labour use of new technology was the ID card system or the incompetently managed IT spine - major infrastructural projects based on state direction and designed for state purposes. The Coalition Programme is explicit on its stance:

" ... we are both committed to turning old thinking on its head and developing new approaches to government. For years, politicians could argue that because they held all the information, they needed more power. But today, technological innovation has - with astonishing speed - developed the opportunity to spread information and decentralise power in a way we have never seen before."

This is pure libertarian genius. Murdoch's boys will be grinding their teeth. Google kids will be grinning from ear to ear ... they continue:

" ... there has been the assumption that central government can only change people's behaviour through rules and regulations. Our Government will be a much smarter one, shunning the bureaucratic levers of the past and finding intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves."

Oh dear, probable collapse of stout party. Here we have a perfectly accurate analysis capped with a rather dodgy belief that the new nudge philosophy will achieve what post-socialist state direction could not. The State is dead, long live the State. Spin is dead, long live Spin.

The first page of the Foreward is dynamic but this shift from hard State to soft State then opens the door to two lengthy paragraphs on the background to the Coalition that can only be seen as defensive, even apologetic in tone, a direct appeal to the confused unwashed of the two coalescing parties.

Defensive and claiming to be smarter than their predecessors? I think the public needs to be just a little wary that the text yet represents the reality of consistent, stable Government with a clear understanding of what it is dealing with in terms of national sustainability and the deficit.

The last two sentences of all are an attempt to send so many signals that it is hard for the casual reader to keep up. This Government is apparently radical (the antithesis of the conservative) yet reforming (which is what Peelite Conservatives take pride in).

The two Leaders ditch for ever the notorious Thatcher claim that there is no such thing as society, made in one of her more sub-Stirnerite moments, but then detach the fact of society firmly from its association with the State. The shared continuity from the Thatcher Right is certainly a distaste for socialism.

References to change and progress are back-handed compliments to the dominant rhetoric of the Labour Movement from Wilson to Blair, from Benn to Mandelson. This document is an attempt at an ideological coup d'etat, a libertarian-populist seizure of power after thirty years of authoritarian rule.

To be fair, the balance of unaligned public opinion, certainly in England, is probably with the coup leaders. The latter have captured the State, apparently that it might, as Marx predicted, wither away.

The greatest irony of the soft English revolution of May 2010 is that it may have ushered in the most left-wing Government (as pre-twentieth century observers might see things) in Britain's history. In reality, the State will soon recapture these ideologues - but do enjoy the revolution while it lasts!

Your decision. Your country. Your future.

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.

Squabbles Over Financial Regulation In London

The squabbles over financial regulation continue with four competing players: Treasury (Government), Financial Services Authority; Bank of England; and the financial services industry itself, backed by its own lobby organizations and the City of London.

The ‘aggressor’ in this case is the Bank of England which wants tougher financial regulation whereas the Treasury and the City worry that a regulatory turn of mind, in an excess of risk avoidance, might kill the goose that lays the tax and profits egg.

The Bank of England’s concern is probably more noble. It genuinely fears that, having escaped from economic meltdown by the skin of our teeth, we have no second chances and that a future crisis could break the back of the British economy.

A second crisis (though never said) may place the future of traditional British liberal capitalism in doubt. The FSA, meanwhile, is probably least noble in its concerns – protecting its turf from attempts by the Bank of England to take over many of its key functions and so displace the primary City regulator.

The FSA has, however, seen the writing on the wall, especially as the Bank has some US precedent behind it. An incoming Tory Government might very well adopt a similar tough line, if only because something decisive may need to be done by the incoming Chancellor for political reasons.

The FSA model is not to hand over powers to the Bank of England but for improved collaboration with the Bank through a financial stability committee. It is seeking co-dominion over City regulation. Much of this is bureaucratic self-protection and need not detain us for long.

More importantly, all this is another sign of the weakness of the New Labour Government in allowing these non-Governmental bodies to fight a turf war in public without settling the matter through edict.

The financial services sector is remaining cautiously and relatively silent except on the attempted coup against the City of London through a new EU Directive where it fears that a weak Government really will take its eye off the ball and allow a French knife to slice the goose's throat.

Bank and FSA are united in seeing bad behavior returning to the banking sector. They are now expressing, often indirectly, concerns at the effects of political weakness on policymaking as the immediate threat recedes.

Centrist governments and finance capital are already drifting back towards their old strategies of collusion.

The technocrats charged with the economy are getting worried that laziness and fear will mean no reform – and that no reform may mean that we will have to go through the whole crisis again at some later stage with much worse effects on the economy and perhaps the polity.

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