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The Eye in Brighton
Posts tagged “politics”
And if no party does win the next election outright, what is likely to happen? No-one is talking about coalition, and the Lib Dems shy away from revealing their hand.
The nearest they have got is leader Nick Clegg’s ambiguous statement that “the party with the clearest mandate would have the first right to seek to govern”… though he studiously avoids saying if that means most MPs or most votes.
The former Lib Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell says it is hard to see his party offering support to a Labour government that had just lost, or to a Tory party that refused the constitutional reform the Lib Dems are so keen on.
But, intriguingly, on Gordon Brown’s 11th hour conversion to limited electoral reform with the alternative vote, Sir Ming said: “If the alternative vote were on offer, and by that I don’t mean a referendum or a Speaker’s Commission but if legislation was agreed, that is certainly something to which we should give the most serious consideration.”
And Sir Ming is not alone in criticising the expectation of an instant handover of power on the Friday after an election, when the outcome may be an uncertain one.
Conservative Andrew Mackay, agrees: “All of them will be dog-tired and exhausted and then, immediately, without sleep, to decide what to do isn’t in the national interest. This country can run without a government for a week or so.”
Mr Mackay was until recently David Cameron’s political and parliamentary adviser.
He thinks that, in a hung parliament where the Tories were the largest party, his leader’s strategy would be to form a minority government, set out a programme to tackle the economic crisis, and challenge the other parties to back him or vote him down with the prospect of asking the Queen to dissolve parliament for another election if he were defeated on a crucial vote.
The Conservatives vehemently oppose the alternative vote, arguing that the current first past the post voting system “delivers clear, clean results” even if it does currently seem to work against them.
But what if a minority Tory government called an early second election which produced another hung parliament? Then all bets might be off.
“Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America’s poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.
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For Mr [Drew] Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: “One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.”
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“The gap between rich and poor in the UK is wider now than 40 years ago, a government-commissioned report says.
“Deep-seated and systemic differences” remain between men and women and minority groups in pay and employment, the National Equality Panel found.
It said in areas such as neighbourhood renewal, taxes and education, policy action was needed to limit inequality.
The issues raised would need “sustained and focused action”, Equalities Minister Harriet Harman said.
“But for the sake of the right of every individual to reach their full potential, for the sake of a strong and meritocratic economy and to achieve a peaceful and cohesive society, that is the challenge that must be met,” she added.
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Theresa May, shadow minister for women and equalities, told the BBC that Labour’s policies had failed.
“It is shocking that after 13 years of a government that wanted to focus on child inequality, we’re still in this situation,” she said.
“Labour has had a one-dimensional approach, looking at the symptoms, not the causes. For example, one in six children are growing up in a workless household. We need policies that can make equality a reality.”
The Liberal Democrats’ children, schools and families spokesman, David Laws, said Gordon Brown’s government had “run out of ideas for tackling the lack of opportunity for so many children and the chasm that separates the rich from the poor”.
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“Voters should want five more years of Gordon Brown because:
“He knows how to deal with the British economy’s problems and to take us through them and he knows what sort of economy we can build for the future that will give young people the jobs that they need…he’s got a passionate desire to improve our public services and his whole career is based on a passionate desire to see all reach their potential.”
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