The British people have spoken (or at least voted) and I don’t imagine too many members of the political class are happy with the results. The Labour government got back in, but with less than 40 per cent of the popular vote and a lot more vigour among opponents than supporters, it’s not a great result. In particular, given the weakness of the Opposition, the result is a pretty clear rejection of Tony Blair and his approach to politics.
For the Tories, the outcome is even worse. They only got 33 per cent of the vote, against a combined 60 per cent for Labour and the Lib Dems, parties which have broadly similar centre-left views. Barring a cataclysmic change in the electoral landscape, there’s no serious prospect that they can win in five years time.
The Lib Dems did better than most expected, but still failed to break out of third party status, even with the Iraq issue going for them. Their best hope is that Labour’s position will weaken to the point where they are forced into democratic reform of the electoral system, either PR or preferential voting.
Two individuals look to be winners. Gordon Brown now seems certain to replace Blair as PM. Blair’s poor performance and manifest unpopularity make it virtually impossible that he can back out of his promise to retire, and he’s likely to do so sooner rather than later. For Brown, the main risk is that the economy will go sour – it has many of the same vulnerabilities as Australia’s.
The other big winner is George Galloway, former Labour MP and apologist for Saddam, who defeated left-wing Labour MP Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow. While I’d normally welcome any indication of opposition to the Iraq war, I have to say that this is a deplorable result. I don’t believe everything I read about Galloway, but his own public actions are enough to condemn him.
I forgot to add one particularly welcome loser. Lynton Crosby has demolished his (largely self-generated) reputation as a Machiavellian genius, and succeeded in reattaching the ‘nasty party’ label to the Tories in a way that will be very difficult for them to shake off.
John Quiggin 
“Barring a cataclysmic change in the electoral landscape, there’s no serious prospect that they can win in five years time.”
That is psephologically false. The combination of first past the post voting and a three party system means that the Tories could win with just a few per cent more total vote.
By 2009, the Murdoch press will have turned on Brown PM with a vengeance and the economy could be in the toilet. It’s not impossible to imagine the Tories winning. The question is whether they are capable of renewing themselves in a way that appeals to, or at least does not repulse, the British electorate.
But, if this outcome looks to be in prospect, Labour can scrap FPP voting.
Hopefully Crosby will also have that same label of ‘nasty’ attached to everything he does from now on.
I think there is a fascinating trend developing in Anglo politics, it appears that it would take something seriously cataclysmic to bring down a sitting government. But what?
Even in Canada where the Liberals deserve to go down as a result of a massive scandal the Tories can’t seem to break through 30% in the polls despite all of the daily bad news for the Liberals.
I think the two party system combined with a weak or largely irrelevant third party has given electorates some pause.
It’s not the voting system, but the perception (reality?) that politics nowadays is practised in much the same way by all parties, so why turf out the devil you know?
By 2009 the UK economy will be in enough strife that, compounded by Labour’s disastrous immigration policies, they’ll be up for one of the nastiest campaigns in British history. This is all Labour’s fault, of course, and the Tories could do worse than get Crosby back for more of the same.
UK Election Blogging
I’m keeping an eye on the Guardian election blog while working. Elections seem to be events made for live blogging. You can feel a sense of the excitement of the count. Latest news – Labour’s majority appears certain to be well below the party’s com…
“Their best hope is that Labour’s position will weaken to the point where they are forced into democratic reform of the electoral system, either PR or preferential voting.”
What about Condorcet? I think I have to send you an email right now.
Is it not possible that the British Government may opt for a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq in response to public opinion?
Sadly, as they are pulling the troops out, Howard the goose, will be putting them in.
One interesting feature of modern British elections is the race by local returning officers to be the first electorate to declare the result. This year, as in the previous three elections, this race was won by Sunderland South, the seat held by Labour’s Chris Mullin (a political novelist before he was MP). They declared in under 45 minutes from the close of the polls, which just missed beating their previous record of 43 minutes in 2001.
The local returning officer had teams of runners to carry ballot boxes around and the runners, vote counters and verifiers had practiced their routines in the days before the poll. Also, according to the BBC, the local returning officer had arranged with local police officers to control traffic lights to ensure rapid delivery of ballot boxes from polling stations. All of this was, apparently, perfectly legal.
Only the English (who throughout the 19th century used to bet in large numbers on the outcomes of the Cambridge Mathematics Tripos exams) would turn election-counting into a contest!
I don’t think it implausible that the Tories will rise again. This time, the “divisive” issue of Iraq saw both Labour and Conservative on the same side (the Tories would also have gone to war, but, er, they wouldn’t have lied about it, er…). Next time, Iraq will (they hope) be irrelevent and there will be the illusion of choice again. The Tories’ only problem is that they have nobody of the calibre of Brown to put up as leader, but this is fixable – they are probably cloning a new Maggie Thatcher right now….
wmmbb,
No real chance – the parties that broadly support the British Government’s position on Iraq got over 70% of the vote.
John – it’s wrong to describe Oona King as a left wing Labour MP. She was one of Blair’s biggest backbench supporters and backed him on the War on Iraq.
With all due respect, Mark, it is possible to be left-wing and to support the War in Iraq! Oona King falls in this category, as did other left-wing Labour MPs. Not to mention a few journalists (eg, Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch)
The British are fast losing a coherent position on Iraq. Blair is on the nose according to everybody. It is his signature issue. I don’t think the Poms will back out of Iraq but not because of the 70% thing, but because Britain is congenitally an empire builder.
Mark, I think you’re right, though Peter’s point is logically valid. I got the impression somewhere that King was a leftwinger, but a quick check suggests the opposite.
A birthplace of modern Parliamentary democracy shows once again it has a farcically unfair (and thus not really democratic) electoral system, giving comfort to authoritarian pretend democracies the world over.
Whilst Labour has lost a decent swag of seats, it has still won around 55% of the seats with about 36% of the votes cast – from an overall voter turnout of about 60%. If my maths are right, that means they received a vote from less than a quarter of the voting population of the UK, yet will govern with a majority of 61 seats over all the other parties combined.
To look at it from another perspective, the Tories result – portrayed as only a little better than disastrous – was about 33% of the vote compared to about 36% for Labour, yet they won about 30% of the seats compared to Labour’s 55%.
Of course the big losers from the farcical system are the Liberal Democrats – a vote of nearly 23% yet still fewer than 10% of the seats. It continually baffles me that people seem to be willing to live with such a patently absurd and undemocratic system and it receives such minimal comment in amongst all the election analysis.
Maybe it’s just me…..
John, it may be her interest in constitutional reform, and her belief early in Blair’s term that Britain was suffering a crisis of democracy. She memorably commented that a lot of Labour MPs lacked interest in these fundamental issues assuming that those who found them important were the “Anorak brigade”.
There’s some analysis of the undemocratic nature of the UK election system at the Guardian election blog.
The percentage of the eligible population who voted for Blair was lower than those who didn’t vote at all, and his government rests on a very slim basis of electoral support. The entry also looks at the number of votes needed to elect an MP from each major party.
Andrew – it’s not just you, but it seems to be hopeless how you can make it more democratic.
The debate is too technical for a grass roots movement so you just have to wait for some wierd confluence of events to make it temporarily advantageous for one of the big parties to put it in.
And maybe that time is now in the UK. Can the conservatives win power regularly again with first past the post? Maybe the next time they get in they will look at it.
The Liberals here would certainly never win with fpp.
UK Election – You Cannot be Serious?!
I really have difficulty figuring out why the big story from the UK election is not something like:
– “British Public Robbed – Electoral System a Sick Joke”,
I saw a few articles (including by Cheryl Kernot) during the UK campaign talking about how the Conservatives were doing a lot of locally targetted “nasty party” stuff, alongside the broad brush crude attacks on refugees, migrants and gypsies, but I hadn’t seen any examples.
I just found an example on the blog of retiring UK Lib Dem MP Richard Allan – http://www.richardallan.org.uk/?p=366, talking of an advert where the Conservatives drew links between the Lib Dems wanting a ‘dog tax’ and the Lib Dem Leader being Scottish and haggis being made out of dog meat, etc. One must allow for possible partisan exaggeration, but if it’s true it’s pretty out there.
WBB- Blair wont back out of Iraq, not because ‘britain is congenitally an empire builder’ (surely that makes Oz one too: also has forces in Iraq. Do we ‘poms’ also need to mention PNG, East Timor and Australias sphere of influence in the south pacific i.e. tahiti, fiji etc. America’s empire building deputy, anyone?) but because despite the many vagaries of his rule and partisan failings he is principled enough to realise that Britain (indeed all foreign forces in Iraq) should stay until the ‘job is done’. Brtiain is all too aware of its imperial past, with a repeat of the 1947 catastrophic sub-continent withdrawl bearing down heavily upon Blair and the rest of us ‘poms’. It is these principles which guide Britain now, not some desire for a return to empire.
wbb Says: May 6th, 2005 at 8:36 pm
No. Its the Anglosphere, stupid!
For a congenital imperialist the UK seems to have been divesting itself of a lot of colonies over the past few generations. It is also subordinating itself to higher powers, whether USA or USE.
The countries of the former British Empire form a nation of sorts. Its just that they are so spread out that executive power is variously distributed to several provinces, and the metropolis shifts now and again.
Blair went into Iraq for much the same reason that Howard went into Iraq, to consolidate the Anglospheric “Special Relationship” with the USA. Unfortunately the adverse turn of events in this conflict has done more to sour this relationship than any number of snippy left wingers. Ironies of History and all that.
Blair has not paid the supreme political sacrifice in prosecution of this abysmal war because skyrocketing housing prices have made Britons happy enought. The CoW Trifecta came home in the end, in spite, not because of the War. The Anglosphere property bubble trumped the Iraq quamire after all.
Why I would have voted Liberal Democrat
… and it’s not just about Iraq.
Here’s a nice summary of social democracy from the emigre Polish philosopher and historian of Marxism, Lesjek Kolakowski:
The trouble with the social democratic idea is that it does not stock and does not sell …
Oi!
Preferential Voting is also a sick joke compared to Condorcet. The Condorcet criterion being “If a candidate is prefered by a majority over all other candidates then that candidate should win”
Both Preferential voting and first-past-the-post fail this criterion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloneproof_Schwartz_Sequential_Dropping
All voting systems are wrong. Any voting system that gets reformed with an eye to “being fair to the party” is n’t being reformed democratically. The current system isn’t really that bad democratically speaking, not if your criterion isn’t how well the parties do (that’s a relative assessment, BTW).
If Labour were to abandon the current system at the prospect of not being helped by it, that would provoke a backlash. It would accurately show that the fairness is not just dependent on what but on when – the timing. It would demonstrate that the syetem selected was always the one that suited the incumbent. The only way round this is to commit for elections some decade or two off, not immediately.
Further, this assessment only looks at parties like the LibDems who suffer from this system – not the other minor parties which are regional, and whose sentiments, regional ones, regional voting was designed to bring out. They would suffer from the building in of a different concept of British identity (the West Lothian problem), and they would undoubtedly punish whoever did it at the polls.
And, of course, there is no perfect democratic technique anyway, and the present system is supposed not to be 100% democratic, even if some people have forgotten that and think that democracy is a good end in itself.
To Jack Strocchi:
To be fair to Tony Blair, I think his (own) arguments for going to war in Iraq are far stronger and more moral than simple maintenance of the special relationship between Britain and the USA. He himself believes (and said so well before 11/9/01) that the West has a moral and self-interested imperative to rid the world of evil regimes, and he has been doing so since his first election (Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Iraq). Unfortunately, he has not trusted the public sufficiently to put this case openly to us very often or with any force, and instead relied on weaker, and petard-hoisting, arguments.
Of course, the opponents of this ethical foreign policy are many — from the lunatic left who supported Serbia in the Kosovan war to the reactionary right who supported Serbia in the Kosovan war. The contrast with the previous Conservative Government which left Bosnia to its fate is stark and instructive.
And writing as I do from Britain, I would say that your argument about skyrocketing house prices winning him this election is complete tosh. Houseprices are not rising rapidly at the moment, and most commentators (and most ordinary people) expect a fall anytime soon. Houseprices were mentioned not once, not by anybody, in any election campaign activity that I saw or read or heard. Nobody I know personally mentioned them. They were not an issue.
The issues that mattered in the campaign were Iraq, the Health Service, Education and Immigration. Oh, and Tony Blair’s character. Along with local issues in many seats.
Sorry, I always regarded George Galloway as a good, honest person . I muyst have missed something. How is he an apologist for Saddam Hussein?
Here’s how, Nu-Ju:
George Galloway to Saddam Hussein at a meeting in Iraq in 1994: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.”
Um, I can make the same comments about [fill in dictator here] without that appreciation (i.e. assessment) meaning approval let alone excusing, which is what apologists do. It certainly couldn’t be an apologia if it was merely the usual BS of a visiting pollie.
But why was Galloway visiting Hussein at all? Why was he praising him publicly? What has he said since then critical of Hussein or the Baathist regime in Iraq?
For the first two, see above about the usual behaviour of pollies. For the last, we don’t know whether he has or has not condemned SH, and anyway that’s a negative; it certainly isn’t incumbent on anyone to make a condemnation. Hey, by that reasoning most people in the world are pro-SH. Not condemning is not an apologia. It could be for all sorts of reasons, e.g. as against Oona King the belief that being anti was itself a betrayal of what an MP should be about – taking a position for reasons that didn’t match the remit of an MP. We just don’t know.
Sorry, PM, you haven’t persuaded me. Is it the usual behaviour of politicians to visit fascist dictators and praise them? Not many other of the 635 members of the British House of Commons visited Hussein (whom Galloway visited more than once), so it is certainly not the usual behaviour of British politicans.
It seems we differ on Galloway. I think it is incumbent on him to condemn the Baathists, especially after praising the regime. I find it hard to understand how people who call themselves left-wing can support fascist dictatorships and the murderous oppression of human life and liberty. But maybe I’m old-fashioned.
Peter,
There is a clear reason why – there is very little (if any) difference in practical terms between the extreme left and the extreme right. Murderous fascist dictators have a lot in common with murderous communist dictators.
GG just could not tell the difference, but then, in practical terms, neither can I.
Murderous communist dictators write better poetry (e.g. Mao) and commission the composing of better national anthems (e.g. Stalin).
Rumsfeld payed Saddam a visit.
Like Pauline Hanson Galloway is getting more attention than he deserves. Hhe does speak for two divergent groups of opinion which have a right to be heard even if he is incompotent to do so, and even if one disagrees with them.
Actually, I think you’re short on history. It’s common to visit and praise dictators! Look over all the examples in the ’20s and ’30s, and during the cold war (e.g. Thatcher and Ceausescu). Churchill himself praised Hitler on specific matters.
The only difference nowadays is that the man was convicted in absentia by the systems that the pollies sought approval from – systems that GG was not swayed by, which shows that by being an old guard type of pollie he was actually better than the new sort (who fled for a different cover).
George Bush was drooling over his new facist buddy Karimov in Uzbekistan just the other day.
Andrew Bartlett says “It continually baffles me that people seem to be willing to live with such a patently absurd and undemocratic system and it receives such minimal comment in amongst all the election analysis.”
At least the Australian system works reasonably well and has allowed the Democrats to dissappear. I hated them more than I hated the Greens, and that’s saying something.
The success of a system is measured by its success in keeping things under control. It only does what people want and/or what is good for them in the incidental pursuit of maintaining their informed or uninformed acquiescence, or at least so much of it as makes it cost-effective to use more forceful methods on the rest.
Elegant statement PML.
Perhaps I’m ever so slightly less cynical than you, so I’d be inclined to amend your formulation of the measure of the success of a system by observing that there is often a dialectic in the minds of the political classes aimed at prioritising the costs of giving people what they want and the opportunities of maintaining their acquiescence.
A system’s success should be measured by its ability to let the people live their own lives the way they want to.
Control is vastly over-rated and frequently counter-productive. Kim Jong-Il seems to have good control – that does not mean I rate ‘juche’ as a good system.
PML and Katz – consent is very different to acquiescence. Did you really mean that? If so, I am much more of an optimist than I thought.
“Should” has little to do with it, except in that incidental way I described. Yes, I used “acquiescence” on purpose, after thinking about the more usual “consent” and deciding there was an important distinction.
From the point of view of those on top, control is all that is left that matters; the “productive” side only matters to them in the same incidental means-to-an-end way. Of course, under the right circumstances that translates into giving them an incentive towards equity, efficiency, and so on, and they may even internalise those values – but that’s not the fundamental incentive for them. To think otherwise is to make the mistake of the co-operative Jews who thought Hitler needed them for the war effort.
Just remember that the purpose of power is power, and if you would rather have it owtherwise that only shows that you haven’t got power and adapted to it. Been corrupted, if you prefer.
Of course, bureaucracy is more harnful and wasteful than any tyrannical whims, even if less obviously so. Gibbon pointed that out.