Archive for the ‘UK Politics’ Category

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Gordon Brown, too little, too late

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Quite an interesting “what-if” story in the Guardian today – what if Gordon Brown had decided to fall on his sword at the start of the election campaign in early April, instead of after he lost the election and the removalist vans were queued up outside Number 10?

As Patrick Wintour reports, it mightn’t have been all that far away from becoming reality:

Gordon Brown drafted a speech on the eve of the general election campaign setting out plans to stand down within a year of the poll, but was persuaded by senior ministers not to go ahead.

At a meeting on the eve of the election, his proposal to announce his plan to stand down was supported by David Muir, his director of political strategy and chief polling adviser. But Ed Balls, Lord Mandelson and Douglas Alexander argued against the idea. One adviser, present at the meeting where Brown’s plan was discussed, told the Guardian: “Gordon was under no illusions about his popularity, or the degree to which he was a barrier to Labour’s re-election.”

I think Balls, Mandelson and Alexander were right – but what would have happened if the Prime Minister had done the sensible thing and decided to make way for David Miliband in April 2009? It is difficult to believe that we would now have a Tory/Lib Dem Coalition Government in power, that is for certain. With a Labour pledge to reform Britain’s electoral system and clean up politics on the table and Miliband at the helm, with a year to build his stature, things could have been so much different.

Now he has a long road ahead.

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Red and blue

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

Over at The Times they have a rather excellent interactive map based on the election results in the UK:


UK Election Map at The Times



I just think its so uncanny how much maps like this can tell you about the political landscape. Most of the tightly-packed seats circling London are Labour seats, apart from most of the ones in the more “posh” areas. Labour also predictably does well around in many of the other big working-class towns and regions – Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Durham, and much of Wales and Scotland.

Meanwhile, the Tories tend to dominate in the slightly larger rural seats and support for the Liberal Democrats tends to follow no immediately discernable pattern.

Of course, it would be remiss of me given my field of work not to  congratulate Danish software developers shiftcontrol on a nice job.

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The choice is simple: work, or vote

Friday, May 7th, 2010

One of the myriad of interesting stories coming out of the UK election has been a failure of the British Electoral Commission to adequately provide polling day services in some constituencies:

There were angry scenes around the country tonight after hundreds of voters were unable to vote when polling stations closed at 10pm despite queueing for hours, casting a shadow over the results of the election.

Up to 200 would-be voters in Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg’s constituency of Sheffield Hallam were left disenfranchised and a number made their way to Clegg’s house to protest.

The Electoral Commission has put out a statement in response, admitting a certain amount of culpability for not ensuring that there were enough polling stations in staff in the busiest areas.

But why hold general elections on Thursdays, for goodness sake? Apparently in the UK this is a rather silly tradition that has been upheld since 1931.

Why not hold elections on Saturdays (as in Australia), when the majority of folks aren’t working, and are generally a bit freer to pop into vote at their leisure? I wonder how many people saw the queues lining the street at their local polling booth and decided not to bother, particularly seeing that voting in the UK is not compulsory and there is no penalty for not making any effort to vote?

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Will hatred for Labour or hatred for the Tories triumph?

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Modern representative democracy really does tend to have a strong “lesser of two evils” theme to it in countries where a small number of major parties dominate. One wonders to what extent the average person casts their vote with the tactical aim of keeping a particular party out of office, as opposed to voting in a strategic sense for a party that they have some belief in. With the UK election now looming, Gary Younge has what might prove to be a telling piece in the Guardian, describing why he’s not that fond of Labour but could never vote for the Tories:

I hate them for a reason. For lots of reasons, actually. For the miners, apartheid, Bobby Sands, Greenham Common, selling council houses, Section 28, lining the pockets of the rich and hammering the poor – to name but a few. I hate them because they hate people I care about. As a young man Cameron looked out on the social carnage of pit closures and mass unemployment, looked at Margaret Thatcher’s government and thought, these are my people. When all the debating is done, that is really all I need to know.

I get the impression that this election may turn out to be rather closer than one would think because of the relative prevalence of this sort of thinking, the unevenness of support for the Liberal Democrats, and the inability of the Conservatives to swing voters their way in all the seats that matter. We’ll know either way in a couple of days.

Of course, with Tony Abbott proving to be a fairly divisive figure locally, there are clear parallels with the Australian situation, and our forthcoming federal election. How many voters, a little disgruntled with Rudd Labor but very unimpressed by some of Abbott’s more extreme and controversial views, will cast their votes for the least objectionable party?

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Mating sloths, bovver boys and toffs

Friday, April 16th, 2010

It’s a curious fact that the United Kingdom has, only in the last twenty-four hours, fielded its first ever televised election debate. Both locally and in the United States, debates between the key party leaders have been conducted during election campaigns for many years now. Historically, British Prime Ministers seem to have been rather reluctant to cede any of their billing as media “top dog” to their political opponents. The difference this time around is the devastating nature of the challenge facing Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who most people have written off in favour of David Cameron over the last few years. Of course, the other reason (antipodean chortle), is that perhaps the Brits are sometimes just a wee bit degenerate when it comes to political innovation. We have, after all, been directly electing our Senate for over a century now… whereas the House of Lords… anyway, let’s just not mention our shared head of state.

The debate outcome has been both interesting and unexpected – indeed it may serve to re-energise the election campaign for a lot of Britons. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, was also invited to participate in the debate, and most commentators seem to believe he stole the show. Clegg’s performance has reignited debate around the possibility of a hung parliament, should the Liberal Democrats perform well enough to capture a decisive number of seats in the May 6 election. Polling results following on from the debate and indeed the subsequent planned debates should be very interesting indeed. One presumes that Conservative and Labour Party boffins (particularly the former) will be just a little bit nervous about what could happen if Clegg manages to ride a wave of debate-driven popularity into the final days of the election campaign.

Even if it achieves nothing else, at least this whole TV debate lark has proven quite the novelty for UK political columnists, with a few notable exceptions. I think Jackie Ashley from the Guardian is being just a tad harsh, but Australian readers might find something a little familiar in this observation:

A tame, silent audience was confronted by three leaders, who rarely made eye contact and never let fly. No real humour, no surprises, nothing spontaneous at all. No doubt some interesting things were said towards the end. Nobody was still awake to hear them.

If this was a natural history programme, it was less carnivores tearing across the plain than hanging around for far too long, waiting for sloths to mate. The television negotiators must have been grinding their teeth with disappointment.

A disturbing use of imagery, yes, but somehow, so very apt.

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Manifesto chic

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

With the UK election campaign now in full swing, Gordon Brown’s Labour is doing its darnedest to remain competitive, despite the troubled legacy of the Blair years. Both Labour and the Conservatives have just released their election manifestos; and as Jonathan Glancey from the Guardian points out, a picture is worth a thousand words.


manifestos.jpg


While Labour’s clearly shooting for Soviet-era revolutionary imagery, the David Cameron’s Tories are clearly very, very serious about the situation. In a sense both parties are trying to “cover off” (ahem) their perceived weaknesses. Labour is fighting the dreary, grey image they have cultivated for themselves with Gordon Brown with an explosion of colour here, and the Conservatives are doing their best to appear businesslike, competent and ready to govern. Looking at the covers, which one do you think is likely to be more interesting?

And the content? It would seem that with the exception of the democratisation of the House of Lords (a long overdue reform – why hasn’t Labour tackled this already?), the government probably hasn’t offered up quite enough to stay in the game.

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Cutting him loose

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

There’s quite a lot ado about parliamentary expenses at the moment, a little bit locally, but to paraphrase the Prime Minister, there’s a whole shitstorm going on in the United Kingdom right now. Even as Kevin Rudd clings gingerly to repeat-offender Joel Fitzgibbon like one does with a somewhat disliked cousin, it is beginning to look as though the ever-escalating UK expenses scandal might be the straw that finally breaks the back of the Brown Labour Government.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is reportedly set to resign from Cabinet, and Communities Secretary Hazel Blears resigned in a shock announcement today. Now backbenchers are threatening to push a petition letter throughout the partyroom calling for Gordon Brown to abdicate, and the Guardian has taken the extraordinary step of calling for the Prime Minister’s resignation in an editorial:

All must agree that the die is cast and a hard judgment made. Otherwise progressive politics will be dragged down at a general election in May 2010 that could lead to a much bigger defeat than Labour suffered in 1979. That might bring a chance for other parties to take it forward, as the Liberal Democrats are trying to do in this election. But they are not placed to enter government. Labour has a year left before an election; its current leader would waste it. It is time to cut him loose.

It’s a little unfair that Gordon Brown should be made to pay a price for the current expenses drama, a drama in which every sitting member of parliament has a stake. The Guardian editorial is nevertheless spot on. Gordon Brown has been given a good run, but he and his government remain on an express train to electoral irrelevance at the polls next year unless something drastically, and changes very soon indeed.

Roll on David Miliband as a fresh alternative to Gordon Brown, and a man of more substance than David Cameron.

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Nobody has got the bazooka

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

As the media breathlessly awaits the anti-climactic results of the G20 conference in London, you really have to pity the poor sods that we have charged with saving the global economy. I don’t think there is a living soul out there who truly believes the cream of the world’s leaders have what it takes to put capitalism back on track, but doubtless we all still hope. It’s a pretty thankless task. It seems that just about every journalist and economic commentator doing the rounds has some advice in hand for the likes of Barack Obama and Gordon Brown and their colleagues, as a pocket full of chaos descends on the square mile. Eminating from about 20 metres from where I emerged from the tube every weekday morning for about a year during 2007/08, the media is beaming in images of blood, death, and stupidity on all sides; the smashing of windows, attacks on police, and the flippant teasing of protesters by office workers.

But wait! There’s more. The Keating watchers among you would no doubt have noted that our beloved former Prime Minister intervention’s into public debate have been rather more rabid and senseless than usual in recent times. The former Member for Blaxland, has emerged once more with some fairly radical advice for President Obama:

“The problem with the Americans is this: that they have a great body of large, systemic banks which are barely solvent or maybe insolvent.

“They have to decide which are insolvent and shut them and for those that are solvent, take them over and recapitalise them.”

…

“The Japanese took eight years before they put any recapitalised money into banks, foolishly,” he said.”The Americans at least are doing it in year one but nobody has got the bazooka and no one wants to fire all the rockets.”

One suddenly gets a mental image of Messr Keating, bazooka balanced precariously on his shoulder, firing a barrage of rockets into the heart of the dreaded GFC. One wonders what Mr. Keating would have thought about all this latter day nationalisation talk of his twenty years ago, when he was flying the flag of centre-right economic policy in government?

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Eulogy for a failed president

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

So it would appear that Boris Johnson has so much time on his hands as Mayor of London that he has had time to write a disingenuous love letter to one of the most disastrous leaders of the free world in living memory. His column in the SMH today, which seems to have been quite widely published, is disingenuous because Johnson tries awfully hard to straddle both sides of the political divide. He wants kudos from those who decry Bush’s legacy, somewhat mercilessly mocking, as he does, Bush’s tenuous grip on the English language. He also seeks kudos from those on the conservative side of the fence, by sneakily hinting that compared to Blair/Brown Labour and of course Australia’s John Howard, Bush wasn’t really that bad at all.

Johnson’s strongest arguments in support of Bush’s time as President of the United States seek to highlight the good humour he brought to the Oval Office:

So farewell then, Dubya. It is with tears in our eyes that we watch you leave the stage after eight tumultuous years, though in my case they are tears of appreciative laughter.

…

In his gift for surreal improvisation he resembles a linguistic dadaist, armed with nuclear weapons and a worrying sense that God is on his side.

Well if that last line doesn’t whiff of someone dressing up a turd in a tuxedo, I don’t know what does. It gets better, of course. I doubt there is any way for a writer to complete the sentence below without completely destroying their own intellectual credibility:

And, therefore, without wishing to defend George W. Bush…

Needless to say Johnson tries – and fails.

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Mister fast money schmicko no longer quite so schmicko

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

In a political sense, it is increasingly looking like the global financial crisis has been just what the doctor ordered for British Labour and in particular Prime Minister Gordon Brown. As The Guardian reports today, a Mori poll has Labour trailing the Tories by only three points now, an amazing seventeen point improvement on what polls were suggesting a few months back before the worst of the crisis hit. For someone like myself, who lived through an extended period whereby it seemed that David Cameron and the Tories were interminably ahead of the Prime Minister by ten points or more, it’s really all quite astonishing.

So why the shift? There is surely a multitude of reasons, but I am going to offer some observations about the comparative public images of Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Brown comes across in the media as a dour, boring, wonkish man. I dare say that a majority of Britons descend into a microsleep the very moment that he appears in front of them on the television, the very second that his voice starts droning across the airwaves in earshot. While the going was good economically, twelve months or so ago, it is probably fair to say that Brown was not really in tune with the entrepreneurial energy of the times. The British people wanted boldness; they wanted action. They were not adverse to a little risk taking by their government. This is of course where the poll success of David Cameron comes in; a young business type actually willing to embrace new age concerns like global warming. He represented a fresh change and a clean break from the past. Sure, he was probably a little wet behind the ears compared to his rival, but he promised to deliver the energy that the Prime Minister seemed to lack.

Now, the tables have turned. We have entered troubling economic times, when suddenly ordinary people are interested in what dour, boring wonks have to say. They are concerned for their future. They are worried about their employment prospects. They are no longer in the mood to take financial risks, or to take a punt on an unknown quantity like David Cameron. They want surety and certainty, and someone who has a lot of experience behind them and the intellectualism required to fortify the nation against the chaos of the global financial situation.

It would be an interesting exercise to plot the poll ratings of Gordon Brown against the FTSE over the last twelve months. And it will be interesting to see if Gordon Brown manages to surge to a lead in the polls over the next six months, on the back of his superior credentials with respect to the financial crisis that seems to currently have observers the world over in a bit of a tizz.

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