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I keep hearing people on all sides saying what we need is “a strong and stable government. ” By strong we seem to mean unchallengable: Supreme Power. In a democracy?

Coalition is NOT a failure of politics - it’s a success. We need people talking to each other, checking each other, stopping each other doing stupid things. It’s majority government that fails people by not representing the true breadth of views of the people.

Not that many days ago a few Conservatives and much of the right-wing press appeared to be calling for something like the equivalent of Acerbo Law (look it up). It was essentially a way to strengthen a party who didn’t quite have a majority - so that they do have a majority. Deeply undemocratic. And it resulted in Mussolini’s fascists gaining great power ikn the 1920s.

I’m finding myself getting extremely angry about the way all this has been conducted. The secrecy. The way politicians seem to have forgotten that they’re public servants. I’m angry with the LibDems for so easily and quickly teaming with the Conservatives. And I’m angry with Labour for being so unflexible and not engaging in discussions.

If we’re going to have coalition government, let’s have proper coalition government - where all the popular parties are represented.

I’d like to hope we’re moving away from majority government and into an era of coalitions. (PR will ensure this.) And if this is the case, then the parties have to grow up and accept that things need to be done differently. A proper democratic coalition would have Lab, Con, Lib around the table, getting proportional amount of seats in cabinet etc. I suspect it will take the British polotical culture a long time to work this out. But maybe in a decade things will be more civilised and more democratic.

So we have our ConDem government (probably). We can only hope that if Cameron tries to do anything seriously damaging to the country, then LibDems will vote against it. We can only hope that the LibDems have not committed themselves so deeply that there’s no way out. They can bring down this government if they want. Of course, the grim reality is that the LibDems have no money left for another election (unlike Labour and Conservative who can raise money from their rich friends). So they’re stuck there.

Last word to Mark Steel on twitter: “Now I know it’s not entirely your fault, but it’s only fair if all of you who voted LibDem to ‘Keep the Tories out’ lines up for a good slap.”

OK, the results are not all in yet, but it’s roughly what we were led to expect. So now what? The situation no politician was willing to speculate about. Looks like we have LibDems going to Conservatives to do the gentlemanly thing and talk to the people with the biggest share of the vote first. Nick Clegg talking about it as if it’s just about numbers, seems to be ignoring policies. And seriously, would anyone trust LibDems again if they propped up the Tories? is this genuinely what those people thought they were voting for? From the LibDems I know, I’d say emphatically not.

Who should be talking?

But here’s my problem: if it really is about going with the people’s mandate like he says, then Conservatives  and Labour should be forming a pact, not Con-Lib!! (if anything Con and Lab have more in common, I’d say.)

So, we’re told we’re in confusion… as if The Public have failed to vote properly. It’s being presented as a crisis. I hate the stupid rolling news - BBC is showing a live helicopter shot of Clegg’s car “making it’s way through the london traffic”! And there’s speculation about 1974-type scenario: minority government then another election in months. Surely we’ve moved on from that?

The polticians said they didn’t want “behind closed doors deals” - all parties have said they don’t want to do this (they’ve used it as argument against nhing parliament). Fine: easy, just do the deals publically then!

Coalition not Pact

It makes absolutely no sense for the parties that came first and third getting together. Other countries must be laughing at us! The coalition should be between the strong first and second! The very fact that this is unthinkable to Labour and Conservative exposes someething ver deeply wrong with our political system.

It really is very simple. The people of Britain have placed most of their votes with Labout and Conservative. It is those two parties who should be working together to make a coalition  that truly represents the mandate.

The Lib Dems should hardly get a look in, given their share of the vote. (And this is truly what people actually object to - them having “kingmaker” powers, large representation for small vote share)

What situtuations should the coalition be between first and third parties, excluding the second? It might make sense if Lib and Con were very closely allied in terms of policy and very far from Lab. But that is clearly not the case here. The Labour party has  exempted itself for purely childish reasons!

People seem to think “work with” has to mean “agree with”. Trust shouldn’t come into it, it’s not needed: if you’re paying attention to the issues, you don’t need to trust the leaders, because you are engaging. It is only if you (the public, or the backbench MPs) are being lazy and not engaging that you need Trust.

A Hung Parliament Is Dangerous?

This myth of a “strong stable” government… meaning giving absolute power to one party - so entrenched in our political culture - really needs to be swept away. If we had a fair voting system (some form of PR), we’d never have a single party having majority control.

Is  hung parliament really such a terrible thing. Isn’t it possible it’s actually a positive thing? If we had proportional representation in this country, all parliaments would be hung. Parties would be forced to always work together. Let’s use the word “coalition” - which suggests real engagement - as opposed to “hung” which suggests a failure.

Coalition government is pretty common too. In the whole of Europe only three countries currently have a majority government (France, Greece, Malta)

One argument against coalition government is that it will lead to worsening debt problems and and fiscal imprudence. Here’s the evidence that this is rubbish.

Coalition government is something we should strive for. It’s far more democratic than Supreme Power to whoever got half the seats (usually not much over a third of the votes) because it means the popular parties all get a say.

A Real Opportunity

We now have a real chance to develop our country’s political system into something mature and modern. A chance to finally sweep out the historical anomalies. To have a proper grown up political system. Like other countries.

We shouldn’t be in a situation where we’ve said what we want but we don’t know what we’re going to get.

A couple of positives

I’m encouraged by the anger of people being turned away from voting: not exactly the voter apathy we are told about.

I’m thrilled by the election of Caroline Lucas in Brighton. So refreshing to see her interviewed by Paxman and actually answering the question! It’s
refreshing but also actually exposes/shows up how poor other politicians are.

There are still things bugging me about the Leaders Debate.

• The fact that the audience was not allowed to clap, boo, cheer or react in any way. To be honest the whole thing was set up to be so sterile it was close to pointless. The leaders were so busy trying to remember their lines that they didn’t even listen (and react) to the garbage the others were spouting. Or maybe they weren’t allowed; was that the agreed etiquette? (even the ghastly screensaver background made me think someone had made a decision to simply mesmerise us… it was just some ambient TV)
• Cameron proposed a dole system where, if you were offered a job and turned it down, then you would get benefits cut or removed (the impression he gave was that this problem was so widespread and so damaging that it was destroying society… nonsense, but that’s another issue); Brown, apparently oblivious to what had just been said, pretty much parrotted the same. An no one stopped them to say actually this is already the case! I know this, I was unemployed for a period last year.
• There was a general agreement on the “need to make cuts” but no willingness to discuss with clarity and exactness where those cuts should be. (”We’ll look after the NHS” - doesn’t seem to turn into an assurance that nothing will be cut there. Or “there will be cuts, but we’ll protect anything important” without specifying what is considered protected)
• David Cameron believes the banks should lend small businesses more because it’s “our money” the banks have. Great, but what policies will you put in place to force the banks to do this? And how does this fit with your determination to “cut red tape” and remove regulation. It made no sense, and no one batted an eyelid.
• Commentators discussing as if it’s a debating competition and we’re supposed to award a prize for best technique. Look how confident his facial expression was this time, how his posture has improved, how much more he smiled, how sincere he appeared, or how well he could do passion.

We need to get back to real challenge of what the politicians are saying, and actually expose them when they are saying nothing. There’s been a lot of talk of the power of Twitter in this election, but I see that as fairly marginal (aside from the interesting, and essentially private, viewing experience I had on Thursday following twitter while watching TV) - twitter is brief and silly. It’s not a robust enough form of communication for real challenge.

What we need is the equivalent of scientific peer review: Wikipedia. It gives a structured way to challenge nonsense:

• require citations
• forum discussing individual points and challenges
• no weasel words
• clear rules about relevancy etc. (prevents sales pitches)

no hiding behind pseudo-semantics.

So we’d have none of this nonsense about cuts, without any substance to the statements - because people wouldn’t let them get away with it!

It’s quite simple. I just want politicians to answer the questions that are put to them. And it’s not good enough for them to act like they think the questions aren’t worth answering.

The other big problem with the way politicians are speaking is that they are not laying out a table of exact programmes and decided policies. They want us just to like them and to trust them. They all want to “get into power” and be left to “make decisions” as things present themselves in the future. In reality there is very little of that in real politics. But people (politicians, managers…), being lazy and arrogant, want to be left to make judgements and choices at the last minute, and not have to commit now. How many times have we heard a politician say “well, I’m not going to answer a hypothetical question!” But that’s exactly what they should be doing. Unless they can be clear about exactly how they will make decisions, they’re not telling us anything!

How they make decisions is a significantly harder thing to express of course. It’s a meta-level. It goes deeper into the philosophical background of people’s fundamental beliefs. It would be fascinating to explore these, but realistically it’s even more an area politicians would not like to discuss. They actually pretend it’s undiscussable. They want to keep things vague, because they think this will make them more powerful (and incidentally explains why they are so petrified of a hung parliament) - because if they’ve committed to everything in advance, then they’re not really powerful decision makers, they’re just slaves carrying out orders…

Bah! Humbug.

Politicians should not be content with the superficial, with half-awake photo-opportunities, with making vague promises, and attention-grabbing unsubstantiated claims.

I’m off to watch the real thinkers on TED.

Leaders debate time again. So bland. They all say stuff like “Banks should help small businesses more.” OK, great, but what are you going to legislate to make this happen. It’s that step that’s missing.

I have a picture in my mind of the politicians standing up on stage, holding bats. Members of the audience are chucking balls at them. These guys are well practiced, and hot every single ball back. Wow, we can be impressed by that. But it’s not what they should be doing. The should be catching the balls and investigating them, addressing them. Real engagement, not just Quick-get-rid-of-it approach.

And I can’t help feeling that the people who currently make it to the top in politics are the ones who are best at deflecting, rather than the ones who have clearest thinking processes or best ideas. Sad and disappointing state of affairs. And all the commentators talking about the performances are simply propagating this superficial view of “how well he came across.”

[There were a couple exceptions where real issues/policies came to the fore: Clegg saying Council House schemes should be started again, for example]

An articulate but clearly frustrated woman in Question Time audience tonight derided the panel for never answering questions. People had come to ask questions. And the politicians were insulting us by simply taking those questions as cues for prepared speeched. Or to patronisingly say “I hear what you’re saying.” (when clearly they didn’t listen)

The twitter comments from Chris Addison, Will Self, Charlie Brooker, Mark Steel, Mark Watson during the debates were the most incisive. Maybe comedians and writers feel free to say what they observe. And politicians aren’t. Well, there’s the problem…

Favourite tweets:

• watsoncomedian:  Ah, at last we’re back to talking about ‘relevant things we’ve recently done’. This week’s theme: ‘I recently went to a factory’.
• mrmarksteel: “I visited a manufacturer today…” How does that make you an authority? I bet you don’t tell us who you visited yesterday.
• mrmarksteel: Cameron’s a Tory to help manufacturing apparently. Like his hero Thatcher - manufacturing manufacturing manufacturing - all she ever did.
• mrmarksteel: “9 energy ministers, 2 of which were the same person.” Well that’s 8 then you innumerate twat.
• watsoncomedian: Strange remark from Brown - ‘I’m pleased to say a majority of students are now women’. Did some of them change sides?
• watsoncomedian: Cameron maintains his 100% record of agreeing with the questioner. He has yet to begin a response with ‘well, firstly, that’s bollocks…’
• charltonbrooker: If only someone would just invent a magic fun-job-creating machine, this bit of the debate would be far shorter.

Last word from Janet Street-Porter, on QT: “I’ll tell you why I want a hung parliament. Because I want all these politicians to Grow Up!”

So… Brown makes a painful gaffe - well, it’s injected some interest into politics - this would make a fab episode of The Thick Of It, if it didn’t seem too far fetched!

I hated his patronising attitude (that stuff about her job) but this is what politicians are pushed into. And his answer was actually very good on the issue of a million immigrants from Europe: he said a million British people were living in the rest of Europe, that this is just how people can move about.

And Gillian Duffy? Well, we’re not allowed to criticise her now. Even quite intelligent commentators are talking about the important issues she raised/questions she asked. She didn’t. Read the transcript. There was no actual question about immigration. In fact what she said was “all these eastern European what are coming in, where are they flocking from?” Er… Eastern Europe? (She’s going to make an est. £250,000 if she agrees to interviews, and is now a part of British political history. A footnote, perhaps, but famous forever.)

He’s clearly been told to keep smiling - but this looked creepy during his apology on her doorstep.

And everyone has said something they’d be ashamed to have overheard. So it seems there’s some sympathy towards him.

[Am I the only one that suspects the whole Gillian Duffy thing was a set up by Labour PR? A fall and a public apology, the human side of Brown? It's all too perfect... (Duffy's careful use of agenda, her scruplulously perfect background...) ...yeah, maybe not...]

He has gone away with an impression that she was berating him from a xenophobic point of view, which wasn’t truly the case. But it was an impression. He wasn’t listening. Here’s what that tells us: he’s not paying attention.

And this is what worries me - politicians not paying attention.

The spin is that Brown was out “meeting real people” but the truth is that he’s not meeting, he’s only shaking hands for a photo opportunity. Pathetic.

More on politicians not paying attention:

• Graham Linehan reports a couple of stunning errors. The letter where “Stephen Timms thinks that the IP in IP address stands for Intellectual Property.  Absolutely no crime in that, unless you happen to be The Minister For Digital Britain, which Timms happens to be. ” He ends noting “These people want to lead us“
• Marcus Brigstocke notices a candidate leaflet which spells Iraq “Eraq”. On the front page!
• Cameron on that 10 year old navy recruit

I think there’s something wrong with me. I used to find General Election month terrifically stimulating. I liked the opportunity for political debate. I devoured all the media coverage. I even campaigned.

And this time we’ve more media coverage than ever before (including the first televised leader debates in the UK! Yes, we are that slow to catch up!) and a genuinely unpredictable result. And still the whole thing leaves me cold.

I’m so bored of politicians that play safe. No one’s got very much to say, really. They’re just patronising us with a tedious act of pretending to be likeable. I don’t care. I don’t want to like them. I’m really missing old opinionated characters: Tony Benn, Shirley Williams, Ann Widdocombe. (Is Jon Redwood still around, or are they hiding him in a cupboard?) See, politicians are so terrified of Saying The Wrong Thing, so coached and groomed to be “on message” that any opinion has been diluted right out of them. And all the major parties believe (wrongly, I think) that radical views will make them unpopular (”unelectable” was the old 1980s term pushed by the Right).

It’s lacklustre… the whole £150 for married couples thing paraded as radical thinking - was ludicrous.

Someone (was it Gyles Brandreth?) quoted the old  point about disregarding anything uncontroversial: it’s nonsense. If you wouldn’t expect another politician to put the opposite point of view then it is pointless to say. If a politician says “I want a better world”, he’s saying nothing. Ignore him.

Tories saying “You Do It”… As, essentially, an anarchist at heart, this should appeal to me but it doesn’t. Because he’s failing to take into account how individuals should deal with, say, the banking crisis.

What people really want is a government that is willing to act like a government. To stop Commerce and Industry from behaving in a way that is detrimental to the general good.

Previous governments have been so weak. Spineless. Unwilling to stand up to USA when they want to go to war to protect oil interests. Unwilling to stand up to bankers when they ask for no regulation. And look at the mess this has yielded.

From a recent TV interview:

Mr Brown said: “In the 1990s the banks all came to us and said: ‘Look, we don’t want to be regulated, we want to be free of regulation’.

“Everybody in the City was saying and all the complaints I was getting were: ‘Look you’re regulating them too much’. The truth is that globally and nationally we should have been regulating them more. So I’ve learnt from that. So you don’t listen to the industry when they say ‘This is good for us’.”

Come on! Anyone could have told you that!

OK, what else?

• Oh! The Labour Party have a chapter in the manifesto called “crime & immigration.” Hmmm….
• Best tweet (Tim Minchin): timminchin I’ve never heard a good reason why voting is not compulsory here as in Oz. Oh, and abstaining cos you’re disenchanted is incredibly dumb.
• The vote now show - on radio 4 is the best thing to come out of theis election. Don’t miss it.

But what’s driven me to write is this. I really hate the anti-democratic stance taken by Lab/Con against people voting LibDem

The editor of the sun admits they deliberately sidelined LibDem: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/18/clegg-media-elite-murdoch-lib-dem

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8628765.stm

For Labour Lord Mandelson warned a hung parliament might give “disproportionate power” to the Lib Dems.

Right… because they’ve always had proportionate representation in parliament?

Anyway, let’s look at what this “disproportionate power” really means. It means a casting vote, a few extra votes to a body that already has very close to a majority. It doesn’t mean they could do something unsupported by the majority, like the threats seem to imply.

I’m personally keen on a hung parliament. Cameron warns of “some sort of indecisive vote, haggling and negotiation”. Negotiation is a Good Thing - it’s a form of cooperation. And what would he call decisive? 100%?

Current poll (YouGov) puts:

• LibDem 33%
• Con 32%
• Lab 26

I’ll be voting, of course I will. But not for any of those parties.

I’ve been reading Armando Iannucci’s “Audacity of Hype” recently. It’s patchy as you might expect - some throwaway random stupidity but also some really really on-the-ball political and social comment.
(With the launch of the iPad the other day, I coincidentally came across the spoof of the iPhone launch. Hilarious: describing Steve Jobs explaining you don’t even have to touch it, you just wink at this icon here.)

Much more interestingly, he’s been saving the rest of us the trouble and paying very close attention to the Chilcot Enquiry, posting a series of tweets in the run up to Tony Blair’s questioning: http://twitter.com/AIannucci - a list of questions they should (but probably won’t) ask. Questions that really expose the changes of mind and hypocrisies.

I’m taking the liberty of repeating the full set here. I think these really expose the level of scandal that has gone on. (I’ve tidied up the abbreviations and typos a little to make it more readable)

1 Was regime change an aim? Campbell diary Apr 2nd ‘02 records you said it was, though Straw agrees that aim is illegal

2 Advisor Manning writes Jan23 ‘03 your support for Bush even if no UN vote. Mar ‘03 you tell House of Commons no decision taken. Explain.

3. On Sep 24th ‘02, you told Commons Saddam could get nuke ‘within a year or two.’ No intelligence ever claimed this. Explain.

4 Between 7+17th Mar’03 Attorney General changed war from illegal to legal. How many helped revise advice? Are you happy they talk to Inquiry?

5 Did Attorney General’s wife play any part in change of advice from Illegal to Legal? Would you be happy for her to speak to Inquiry?

6 Wilmshurst resignation note was censored for “security”. Censored bit referred to 7th Mar advice war is illegal. Not security. Explain.

Q for Goldsmith. Do you stand by claim you changed Iraq advice to “legal” yourself? Happy for wife and Lord Falconer to confirm this?

7 Legal advice was war illegal as self defence as Saddam not planning imminent attack. Why did you not retract 45minute claim?

8 Why did you present Attorney General’s advice to Cabinet, Commons and Military as clear and unequivocal when you knew it wasn’t?

9 Last Dec John Prescott said ‘Bush is crap. You know it, I know it, the party knows it.’ Why were our troops at his disposal?

10. Did you let political considerations delay proper military planning and financing, especially over troop equipment?

I could barely bring myself to listen to Blair’s answers… I will write more on this topic when I’ve calmed down a bit.

Can’t work out whether to be terrified by the latest disease apparently sweeping the planet. Gordon Brown is going to write to us all this week, apparently. And there’s alarming suggestions by the WHO that “up to” 40% people will “be affected”. Is it all just hype and media excitement?

It strikes me that these pandemics used to be called things like Russian flu, Asian flu, Spanish flu, Hong Kong flu. But in these more enlightened times, would it seem racist to classify them by Where They Came From, is that the problem? So now we call these diseases Bird flu, Swine flu… Yeah, blame the animals, they won’t get offended!

Some years ago, I knew some Americans who came to live here. Not knowing anything about how to find a place to stay in Glasgow, they’d accepted whatever the agency sent them. They were overjoyed to find out they’d be living on an estate! …the Queen lives on an estate, doesn’t she? When it turned out to be a housing estate in the east end of Glasgow, they were less pleased.

Clive Anderson came up with a great quote in his “Chat Room” radio programme last week.

“The upper classes tend to be similar to the lower classes. There’s a sort of established theory… They gamble a lot, they drink a lot, they smash up things, they have lots of children, they marry young, they live on estates, they have guns.”

Excellent! So true…

This was in the context of a serious discussion about David Attenborough’s support of the Stop At Two campaign for population control. For more info: http://www.optimumpopulation.org/

Panorama has revealed that Primark has used child labour to produce its ultra cheapo clothing: Guardian’s report. Yeah, well, of course it has!! Did anyone really think otherwise? Are we in such a state of denial about how things are produced?

So… Primark is acting all shocked and firing the firms that have done this - see BBC report.

Am I just too cynical? I find this funny: http://www.ethicalprimark.co.uk/

And this highlights a much wider debate regarding what we really think we should pay for things… whether music, food etc. And how we need to get out of the way of thinking of things as being disposable. Just today, Gordon Brown’s been telling us to Stop Wasting Food! Quite right, but shouldn’t that be obvious?

We must stop thinking of things as being throwaway… i’ve heard people talk about Primark as “use-once clothing”… or even - just buy a selection, doesn’t matter if you never wear it at that price. This is horrible in a world of finite resources.