Clegg The Kingmaker

As was predicted this has been a tight election and no party has gained an overall majority. The Conservatives secured the most votes but will be disappointed nonetheless, despite their talks of success, given the party’s high approval rating even a few months back.

However there have been some surprising results. Labour has been criticised for performing badly but personally I think this is a huge success story for Labour, bearing in mind that last year the Conservatives were miles ahead in the polls and some pundits were claiming that we could see Labour lose power for a generation. Instead, although 48 seats behind the Conservatives, they have a chance of clinging on to power if they can make a deal with the Liberal Democrats, which has already been dubbed a “Coalition of Losers”.

The other big surprise was a loss in votes for the Liberal Democrats despite a recent surge in the polls. Nevertheless because of the Conservatives failure to win an outright majority they have turned out to be the kingmakers in this election. Nick Clegg now has a difficult choice of who to support to form a government.

David Cameron has been trying to woo Nick Clegg much to the dismay of many members of the Conservative Party. A Conservative-Lib Dem coalition seems to be the option the media thinks most likely. However I’d be amazed if an agreement was reached. The key issue the Lib Dems would want in a coalition is a referendum on the voting system, but  the Conservatives would never allow that given that it favours both Labour and the Lib Dems. On other key issues like Europe there are vast differences between the parties and it would show how desperate Cameron is for power if he sacrifices some of his party’s key issues to the Lib Dems. Nick Clegg for his part would alienate many of his own voters who are anti-Conservative.

Clegg would have problems if he supported the Labour Party as well. After all his talk of change he will not want to be seen to be propping up a failed and unpopular government. However the party is much more in tune with the Lib Dems and have already spent the best part of a day promising the Lib Dems a referendum on the Proportional Representation system they so desperately want.

So I believe the most likely result is that talks fail between Cameron and Clegg and they turn instead to the Labour party for a coalition. This would most likely come with a demand for Brown’s resignation so that they can justify it as “change”. But this would leave us with a second consecutive unelected Labour Prime Minister.

We are going to see an interesting couple of days, with the media speculating on what’s going on in the Leaders’ private talks. Voters will have to wait at least a few days if not weeks before they know whether it will be a Labour or Conservative coalition running the country. Either way, any deal will likely prove unstable and we could see another election before the end of the year.

The Dawn Of An Identical Era

So tomorrow the country will go to the polls and decide the future direction of the country for at least the next year, depending on whether the Conservatives manage an outright victory or not.

This election has been hyped up by the media for so long now as the most important General Election since the war. The Expenses Scandal was meant to galvanise the public into making radical changes to the way this country is governed by punishing the three main parties. The old corrupt career politicians would be voted out and we would see the rise of the smaller parties.

This has not happened. Although there will be a huge exodus from Parliament of those who were caught with their hands in the public’s cookie jar, many of those caught up in the Expenses Scandal will carry on. And those that replace them are if anything worse. Nearly 30 Conservative candidates work for the PR industry and lobbying firms, and the story is similar across the other main parties.

Yet despite an early surge in support for the smaller parties, the three main parties have shored up their votes in time for the election. The only major change is that the Liberal Democrats and Labour have swapped positions in the polls. Much of the ‘vote for change’ vote has gone the Lib Dems’ way, and yet they have been crucial in supporting much of Labour’s legislation and have had as many problems with the Expenses Scandal as anyone else – the smaller numbers of those caught out reflects the smaller size of the party.

So whatever the outcome on Friday, the country is likely to end up disappointed by more of the same after the hope of change promised by so many people. A Conservative majority will see a government little different to the current one. A Hung Parliament will see back-door deals being made away from public scrutiny, and could even see Labour cling on to power despite likely coming third in the vote. Worse than that we would not even get Gordon Brown back in, as whatever happens in this election the party is likely to twist the knife in his back and bring in a new leader who none of us would have voted for. Sound familiar to the current government?

This new era will unfortunately be of more of the same old politics and self-serving politicians, the only change being the names of our political masters.

Boris On Clegg

An interesting column in the Telegraph by Boris Johnson caught my eye this morning. It was nice to finally see amongst the media someone who wasn’t swooning over “Churchill Clegg” and the Lib Dems, like a schoolgirl with a crush on the new kid at school.

In the article he contemplates the madness that has befallen the nation over the new found support for Mr Clegg. Whilst I do not share his blind optimism about the certainty of a Conservative all out victory at the forthcoming General Election, he does make some valid arguments in his dressing down of Mr Clegg. My favourite paragraphs from the column:

“Everybody treats Vince Cable as a semi-holy Mahatma Gandhi of British politics, because he is supposed in some way to have anticipated the financial crisis. Actually his most notable recommendation before the crisis was that Britain should join the euro – a move that would gravely have worsened our current position by leaving us in a Greek-style straitjacket.

What crouton of substance did Clegg offer last Thursday, in the opaque minestrone of waffle? He wants to get rid of Trident. Great! So Lib Dem foreign policy means voluntarily resigning from the UN Security Council, abandoning all pretensions to world influence, and sub-contracting our nuclear deterrent to France! They are a bunch of euro-loving road-hump fetishists who are attempting like some defective vacuum cleaner to suck and blow at the same time; and the worst of it is that if you do vote Lib Dem in the demented belief that there could ever be such a thing as a Lib Dem government, you won't get Prime Minister Clegg. You'll get Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for five more holepunch-hurling years, because the Lib Dems almost always vote with Labour, and in my years in Parliament I can't remember a single moment when they opposed a Labour measure to expand state spending or state control.”

The First Televised Debate

Much has been made of Britain’s first televised leader’s debate. It has been labelled a game changer by most of the media with the Lib Dems now enjoying a 2 point lead over Labour with 30% according to the latest YouGov poll.

Personally I’m not quite sure why the Lib Dems have risen by so much in the polls. I should first off say that I only managed to watch 30 minutes of the debate before switching off in complete boredom – and this is coming from someone who actually finds politics interesting. Of course the debate could have livened up after that but I doubt it.

Mr Brown was his usual dull self, trying to defend Labour’s record and seeking re-election on that – a bad policy considering their appalling record. Mr Cameron seemed to be giving the most sensible answers but failed to get his message across effectively. I’m not sure whether it was an attempt to act serious and Prime Ministerial or whether it was a touch of the nerves but again he seemed incredibly dull. Mr Clegg was in fact the only person who seemed energetic, enthusiastic and interesting, which can be the only reason I can think of for his rise in support because what he was actually saying was complete rubbish. His policies were vague and incredibly idealistic – Mr Cameron and Mr Brown should have been able to pick holes in his arguments easily and exposed the Lib Dems for the idealistic party they are – none of their policies would work in practice. Instead Mr Brown and Mr Cameron chose to argue with each other and ignore Mr Clegg.

Of course the easy way to have made this debate enjoyable to watch would have been to cut the constraints that all the parties signed up to – in particular the ban on applause. If this debate had been more along the lines of Prime Minister’s Questions (which I generally enjoy watching) with jeering and applause from different members of the audience then this would have livened the debate up substantially.

Instead I rather suspect that no-one will be able to remember Britain’s ‘First Great Televised Debate’ for the boredom and monotony it produced. However I shall not say that the debate was insignificant – clearly it has had an effect on the polls and certainly if it stays the way it is then this election will have turned into a 3 legged race. However if the Conservatives and Labour have any sense they will concentrate their efforts in the next two debates to taking apart Mr Clegg’s policies and showing how they are unworkable in practice.

So I shall not follow in the footsteps of most other commentators in proclaiming the rise of the Liberal Democrats, not until the dust has settled and we have seen the next two debates. After all there are still two and a half weeks of the election campaign left to run, and as we all know even one week is a long time in politics.