Gordon Brown: Der Untergang

Fully Democratic voting systems deliver 36% of the power for 36% of the votes. This is boring for career politicans, but it’s also predictable. Most European politicians have to exercise skills to work together in the national interest more than once every 36 years plus remembrance day. As the only way to more power is to win more votes, they have to work harder with the public, and are generally more respected for it.

As it is in the UK, ninety years of cruising around in the belief that 36% of the vote entitles our political masters to 100% of the power has scarce prepared them for an hour such as this. Although they are being uncharacteristically soppy-stern and polite, they don’t seem to know how to talk with each other, rather than at each other. One optimistic hope is that they will learn, and this will be good for us all. The problem has been acknowledged since the 1860’s, and the kind of solution we need an open secret since the Royal Commission of 1908-10. They can hardly say they weren‘t warned.

And as the great Poker Game in the Sky grinds on around Westminster, first man down is Gordon Brown. How will historians see him?

Two interesting counterfactuals could be run:

• What if John Smith had lived another ten years?
  
  
• What if Brown had cut and run in 2007 to establish his legitimacy?

To Brown’s credit, probably, is his performance as a very British iron chancellor. His staunchest opponents will have to grudgingly admit he held his nose and did what probably had to be done about the credit crunch, and competently. His tax credits scheme was a way of redistributing income without raising income tax. He generated shedloads of cash to throw at education and health after thirty years of cuts. Yes, there’s a comparatively high peacetime public debt, but everyone’s got one of those coming out of recession, whilst economic historians will point out that as a proportion of GDP it’s actually lower than for most of the tweniteth century.

Brown was a Roundhead at Tony Blair’s Cavalier party. When Blair and Brown met at the Loch Fyne Fish Restaurant, or wherever, they carved up the next 13 years of the governance of Brtain between them. The process was probably much swifter and easier than what has been going on since last Thursday, and considerably more lasting.

However, as Blair swigged the champagne, Brown gagged on his Irn Bru. Therein lies tragedy.

Once Brown had gotten over the joy of playing with the real levers of power at Number 11, he probably hated the party, but hung on in there for the joy that lay ahead. How sad that it was so joyless when he got it. Nobody knows at what point Blair and/or Brown bricked up the corridor from Number 11 to Number 10, but his estrangement from his ertswhile dinner companion was disastrous. Brown, as a man of genuine rectitude, probably found it hard to believe what some of his less puritanical colleagues were up to.

But Brown was a genuine conviction politician. I remember his appearance at the Lambeth Conference. He obviously knew and owned the Millennium Development Goals without cue cards. He actually belived in that stuff.

Colleagues from all over the world, who believe the English to be clever but devious, were impressed by his obvious sincerity and passion. Not quite English. Scots, in fact.

Too passionate, not emotionally intelligent enough? How about what they are already calling Bigot-Gate? Other politicians suggest they would never call a voter anything as rude as “that woman.” When the great bin of emails is emptied out on the day of doom, and the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, I believe it will show other politicians have, in fact, called voters, and their colleagues, considerably ruder things and got away with it. But not with the microphone on.

And after all those complaints about Tony Blair’s addiction to spin, it’s ironic and sad, in some ways, that Brown’s “Lion in Winter” style was such a rat sandwich to Fleet Street, if not all the British public.

Blair danced for us and we tried to dance, with all the finesse Btits bring to that activity. Brown wept for us and we would not wail. He’s almost certainly done the decent thing politically. I think history will be kinder to him than the Sun. Let’s see who’s next.

Out of the Thick of It...

comes Learning? As various politicians catch up on much-needed beauty sleep and decide what to do this weekend, there’s a distinct feeling in the air that the whole game is up for the old politics, but nobody quite knows how, or what to do about it. I’ll be off this stuff tomorrow but as a trained historian, I wonder what the three main parties could learn from their various disappointments of the past 76 hours.

• Labour:
  The whole New Labour Thing has rather run out of steam, holed below the waterline by the moral legacy of the Iraq War and an uncomfortable feeling that some labour people had grown disturbingly fat out of government. Secular New Labour 1997 messianism is a gone coon. Gordon Brown is a man of genuine passion and commitment, but to make himself electable he would need to turn back the clock to the weeks after he assumed power, and hold that snap autumn election he never did...
  
  
• Conservative:
  The party is still in serious transition, but in a direction that might make for majority government one day, with a popular leader. The overwhelming likelihood of DC becoming PM brings the opportunity to demonsrate skill and responsibility, and a collaborative leadership style that fits contemporary mores and aspirations. In Boris Johnson’s wonderful phrase the Meat in the Sausage, morally, should be Conservative. In terms of Tory tradition, they need to develop a way of doing Disraeli for Today, not Stanley Baldwin dressing-up games or Thatcherism, which is as repellent as ever — the Tory gone coon.
  
  
• Liberal Democrat:
  A terminally frustrating night for LD’s! Their popular vote very modestly increased, but they suffered badly from third party squeeze in many places in the South. The Voting pattern is becoming far more volatile, quirky and granular than ever and this is beginning to hurt rather than promote the Liberal Democrats on their way up the greasy pole. Think of last Thursday as a big stretch up, followed by a greasy slip down to where, formally, they were when they started. Ouch! The silver lining in their cloud is that a large majority voted for parties which were willing to question our rather deadbeat and now clearly ineffective voting system. Time to dust down the Royal Commission on Proportional Representation of 1918, and actually do something about its conclusions. Ninety years is a long time in politics! Lib-Lab pacts, however, have a long but toxic history...
  

Many will be relieved by the ailing performance of right wing minority parties. The experience of BNP in local government has plainly shrunken their appeal.

The biggest challenge for anyone who cares has to be those people who couldn’t or wouldn’t vote. It must be time to take serious steps to draw younger (= under 30) voters into the frame, perhaps by developing a system for internet or mobile phone voting. Almost anything would be more secure than present postal voting, but this would not be anything like as easy as it may sound. However there must be no repetition of the banana republic scenes outside, and even inside voting stations in Sheffield and London. Our present practice is too narrow and remote for the needs of this generation...

Mind Games for Politicians

Various bleary eyed politicians are now nodding off on TV. Time for them to sleep, perchance to dream.

Fact is, Everyone has slightly underperformed. There has been a substantial swing to the Conservatives, especially in England, but with a very erratic granularity. Turnout was very slightly up, by 4%, but from one of the lowest ever. Time to consider internet voting?

So the options to ponder over the cornflakes in eight hours’ time are rather fascinating.

I think I bet on the power of inertia to produce a minority administration, elected on a slogan of “time for change!”— not quite, morally, what Michael Gove calls a “strong, stable, Conservative-led government.” Perhaps this would be followed by another election before five years are up. However there is no necessity for this. Constitutionally, Gordon Brown could do what Ted Heath did in 1974, and try to form an alliance with Liberal Democrats.

How Democratic is all this? A minority government could not, morally, be presented as the will of the people. Indeed UK minority governments have not been particularly strong. It’s actually the will of 38% of 62% = 24% of the voters. More people didn’t vote at all than voted for anyone. And, actually, far more people voted for second and third parties than for the winning party. This leaves two options for the future, and it will be interesting to see what our politicians can get their heads round, or not:

• Some people may say “38% of the votes — you deserve 38% of the power. If you want more power, get more votes.” There’s nothing undemocratic about such a notion; indeed it would be the European norm.
  
  
• But politicians, esoecially those from the largest party, do have the option of saying “38% of the votes, so, in our elective dictatorship, we get 100% of the power, and everyone else gets another pop at it in 5 years time.” Eyes down, lads, for a full house.
  

I think the political classes probably don’t have the imagination and collaborative capacity to do the former, especially all bleary eyed in the morning. You could read the tealeaves to say people wanted Change, includng Gordon Brown out, but not quite David Cameron in as El Supremo. The decision lies in the heads, hands and imaginations of our politicos — something that of course, we are always assured can’t happen in a first past the post system. It just has. Spoonbending times!

Save Politicians from Dole Queue

General Election Day. Politicians have been trying to convince us this is a grave day of decision for most of the populace, who, by and large, seem to feel it isn’t, really. It’s a matter of articulating distinctive selling points against the backdrop of a large public narrative, fuelled by expenses scandals and media cynicism, that says “they’re all the same.”

This is especially hard to do with a voting system which, as the Electoral Reform Society points out it, produces 600,000 players and an audience of 25,000,000. 600,000 people happen to live in marginal seats, so they get a real election, complete with politicians who take them serously, whilst the other 25 million of us, merely watch the floats go by. 385 seats are a done deal before the show begins. The only political animal 95% of us can aspire to be is a sheep:

You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to see that, however exciting this may all be for the lucky 600,000, the other 25 million shuffle in their seats.

All politicans agree people ought to get out and vote, and profess dismay at the way turnout has collapsed over the past twenty years and among the young. If they mean what they say, an alien inquirer might wonder, why not do the obvious and bring the disenfranchised 25 million onto the stage? It’s not rocket science.

Or perhaps it is

1. Changing the voting system means turkeys voting for Christmas. Why would they? The present system suits the political nomenklatura, because it creates a landscape they can manage without much reference to ordinary people. So we have a burgeoning professional political class that squashes its personal discretion and conviction in order to keep on message. It’s the price of power. Anyway, it would be a fearful bore and rather expensive to engage with 44 million. It’s as much as they can do to talk to 600,000.
   
   
2. Furthermore the present system means politicans sometimes lose, but it’s worth sticking with the game because only by doing so can you win it. And when your turn comes, Bingo! you can live for five years in bright sunlit uplands where you don’t have to listen to or take other politicians seriously, let alone the public.
   
   
3. This leads to rather unresponsive government. To give just one example someone mentioned to me this week, against the clear opposition of 60% of the population you can start an illegal war that kills half a million innocent civilians. Legitimacy is a vague, slippery concept. It won’t lose you an election.

Meanwhile, one thing that has well and truly got our daughter Steph’s goat is the Sun’s take on the election — especially one story yesterday that showed 16 Page Three models pleading “Save these girls from Dole Queue.” This did not sound like the kind of thing a nice little bishop should be scanning, but in the interests of political esearch, and finding out what the best selling newspaper in Britain has to say for itself, I pressed on.

I am a doctor.

SIXTEEN Page 3 Girls in all their glory represent the very image of freedom in this country. But if Labour or the Lib Dems win the election, this could be the last time they are allowed to pose together.

The “True Blue 16 Beauties” had, unfortunately, done their usual thing and forgotten to get dressed yesterday morning. They excoriate Labour and Liberal democrat politicians for questioning Mr Murdoch’s soft porn habit, and warn that if he managed to tame it

at a stroke the very liberties that put the Great into Great Britain will be torn asunder. The radical ideas of the 17th-century philosopher John Locke helped shape our freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and, later, America's Constitution

Scary stuff. One of the girls, Poppy, explains:

The basis of Lockean thought is his theory of the Contract of Government, under which all political power is a trust for the benefit of the people. His thinking underpins our ideas of national identity and society

Poppy’s words call into serious question Locke’s observation (in the Essay concerning human understanding) “that in bare naked perception the mind is, for the most part, only passive.” If Poppy does end up in the dole queue, it won’t be long before a University Philosphy Department snaps her up. Lecturers get the kind of regular salaries that will enable her to buy herself some nice clothes, including, perhaps, some underwear. So what’s the Sun trying to say to us? “You don’t have to be a Dirty Old Man to vote Tory, but it helps?” Now that is off message...

UK General Election: bringing it on

History is on the march. Tonight sees the first UK television debate in a general election. As a Christian leader I want to encourage people to seek the common good, to get out, engage and vote. In addition to the CTBI Faith in Politics briefing, I recommend the Ekklesia Ethics election initiative for jaded electoral palates, as well as its resources briefing. Among declarations promoting faith in the public square the Faithworks 2010 declaration seems to me the most positive and realistic.

So far however, I regret to say, the story I’ve been picking up has been fairly massive public indifference to the whole business, certainly compared to other elections over the past forty years. Public participation rates have been sinking since the sixties. A recent poll in the Times reported that more voters want a hung parliament than government by any of the three established parties. You can drive along whole swathes of road without seeing any evidence that there’s anything going on at all.

It may be that everything will ignite tonight in Manchester — midget wrestling has a curiosity value, if nothing else. However there are three massive facts about UK general elections which may go some way towards accounting for the absence of public interest:

1. Such is the UK parliamentary voting system that the vast majority of results may be assumed before the thing begins. Whilst politicians piddle about with constituional reforms that are, frankly, irrelevant, like the composition of the House of Lords, they mask the fact that the system for electing the House of Commons renders the majority of votes cast irrelevant. The problem began with the abolition of the old Victorian multi-member constituencies, and has been acknowledged since the 1930’s, but it’s never been in the interest of the political nomenklatura to do anything about it. Sure it’s not fair, but they’d rather the other lot won for a season, as long as they got their shot at what Lord Hailsham called “elective dictatorship” another day. Not very surprisingly, the public become jaded about a process in which 25 million of their votes seemingly make no difference to the result. Polls consistently exhibit an eerily similar majority in favour of electoral reform to the proportion who opposed the Iraq war — around 60%. Frankly, the outlook is not encouraging. There’s a website which can tell you how powerful your vote is here. On it I discover that the average UK voter has five times more chance of their vote making any difference than I do.This fact in itself is not exactly going to bring people out onto the streets, is it?
   
   
2. People think they see a professional political class getting fat on ther earnings, and this breeds cynicism. Actually I don’t think this is entirely fair — most MP’s point out they could have earned as much and more money doing something else, but the expenses scandal revealed an astronomic degree of public anger and frustration. This is about more than just garden gnome allowance. It was instructive to hear Mrs Blair asked why she needed six houses. Her answer was that the Blairs, in fact, only have five houses. They had bought six, but one was far too small, and had had to be bashed into the one next door. Talk about missing the point.
   
   
3. Looking at the manifestos, the contest is not about where the ship is going, as much as how the ship is running. The manifestos are basically management pitches, and, frankly, my dear, most people don’t ignite about such stuff, especially now UK governments have developed a whole web of agencies, quangos and outsourcing to avoid taking any real responsibility for anything. They all talk the same language about public services. They all refuse to be honest about their values or lack of them. They all get bogged down in policy detail and there is some evidence that people have no idea whose policy is what. A recent Times Poll discovered that voters could only identify 50% of key pledges with the correct party. I learnt yesterday, for example, that if I vote Conservatve they will “use pupil level annual school census data to include service children for a pupil premium in schools ensuring they attract extra funding.” It’s not quite the Gettysburg address.

PS The 1960’s midget wrestlers names are all genuine, and any similarity to any Politician is merely coincidental.