British Election: Take Two

In the absence of anything much to report on the economy, allow me to comment again on the British election.

There are some extraordinary goings on.

1. Gordon Brown, the current Prime Minister, has announced he will resign and that his Labour party will have to undergo a search for a new leader. This throws open the issue of the ‘unelected’ PM. The opposition Conservatives made quite a storm over the fact that Brown became PM when he was elected leader of the party to replace the then retiring Tony Blair. He assumed the PM position without having led his party through an election, and the Conservatives attempted to make this sound as if he somehow cheated. They kept referring to him as the ‘unelected’ PM. In British politics, because it is a parliamentary system and not a presidency, there is nothing wrong with the way in which Brown arrived in the top job. The rule is simple: whoever is the leader of the party with the most seats in Parliament gets to be PM. That’s the way it’s been for the better part of three hundred years, so it’s a bit odd that the Conservatives pounce on poor old Brown in this way. He’s simply playing by the rules. Besides, the Conservatives are the ones who criticized the ‘neo-presidential’ nature of the Blair regime, so they have to do a total volte face in order to poke at Brown for being an old fashioned parliamentarian.
2. Brown’s resignation set the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons. Up until his announcement the Liberal Democrat had been negotiating with the Conservatives about an arrangement called a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement. Such an agreement stops short of a formal coalition, and, instead, is a looser arrangement in which one party governs with the consent of another and focuses on an agreed agenda rather than exclusively on its own proposed policies. Each piece of legislation in this agreed agenda then gets the support of both parties, but the minor party – in this case the Lib-Dems – do not form a part of the executive branch. They simply accommodate legislation by supporting it on the floor of Parliament. So there would be no Lib-Dems in the Cabinet. In contrast, a formal coalition implies that cabinet jobs are allotted to both the parties, and that they govern jointly. Brown has suddenly moved the discussion from the loose confidence and supply arrangement to a formal coalition style proposal. He raised the ante by offering to step aside and allow his party to choose someone else to lead a coalition.
3. Within hours the Conservative leader, David Cameron, appears to have matched the offer. So now the Lib-Dems are talking about coalitions with both major potential partners.
4. The sticking point so far has ben the unwillingness of the Conservatives to go along with the Lib-Dem proposal for reform of the electoral process. Such reform is anathema to the right wing of the Conservatives who view reform as a great danger. They believe, probably rightly, that a reformed system would make it very difficult for them to govern again without help from a less right wing party. They would be forced towards the center, which the right wingers want to avoid. But reform is the central issue for the Lib-Dems who are always shut out of power by the inherent bias of the British system. So an impasse had been reached with the tepid offer Cameron made over the weekend – to have a study of reform – enough to slow down the talks. Then in steps Brown, who, besides resigning, gave dark hints that Labour would be agreeable to a vote on reform without a ‘study’ and without a referendum. That got the Lib-Dems attention. It also got the Conservatives attention. Sufficiently that they too suddenly seem to be offering reform on the basis of a vote in Parliament, without a ‘study’ or a referendum.
5. One last big factor: the Conservatives are basically an English party. They have virtually no presence in Scotland, and a very weak presence in Wales. None of the British mainland parties have a presence in Northern Ireland which, as ever, goes its own way in politics. The key point here is that devolution of power away from Parliament in London to the local parts of Britain remains a hot topic. Were a government to be set up in London that has absolutely no representation from Scotland, pressure would build to make the separation of Scotland more formal. The Scottish Nationalist party has a small number of seats in Parliament, but Labour remains the major party up north. The Lib-Dems have a few Scottish seats as well. This regionalism may not be crucial to the outcome of the coalition talks, but the obvious English bias of the Conservatives, were they to take power, could stir up what is already a festering problem.

So where are we?

Who knows?

The talks have occupied the entire day. As of 11:00 pm in London the Lib-Dems were engaged in internal discussions. Presumably they are comparing the respective offers from their two suitors.

My original guess was that the Lib-Dem heart was with Labour, but that their head was with the Conservatives. The temptation will be very strong to fall into a left of center coalition now that Brown is gone. His resignation is a master stroke. He has been criticized relentlessly for being a poor politician, so it is ironic in the extreme that his greatest political move involves his own resignation. It mat yet work. Cameron is under intense pressure from his right wing not to go too far with his concessions to the Lib-Dems. Meanwhile Nick Clegg, the Lib-Dem leader, is under a similar amount of pressure not to go too far towards the Conservatives position.

In that light, Brown’s announcement has probably moved the prospect for a Labour/Lib-Dem coalition from an outside bet to a very real possibility.

Were the left of center coalition to be the conclusion from all this wrangling, it will have a precarious majority and would need constant attention from the various party whips to keep recalcitrant members of Parliament in line. A center-right coalition, by contrast, would have a much larger and safer majority on paper, but would be subject to attacks not just from a Labour led opposition, but also from the right wingers who hate the Lib-Dem positions that such a coalition would have to espouse.

Given all this, we can expect two things: a cobbled together coalition that legislates electoral reform; and a new election within a year probably based on new electoral rules.

Forecasting the outcome of that election will be next to impossible. One thing we can predict, though, is that coalition government will become the norm, and not the extremely rare occurrence that it now is.