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Britannia sinks beneath the waves
So it appears that Nick, courting two lovers at once as if he were a man soliciting bids from two removal van firms, has finally made a deal with Dave. I feel slightly sick. Not as sick as those who have to live under the result, of course.
No, wait: it appears they haven't finished the deal yet. In which case, why did Dave actually accept appointment as Prime Minister, and not just, as in the old formulation, undertake to attempt to form a government? This seems precipitate.
The trick for the Lib Dems will be to avoid seeming responsible for the Tory slashing budget cuts to come. Vince Cable, LD's treasury spokesman, is the best they have, and it'd be nice to preserve his reputation.
The best thing for me to do is reprint what I wrote in the comment section of a British LJ on Sunday, with annotations added:
---
I'm not so sure that PR1 really is there for the taking. The backbench Tories are vehemently against it. (As why should they not be? They'd lose many of their seats, and the Tories have more safe seats than all other parties put together, so, like Smaug losing a golden cup,2 the prospect has them all the more incensed.) And Cameron can't make them go along with it, any more than Heath could have in '74.3 In fact, it appears that most Tories are furious at their leader, for failing to achieve a majority win in an election they saw as a sure bet.
I'm actually amused at how panicked many Lib Dems are at the possibility of a coalition with the Conservatives. I have no love for the Conservatives either, but if you support what is, in practice, a third party, and you don't want to just remain in opposition permanently, and you don't want to devolve into an appendage to Labour (as the Australian National Party is to their Liberals on the federal level), then working with the Conservatives is something that's going to happen occasionally. You can't practice inclusive politics and tabernacle politics4 at the same time.
Of course the LDs are rooked without PR, and they're not going to get it from the Tories. One would hope that Nick Clegg's political instincts are at least as good as Jeremy Thorpe's, for goodness sake.5 In fact, I wonder what negotiations could possibly still be going on. In my view, the C-LD meeting should last about five minutes, and consist of Nick saying, "So tell me, Dave, can you deliver PR? And by 'PR' I don't mean AV.6 And by 'deliver' I don't mean a commission or a committee or a conference to discuss it. We've done that.7 I mean a bill with an enforced three-line whip."8 And when Dave replies, "You know I can't do that," Nick stands up, says, "Nice talking to you," and leaves, to make a call at Number Ten.9
1. Proportional representation, the sine qua non without which the Liberal Democrats should refuse to form a coalition with anybody.
2. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, chapter 12.
3. The last time the Conservatives tried (and failed) to make a deal with the Liberals.
4. Tabernacle politics: The belief that all virtue lies within, and only within, the tabernacle, i.e. your own party, and all without is chaos and darkness. Most famously practiced by Aneurin Bevan, the 1940s-50s Labour politician who said that the Tories were "lower than vermin." They don't make invective like that any more.
5. Thorpe was the Liberal leader who had the sense, barely, to avoid being wooed too cheaply by Edward Heath in 1974. As Thorpe's career collapsed a couple of years later in the wake of some of the worst misjudgment exercised by a British political figure between the Profumo Affair and the recent MPs expenses row, it's remarkable that he showed more wisdom on this occasion.
6. Alternative Vote (in British) or Instant Runoff (in American), the system used for counting Hugo ballots, and one with inconsistent prospects for actually delivering proportional representation in multiple seats.
7. Tony Blair, on assuming office, promptly commissioned a thorough report on PR possibilities. It was the best-written government commission report ever issued (because it was written by its chairman, Roy Jenkins, biographer of Gladstone and Churchill), and you can read it here. It made a definitive recommendation for a particular system, and it was supposed to be followed by a referendum on implementation. But there was no referendum.
8. Three-line whip: a voting instruction underlined three times. The ultimate appeal by party leaders to their MPs' loyalty. Quite seriously enforceable.
9. The Prime Minister's office. When Gordon Brown was still in it.
No, wait: it appears they haven't finished the deal yet. In which case, why did Dave actually accept appointment as Prime Minister, and not just, as in the old formulation, undertake to attempt to form a government? This seems precipitate.
The trick for the Lib Dems will be to avoid seeming responsible for the Tory slashing budget cuts to come. Vince Cable, LD's treasury spokesman, is the best they have, and it'd be nice to preserve his reputation.
The best thing for me to do is reprint what I wrote in the comment section of a British LJ on Sunday, with annotations added:
---
I'm not so sure that PR1 really is there for the taking. The backbench Tories are vehemently against it. (As why should they not be? They'd lose many of their seats, and the Tories have more safe seats than all other parties put together, so, like Smaug losing a golden cup,2 the prospect has them all the more incensed.) And Cameron can't make them go along with it, any more than Heath could have in '74.3 In fact, it appears that most Tories are furious at their leader, for failing to achieve a majority win in an election they saw as a sure bet.
I'm actually amused at how panicked many Lib Dems are at the possibility of a coalition with the Conservatives. I have no love for the Conservatives either, but if you support what is, in practice, a third party, and you don't want to just remain in opposition permanently, and you don't want to devolve into an appendage to Labour (as the Australian National Party is to their Liberals on the federal level), then working with the Conservatives is something that's going to happen occasionally. You can't practice inclusive politics and tabernacle politics4 at the same time.
Of course the LDs are rooked without PR, and they're not going to get it from the Tories. One would hope that Nick Clegg's political instincts are at least as good as Jeremy Thorpe's, for goodness sake.5 In fact, I wonder what negotiations could possibly still be going on. In my view, the C-LD meeting should last about five minutes, and consist of Nick saying, "So tell me, Dave, can you deliver PR? And by 'PR' I don't mean AV.6 And by 'deliver' I don't mean a commission or a committee or a conference to discuss it. We've done that.7 I mean a bill with an enforced three-line whip."8 And when Dave replies, "You know I can't do that," Nick stands up, says, "Nice talking to you," and leaves, to make a call at Number Ten.9
1. Proportional representation, the sine qua non without which the Liberal Democrats should refuse to form a coalition with anybody.
2. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, chapter 12.
3. The last time the Conservatives tried (and failed) to make a deal with the Liberals.
4. Tabernacle politics: The belief that all virtue lies within, and only within, the tabernacle, i.e. your own party, and all without is chaos and darkness. Most famously practiced by Aneurin Bevan, the 1940s-50s Labour politician who said that the Tories were "lower than vermin." They don't make invective like that any more.
5. Thorpe was the Liberal leader who had the sense, barely, to avoid being wooed too cheaply by Edward Heath in 1974. As Thorpe's career collapsed a couple of years later in the wake of some of the worst misjudgment exercised by a British political figure between the Profumo Affair and the recent MPs expenses row, it's remarkable that he showed more wisdom on this occasion.
6. Alternative Vote (in British) or Instant Runoff (in American), the system used for counting Hugo ballots, and one with inconsistent prospects for actually delivering proportional representation in multiple seats.
7. Tony Blair, on assuming office, promptly commissioned a thorough report on PR possibilities. It was the best-written government commission report ever issued (because it was written by its chairman, Roy Jenkins, biographer of Gladstone and Churchill), and you can read it here. It made a definitive recommendation for a particular system, and it was supposed to be followed by a referendum on implementation. But there was no referendum.
8. Three-line whip: a voting instruction underlined three times. The ultimate appeal by party leaders to their MPs' loyalty. Quite seriously enforceable.
9. The Prime Minister's office. When Gordon Brown was still in it.
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Put in order, from left to right, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives. And where is "Tory" in all that. Sounds like they're still up against the Whigs.
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The Lib Dems see themselves not in the middle of anything, but at the liberal end of the spectrum where both Labour and Conservative are authoritarian. And considering the many draconian Ashcroft/Gonzalez-like measures that Labour has enacted (monitoring cameras are now almost everywhere in Britain), you can see the point, and that left-wing is not always the same as disliking government meddling in private lives.
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This achieves a kind of rough consensus for the individual seat. Thus, if in one seat, a Conservative gets 40% of the vote, LD 35% and Labour 25%, under the current system the Conservative wins. But if most of the Labour voters preferred the LD to the Conservative, LD has consensus over the Conservative, and under AV the LD would win.
In practice in Britain this would increase the number of LD seats, especially because there are a lot of Conservative seats in southern England which are pretty much like that case (some of which go LD now because of tactical voting, LD campaigners persuading Labour voters to go LD to get the Tory out), but it's not PR because it still has nothing to do with the overall spread of party preference in the region or nationwide.
What the Jenkins Commission proposed was creating a separate set of regional MPs whose party allocation would address voting imbalance. Whatever party got the fewest constituency MPs in comparison to its total vote would get the greatest share of regional MPs. Something rather like this actually operates in the Scottish Parliament.
A fixed parliamentary term is a big change because the current five-year term is a maximum only. The PM is free to call the election a year or even more earlier to maximize on a favorable political wind (though it's always amusing when the favorable wind never arrives and the election is forced by the term running out, as happened to Labour this year and in 1979, and to the Conservatives in 1964, 1992, and 1997). It's also possible to call a snap election earlier still, to capitalize on particular political circumstances, and that too has happened often.
Few parliamentary countries operate on fixed terms. New Zealand does.
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fixed term
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