Dave Kean

Today’s big news is that Gordon Brown is stepping down from leading Labour in the hope it will make it easier for Labour and the Lib Dems continue talking. For Clegg personally it does a couple of things, first he is not seen as propping up Brown’s premiership. Secondly perhaps the biggest stumbling block between Labour and Lib Dems was the uncomfortable relationship between Brown and Clegg

But perhaps most importantly it’s put pressure on the Conservatives to come up with a deal that involves a promise on proportional or alternative representation. So far the conservatives have made vague noises that they will set up committees to look at AR, but nothing Cameron can be nailed down on so far.

After the very public opening of negotiations with Labour I suspect Cameron’s position will change rather quickly. This may be his only chance to become PM, after so many years in opposition I suspect the party will not give him a lot of time to get this sorted.

A vast majority of Lib Dems feel that a promise on AR is essential to any coalition deal no matter who the bedfellows are. A LibDemVoice survey claims close to 80% of the membership feel that a promise on PR is essential to any alliance or coalition.

Now that negotiations with Labour are publically going on and Brown is stepping aside, the Conservatives have to give a little more or potentially loose power to a Labour-Lib Dem-Nationalist-Alliance-Green coalition. This rather sketchy grouping will provide a wafer thin majority in the House of Commons (assuming Sinn Fein don’t take their five seats as usual).

Not exactly a super stable platform, but it’s enough go to the Queen with, and keep Labour in Number 10 for now and give the Lib Dems what they want (a say, a referendum on PR and a couple of cabinet seats) and time have the Labour leadership election.

A significant number of commentators seem to think a coalition government will only be lasting maybe a year or 18 months, probably not enough time for the Lib Dems to get their PR referendum completed. I don’t think the parties have the energy or finances to run another election campaign before then, while this is not American politics with high profile fundraisers, the parties still needs millions to run the campaigns.

An interesting side note, the three parties are rumoured to have spent around 30 million pounds during the campaign. That gets spent in a single state here for the senate races and is maybe 10-15% of what a single party spends for the presidential election.

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.

Gordon Brown admitted he made some mistakes when he listened to banking lobbyists and loosened regulations on their clients. Like the banking regulators in many other countries they put the banks interest before that of their customers and the public in general.

After becoming PM Brown has said that regulations should have been tighter around the world, however his statements during an interview in ITV’s Tonight program contradict his previous position that as chancellor he did everything he could and the banking crisis was largely the fault of American regulators.

Of course David Cameron jumped straight onto this with: “Gordon Brown told us two things: he said this all came from America and he said his judgment was right in every regard. He is now saying that those two things are not true, that there were big mistakes made here in Britain in the regulatory system that he designed.”

Brown followed his admission that he screwed up by listening to lobbyists with “So I’ve learnt from that. So you don’t listen to the industry when they say, ‘This is good for us’. You’ve got to talk about the whole public interest.”

In another interesting admission during the interview he said he’s not very good at the whole PR side of politics. And this is news to whom exactly?

Interestingly after this interview aired the election polls tightened a little. There is now 4% (down from 5% yesterday) between the two major parties in some of the polls. Polls once again show that a minority or hung parliament is a distinct possibility.

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.

The major parties are all publishing their manifestoes over the next few days. Each party is making statements about where they will not raise taxes to fill the black hole in national spending. For example Labour has said no change to income tax, but said nothing about VAT (sales tax) and the pledge to increase National Insurance (social security contributions if you are American) was already known.

The open promise to keep “business taxes as low as possible” is a pointless waste of good paper and does nothing to help Labours’ dwindling credibility on the economy.

Once again David Cameroon and the conservatives are not talking about the economy, the economy, but how the National Health Service (NHS) will be safe in their hands. It’s an interesting strategy, because if there is one thing that Labour has looked after OK over the last 13 years it’s the NHS. The previous conservative government under Thatcher and Major reduced funding and did the NHS a huge disservice. While there may be many problems with the NHS, too many managers seems to be one of the favorites, it provides a top quality service and is staffed by people who really care about the patient.

Clearly money public money is tight, clearly all the major political parties, if they’re going to be credible and trusted by the electorate in the run-up to the election, have got to make promises which we know the costs for and are clear know where the money is going to come from.

Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg (who I’m rather warming too, if my vote were still in Guildford they might get it) did have a couple of good lines over the weekend. He pointed to the rioting in Greece as a warning of what could happen if public spending were cut back too much.

Earlier this year Greece’s socialist government introduced some rather deep cuts to public spending to bring its deficit under control. Many thousands took to the streets and there was a general strike across the country in protest to the cuts.

While the UK has a nice history of rioting and social unrest over government taxation in the past (see “Pole Tax Riots” on Wikipedia), it seems difficult to see something similar happening. Primarily because the social stress brought about by the growing divide between the disenfranchised working class and those the new-money middle class no longer exists in quite the same stark fashion that it did under Thatcher.

With out that stress and the divisive policies along side the strict anti-strike laws in the UK it seems difficult to imagine to same level of coordinated protests over the loss of civil servant jobs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the upcoming election. In 1997 Tony Blair promised the electorate real change and asked us to give Labour the mandate to go and make those changes. He got his mandate through a landslide election.

May 7th could dawn with the same optimism we felt when New Labour swept aside the Tory old guard and promised us a new tomorrow. As we watch the opening salvoes in the election fight I don’t see the same excitement, the same promise of a bright future.

This election is shaping up to follow the traditional pattern; the parties and their spin doctors spend the next four weeks talking about how the other guy is wrong, that it does not all add up and that there are “black holes” in their budget figures. This election could rapidly devolve into mud slinging, dirty lies and twisted half truths.

There is an alternative to the “business as usual” election race for the bottom. Someone could see this as an opportunity to truly engage the electorate and set out their vision for Britain in 2015.

Voters are not stupid; we see that the present government is in trouble and seems to be running out of ideas. Just for once I’d like to hear from the politicians that they understand what we want, and repeat it back to the electorate just so we can hear it.

After the lies over Iraq, the sexing up of dossiers, the expenses scandal and the usual run of illegitimate children and affairs we deserve to be respected. We have lost trust in our elected representatives. This is why the mood and desire for change is different from that in 1997.

Today it’s legal for an MP to simultaneously work as a paid lobbyist and still take their seat in the House of Commons. It’s not just the rules that need to change. To the outsider looking in there is a culture of entitlement, and that needs to be put right.

After the expenses scandal none of the parties dare claim the ethical high ground in the way Tony Blair and Labour could in 1997. They offered the country a real change from the Conservative culture of sleaze.

If politicians can treat us with respect, then maybe we could start believe in British politicians once more. All we ask is that our representatives let us know they hear our problems and remember who they represent when they take their seat in Westminster

Our demands are not much. We want fiscal responsibility from our leaders; we want them to lead by example, we want personal freedom to pursue opportunity and a safety net for those who need it. We want to be responsible and just ask the chance to be so.

There are too many professional politicians in parliament, too many MPs of questionable quality who have never worked a day in the real world in their lives. They seek power not to make a better Britain, but to build a career in politics.

The sad truth is that MP’s are not beholden to the people that elected them, but to the party whips. They are too indebted to the party to show real independence. Parliament should be controlled by it’s members, it should be more transparent and better understood by the voters.