Off Topic: British Elections

Yes there is a world out there beyond the shores of the US. And, yes, it is equally as tribal in its politics. Yesterday’s election in the UK was widely thought of, prior to the event, to be a once in a lifetime occurrence. This view was founded on the polling that showed the third party Liberal-Democrats as a potent force rather than as their normal ‘nice guys but entirely irrelevant’ force of other elections. The Lib-Dems are an amalgam of the old Liberal party – my political home base – and a more recent offshoot of the Labour party called the Social Democrats. Neither had any real influence in recent decades, and both were viewed as perennial side shows: the kind of places where disgruntled, vaguely intellectual, and horribly ineffectual people gathered to bemoan their lack of power.

The Lib-Dems are the poster children for the phrase ‘if only’.

But yesterday was supposed to change all that.

Their leader, Nick Clegg, gave a solid performance in the UK’s first TV ‘debate’, and his party’s support seemed to rocket.

Until people actually went to vote.

At which point tribalism intruded and all those good intentions faded way, leaving poor old Clegg with a smaller number of seats in Parliament than before. This was not supposed to happen.

As a quick reminder: the UK is not a presidential system, so parties are paramount. The party with the most seats gets to form the government, and whoever is that party’s leader gets to be Prime Minister. Simple. Except when no one has enough seats to ensure an enduring majority. The magic number is 326. Since there are 650 seats to contest, spread across Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, any party with at least 326 gets to run the country. Unfortunately for all concerned no one managed to cross that threshold yesterday. So we enter the murky world of a ‘hung parliament’, where exactly who is in charge is problematic.

The Conservatives, the UK analog to the Republicans except that it is way to the left of the GOP, reached 306, and are the largest party. They can claim somewhat of a victory in that they ended up with the largest voter support at about 36% of the votes cast. They also added a net of 97 seats to their total, so their’s was the biggest gain on the day.

In contrast the Labour party saw its position collapse. They lost a net 91 seats – ending up with a low of 258 – and saw their share of the vote slip to 29%. In the context of the party’s past this was an epic defeat, on a par with the wipe out they experienced under the leadership of the lunatic socialist Michael Foot a few decades back. Yet they hung on and kept a larger number of seats than many people had predicted.

Were it not for the pesky Lib-Dems the kind of swing implied by the performances of the ‘big two’ would normally have produced a working majority for David Cameron and his fellow Conservatives.

But.

The Lib-Dems won 57 seats, and managed to eke out 23% of the vote.

Now you will immediately notice that the electoral system in the UK distorts the vote. The Lib-Dems polled only 3% less votes, and yet ended up with almost 200 seats less, than Labor. This is the kind of distortion that has led the Lib-Dems to champion electoral reform, which has been a cause of theirs since I was a kid going door to door on their behalf back in the deep twentieth century.

I mention this because electoral reform is about to loom large in UK politics.

The UK, unlike other European countries, is entirely unused to coalition governments. They are viewed as not very British and the kind of messy things that unreliable countries like France or Italy get themselves into. Yet here we are.

No one won yesterday, so the haggling has begun.

The first shot in the negotiation came from Clegg, who announced that he thought it only fair and reasonable – how terrible British of him – that the Conservatives take a shot at forming a government. They, after all are the largest party at the moment. What he meant was: what will you give me so that I support you? Cameron guessed that what the deal was and shot back: pretty much everything except that nasty electoral reform.

That’s where we are right now.

Lest you think I have forgotten him: the Labour leader, and lately the prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has deferred to his two rivals for the moment. He is still the Prime Minister and remains thus until someone displaces him. He, too, has offered Clegg a deal to induce the Lib-Dems into a coalition, but so far his offer is less defined. He also suffers from the stigma of being very unpopular and therefore not as attractive a coalition partner for an up and comer like Clegg.

Balancing that, of course, is the counterfactual that Labour and the Lib-Dems are far closer ideologically than the Conservatives are to either.

Which puts Clegg into a huge bind.

His preferred partner would be Brown. The two parties are much closer on things like the economy, the environment and even that dreaded electoral reform, than the Lib-Dems are to the Conservatives. But the Conservatives are the guys on the rise. Cameron is dealing from a slightly better position: he could, as he noted in his speech, try to go it alone and then dare the others to cause him to fail. In which case he would be forced to call another election and they would have to start all over again.

Given the state of the economy, no one wants an immediate election. So the coalition dance looks set to occupy the weekend, and will produce great theater. Clegg will be forced to go one way or another fairly quickly: my guess is that by Monday he will have to choose his poison. There are rumblings in the international bond markets already about the turmoil a hung parliament could create, and any indecision will only make things worse.

In a funny sort of way this election reflects the UK’s mood. It is distinctly a ‘none of the above’ result. Until recently the smart money was on a big Conservative win. But Cameron failed to convince a jittery and worried electorate. Instead they backed off. But they also rejected Brown and the Labour party who have ruled for a very long time and appear to be completely out of novel ideas. Brown’s great strength in the past was his handling of the economy, but the crisis exposed that strength as something of an illusion. My own feeling about Brown is that he’s a smart guy, but an inept politician. He deserves to go.

Which leaves us with Clegg and his dilemma. Clegg’s brief moment in the sun, about two weeks ago, threatened to turn UK politics inside out. But when push came to shove, voters backed off and voted indecisively. It is as if they want change, but are unsure of exactly how that change should manifest itself.

So ‘none of the above’ it is.

Where does Clegg go?

My heart says Labour. My head says Conservative.

A Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition would have sufficient votes to sustain itself against all but the most determined uprising in their respective ranks. And let there be no doubt: such a coalition goes against nature, so there will be plenty of sour and defiant backbenchers aghast at having to go along with any potential joint program. Inevitably the government will fall: probably as soon as that dreaded electoral reform turns up as an agenda item. The ideological divide between the two parties runs historically deep as the epic struggles between Disraeli and Gladstone can attest. The Conservatives can never forget that it was the old Liberal party that set the UK on its modern path towards providing a social safety net for workers. Those memories linger on. In today’s world a big immediate example of that age old divide will come during the debate about how to deal with the budget deficit. Cameron argues for immediate cuts. The Lib-Dems want to delay so that a recovery is well established before the cuts are enacted. The Lib-Dems are right. Cameron is being a moron by suggesting that the cuts need to start straight away. That would condemn the country to a renewed recession. Or perhaps this all works out: the Lib-Dems can act as a civilizing force on those neo-Thatcherite urges tugging at Cameron. Not.

As you can tell: how the weekend’s haggling is sorted out is anyone’s guess.

Clearly Clegg’s phone will be busy. He is sitting down with Cameron Friday evening. Already die hard Lib-Dems are campaigning against the unholy alliance.

Whatever happens this weekend will make for gripping political theater. In the dull old UK. Who’d have guessed it?