Dave Kean

The initial exit polls have been published just as the polls closed. They show the Torys on somehting well over 300, Labour on 255 and the Lib Dems getting somewhere in the mid-60′s

If the Tories were much above 300 seats in the House of Commons they could pretty much get business done with the help of the Ulster Unionists and perhaps a few other deals.

If they end up with a figure closer to 300 the Lib Dems and Labour might fell they are in a position to say “Hold on, you’ve no mandate”

Starting at 22:00 British Summer Time the BBC is streaming their election coverage online. Additional live coverage on BBC Radio 4.

BBC One – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/election2010/liveevent/

Radio 4 – http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/

Any general election day is something of a celebration of democracy: this one feels a little different, for only the second time in the last thirty years we may see a change of government. As I wrote a few weeks ago, this feel different from 1997, the mood is a lot darker and there is not the feeling of better days to come that was had when Tony Blair and New Labour swept the Conservatives from power so comprehensively.

The electorate once again has the chance to remind those who end up in Westminster just who their ultimate boss is. It’s not the whips or the party grandees, it’s the electorate they have been courting so determinedly for the last few weeks.

I think we all understand the country is in trouble. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have actually seen the books and if it’s as bad as we’ve been led to believe it may be the country is faced with the biggest peace time deficit ever.

Whenever the next Prime Minister is will have to face the debt that’s been run up and make a large number of tough decisions. As a country we have tried to mitigate the recession by spending money the country did not have. This money has to be paid back.

In Greece we can see what happens when a government and people live so far beyond their means. There has been a nationwide social breakdown followed by strikes, arson, rioting and today deaths. While I don’ believe that Britain could head down the same path as Greece, but if the government does not reduce it’s spending to match it’s income then massive social problems await.

Blair and Labour were elected in ’97 with a mandate to fix public services and that took money. This increase in public spending was affordable as long as the economy kept growing at a pace that supported it.

When it stopped growing a couple of years ago swift, and potentially unpopular action was required. To be frank, I think Brown bottled it, with worried too much about being reelected rather than doing the right thing for the country

This election is unlike any other. In 1979 the country was feeling the pain, we were in the aftermath of the winter of discontent and inflation was rampant. It was obvious to all that the economy needed to be sorted and it turns out Thatcher was willing to risk her popularity and was the person to do it.

War and a Labour party that was all but unelectable aided her subsequent election wins, but the wins in the 80’ were based upon an economy made possible by the difficult choices and occasionally painful policies her government followed when they first came to power.

I also believe the same policies divided the country in a way never seem before. There were those who made fortunes off her policies, and a huge subclass that were left behind. Her government squandered billions of North Sea oil money and billions more raised by selling publicly owned companies.

The problems with the economy today are less immediate to most people, the power is there and rubbish does not lay uncollected in the street. The tough decisions were put off by Gordon Brown, but they are still there to be made.

The Australian government did the right thing, they made unpopular decisions and decided to live with the results. It hurt, and is still hurting, but the country will come out of the recession in better shape because of it. Whoever is living in Number 10 next week will have to make hard, painful and unpopular decisions. I hope they do the right thing for the country, not the right things for the polls.

One thing I don’t understand is that if Labour has identified 6 Billion in efficiency savings, why have they waited until now to implement them. They have seen the state of borrowing and if they truly waited until the election to roll out these savings it’s truly criminal to waste billions in taxpayers money.

Labour has had something of a deathbed conversion to a principal of Proportional Representation. An idea that the Lib Dems have held dear for many elections.

This election has become more than who leads, but also something of a referendum on PR and its merits. The Lib Dems have waged a very intense and successful campaign over the last month; a significant amount of credit for this must go to Nick Clegg.

I think the Liberal Democrats and their growth as a true contender over the last month reflect an overwhelming national mood for real change. Business as usual for has left a country full of disenfranchised voters who are tired of the old politics and the professional politicians who see an election as a career more rather than the opportunity to better the world for the people they represent.

Proportional representation will not fix that, but it will give the UK something important: a parliament that is a true reflection of one of the most vibrant and diverse countries on earth. I think this election has shown that the two-party system is unrepresentative of the country and perhaps it’s time is done.

David Cameron promises a different version of Conservative Government than offered in the past. I think he deserves credit for moving to the political center ground and going some distance to making the Tory’s electable, a feat so many other leaders have failed to do. He has forced the party to become accept diversity; reject the Thatcherism that the party grandees embrace so surely. These are the people who have kept the Conservatives on the opposition benches for the last 134 years.

However his message that it’s going to be different has not been conveyed very well. There are contradictions and very little detail, the manifesto and promises sit there with little information to convey what it really means. He is message on people taking more responsibility for their lives and choices is an interesting argument against “big government”, but high among his policies is getting rid of the Human Rights Act. The one thing the people have to protect themselves.

In another contradiction the Cameron talks of “united and equal” taxation, while advocating inheritance tax cuts for the wealthy. At the same time the party plans to continue the recovery with both austerity and spending pledges at the same time.

In a two party world the other choice would be embracing five more years of Labour government under Gordon Brown. There is no question that Labour have achieved much in the last three terms, the saving of the NHS, investment in education and a minimum wage are huge items of agenda the party delivered.

Hand in hand with revitalizing these services, we were promised reform. The inefficiency still exists and has grown in the last few years with all sorts of Quangos and legions of managers in the NHS. If Brown says they can find 6 Billion in savings this year, why have they not done it already? Politicians the world over forget whose money it is they are spending.

In this campaign Brown has failed to inspire me with a vision for the future or provided an argument for giving Labour another chance.

For many the second biggest issue on the table is the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was maybe the most important foreign policy call of the past sixty years. Labour lied, the Tories backed them and both were catastrophically wrong.

The Liberal Democrats have become a significant factor in this election and when this is all said and done there is every chance they become that party that makes, or breaks a minority government through a formal pact.

The party has traditional appealed to the working middle classes. Labours record on defeating poverty and being a spokesman for the working class remains unmatched, but for me they, and in particular Gordon Brown has not done enough. The Lib Dems are philosophically closer to Labour than Cameron and the Tories, but could they work with a Labour party led by Brown?

After decades of being on the outside of the two-party political system and not being heard, Nick Clegg and the Lib Dem center message has been heard very clearly in a way I’ve not seem in my lifetime. Today both Labour and the Conservatives must be second guessing the decision to invite Nick Clegg to the debates.

“What I’m interested in is the big poll on 6 May, when people really have to choose five more years of Gordon Brown – the uncertainty, the bickering, the haggling of a hung parliament – or a decisive clean break with the Conservatives.”  David Cameroon

Is it really as simple as that? Perhaps it is, but a hung parliament could potentially force debate and compromise. With a huge Labour majority these are things that have been missing for the last 13 years.

After the Labour landslide victories in the ’97 (179 seat majority) and ’01 (167 seat majority) general elections there was no requirement for Labour to worry what the opposition had to say. The last election in 2005 was not quite as overwhelming a victory, giving Labour a still substantial 66 seat majority.

For the last 13 years Labour had a very comfortable working majority, with the loyalty to the party rather than the electorate it’s meant unpopular legislation can still be railroaded through in comfort with the minimum of debate. There have been once or twice that the party whips have had to do a little work, but the MP’s understand where their loyalty lay.

The opposition is relegated to a rather noisy, but ultimately inconsequential role.

There is no check and balance to the government and they are allowed to operate with relative impunity.

Looking back to 2001 and 2002, having a 167 seat majority when some very controversial laws and motions were being revised (extended detention without charge, ID cards and the war in Iraq) meant that the wants and desires of the electorate were not necessarily considered.

Looking at it in a rather simplistic way I do think that a functional pack made up of a couple of the current parties could be a good thing for government and would certainly add a check to the system that has been missing since the tine Conservative majority of the mid 90’s. A Labour-Lib Dem pact (anti-Conservative more than anything else) seems the obvious alignment. The Lib Dems are philosophically a lot closer to Labour than the Cameron and the Conservatives. To give some additional credit to Nick Clegg, he’s done a rather good job in differentiating the party from the big two during the last year and taking a lot of the ground in the political center Under the leadership of Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy the party seemed a little further to the left than today.

It’s been an interesting week in the UK, Lib Dem Nick Clegg clearly won the first debate.

For me this was because he used straightforward language and stayed away from the forced sloganeering that permeates politics. He did not have anything really new to say, but was consistent and it was not exactly the venue for spontaneous announcements. However Gordon Brown may have given Nick Clegg his new slogan: “I agree with Nick”. The PM used this seven times during the first debate.

A poll published today put the Lib Dems in the lead with 33 per cent, one point ahead of the Conservatives and with Labour trailing on 26 per cent. This polling suggests that a hung Parliament is increasingly likely and that the role of the Lib Dems would be to make a pact with one of the major parties to form government.

Philosophically Labour seems like the natural partners and it’s very possible that Labour is actively working towards that end.

Clegg seems to have found some additional confidence and has made some strong statements. He’s plenty of time to get this wrong, but so far I’m impressed.

“The general election campaign is starting to come to life for the simple reason that a growing number of people are starting – and it is only a start – to believe, starting to hope, that we can do something different this time,”

“That the old tired choices that they have been given by the old parties of the past no longer need to govern the way in which we run politics in the future. I think that is tremendously exciting.”

The system

I was asked about the difference between the British and US systems, they are both “first-past-the-post” with a couple of important differences. In the UK, it’s one winner – one seat. The party with the most seats in the House of Commons forms government.

In America the winner of each state usually wins all of that state’s electoral votes, but those votes are distributed in proportion to the population (yes a couple of states divide the electoral votes, but lets ignore that). There is proportionality built into the system that’s missing from the House of Commons.

However, the biggest difference between the British and American election systems is that in the U.S., people vote for a leader. In the U.K. people vote for parties. The party then appoints their leader and the electorate has no say in that. If the party has the largest number of seats then their leader becomes the Prime Minister.

This is why Tony Blair was replaced by Gordon Brown with no election taking place. Blair stood down as party leader and was replaced by Brown. The electorate was not consulted (nor was it required) as it was an internal party appointment.

Following on from the two big boys the Lib Dems published their manifesto yesterday. Somewhat ironically, the party that’s been the loudest critic of the big banks and their role in the economic downturn chose the heart of the City of London to have their press launch.

The overall message seems to be “trust us”; there is no marketing wet dream slogan to stand behind. The party described this as a “serious document for serious times”. The Lib Dems have been preaching the “change for people” and “building a fairer Britain for a number of years, and quite successfully at times too.

First examination and the party seem to have put a lot of effort into differentiating themselves from the Conservatives and Labour. Perhaps more work on showing how they can actually afford their promises would be nice.

The biggest “bribe” is no income tax paid on the first 10K/year. Add in raising pensions in line with earnings or inflation (why this is not done already just disturbs me) and the usual more police/smaller classes promises and it’s a large hole in tax revenue and additional costs that has to be filled from somewhere.

There is some tax raising proposals in the mix. First was to tax homes above 2 million pounds, followed a levy on bank earnings to help pay for the support they’ve had over the last year. Some tax credits for higher earners were also to be scrapped under the Lib Dem plans.

There are notes about public spending cuts and some nice tables at the back. Restrictions on public sector raises along with stopping the ID card program, not replacing the Trident and a few other things are part of the opposed cuts. Not sure if this adds up to the 15-17 billion a year required to pay for the promises.

Interestingly there were no pledges to keep income tax or VAT at current levels. In fact the manifesto makes it clear that tax raises may be required to reduce borrowings, but that it’s a last resort and the big focus will be on cutting spending. One big point of differentiation was talking directly about the deficit and that the borrowed money has to be paid back somehow.

The public sector savings proposed are substantial and first glance makes it tough to confirm that the numbers add up, this does create something of a credibility issue, but if the party set out to make sure people knew they were different from Labour and the Conservatives they did a nice job.

The BBC has Paxmans full interview with Nick Clegg here. Paxman comes off as being his usual direct self, while Clegg took a little time to get in track, but did OK

David Cameron stood in front of the crumbling, but iconic Batersea power station and  framed the launch of the conservative manifesto as giving power back to the people (Tooting Popular Front and Wolfie anyone?) by asking the voters to join them in forming the next government.

Once I got past the jargon (Labours was refreshingly buzz-word free) I felt much like I did after perusing the Labour manifesto yesterday. Once again there is a lot of effort talking about how tomorrow will be different from the last few years, but with no compelling vision for what the country will look like in 2015 if we were to believe.

The sharing government part comes from a proposed “Big Society”: a combination of decentralization and social responsibility. The idea as I saw it was that the electorate will be able to take over public services, choose the run their own school or hospital as a trust. No detail is given as to how that could happen,

“The Labour way assumes that only Big Government can solve our problems, but the alternative to Big Government is not no government: its good government, effective government”

Labour and the Lib Dems have both claimed VAT will have to rise to pay for Tory tax cuts and spending pledges. The NI rise, affecting anyone earning over £20,000, will hit small businesses “especially hard”, costing, according to the document, up to 57,000 jobs in small and medium-sized enterprises.

The Conservatives and Labour traded barbs over taxes (this is good, they get that the economy is the central issue). Labour proposes a 1% increase in National Insurance (social security for my American friends) for those earning over 20K/year. The Conservatives are not totally against the rise, but have pledged to raise the threshold for the higher contribution to 35K/year.

Cameron said nothing about keeping taxes where they are; both income tax and VAT (sales tax) were not mentioned. The Conservatives have said that the 6 billion/year hole left by pushing out the National Insurance raise will be met by efficiency savings. In an organization the size of the civil service that should not be a difficult figure to find, but the question comes why has it no been done before now.

This is one of my biggest problems. Labour offered some public sector workers guaranteed minimum wages. Call it what it is, a bribe. The conservatives pledged a public sector pay freeze for all but a million of the lowest earners (how many public employees are there in the country?)

Politicians the world over forget whose money they are blowing on legions of managers for the NHS (more managers than hospital beds…), quangos overseeing public services and civil servants micro-managing public services.

“Together we can even make politics and politicians work better. And if we can do that, we can do anything. Yes, together we can do anything. So my invitation today is this: join us, to form a new kind of government for Britain.”

Labour published their manifesto today, Cameroon and the Conservatives tomorrow and the third of the major parties, the Lib-Dems release theirs on Wednesday.

Brown said Labour has a plan for the future and their first priority is to secure the recovery. Any party that says continuing the recovery is anything other than job #1 will be dead in the water, so no shocks there..

Labours manifesto harboured no was no real surprises (as these things generally don’t). There were some minor give aways and one fairly major one that looks a lot like a bribe. Labour is offering a “living wage” to all those employed by the government, this is to lead by example and show the government can be a good employer. Under Labour the public sector has grown by close to 600,000 over the last 13 years.

To appeal to the squeezed middle class there was some minor tax credits, but that’s about it.

No increase in income tax rates in the next Parliament. No commitment to increase VAT (sales tax), but they did promise not to extend VAT to food, children’s clothes, books, newspapers and public transport fares.

Brown added a shot straight at one of the perceived weakness of the conservatives, taxation.  “We have not raised VAT since 1997, the only party that has raised VAT in the last 25 years is the Conservative Party.”

The economy thankfully gets lots of play and there is a commitment to halving the deficit over the next four years and some additional funds (sounds like venture capitol seed money) to “green” businesses. For a significant number of voters it’s going to come down to who is most trusted, or perhaps is least distrusted, to run the economy.

A lot of it seems like “business as usual with a lot of talk about the positives and minimizing the negative. There was little to no detail about where the spending cuts are going to be, the government have acknowledged they are coming and they will be deep, but have said they will not affect “front line” services.

Economists compare the depth of the cuts needed to those put in place by the Thatcher government in the early 80’s. Those cut a lot of public services, including the NHS, rather severely.

My first flick through the manifesto indicates it’s about hope. Along with showing that Labour should be trusted for another four years and don’t let the conservatives wreck the recovery.