The Virtual Stoa

Is it a problem that both John Prescott and Bhikhu Parekh are Baron INSERT NAME HERE of Kingston-upon-Hull? Or does it make the crucial difference that I always see hyphens in the news reports for Prescott (Kingston-upon-Hull) but not for Parekh (Kingston upon Hull)? Ought they to have a fight, or something, to settle the matter of who is going to receive loyalty oaths from local vassals, or have the Kingston-upon-Hull serf population work from time to time on their estates? (I am reasonably confident that Prescott would win that fight.) Are there other examples of places with multiple peers attached? And do the locals mind this kind of duplication? Questions, questions.

The 1937 Buxton Liberal Party Assembly:

This Assembly of the Liberal Party, indignantly aware of the grossly unequal distribution of property in this country, believes that the greatest possible measure of personal ownership, with the independence and security it brings ought to be enjoyed by all. It also believes that the opportunities for a full life hitherto open only to the rich should be placed before all. It recognises these twin ends as the inspiration of its domestic policy and pledges its whole strength in urging them on the nation in far-reaching reforms to achieve them.

The 1959 Liberal Party Manifesto:

People Count . . . This traditionally private-enterprise country must pull together to bring about ownership for all.

Liberals want co-ownership and co-partnership schemes encouraged through tax-reliefs. They want special tax-free employee savings accounts schemes brought in. They want more people to be able to buy their own homes. Schedule A income tax and Stamp duty must be abolished. To encourage mobility of labour, Liberals want temporary unemployment allowances increased.

The February 1974 Liberal Party Manifesto:

To finance all these proposals, there must be a radical redistribution of income and inherited wealth, the credit income tax proposals being the principal instrument for the former, and the Liberal proposal for a Gifts and Inheritance Tax, to replace Estate Duty and related in its incidence and rate to the gift or legacy and the wealth of the recipient, for the latter.

Stuart White on the abolition of the CTF, over at Next Left: “a great liberal policy killed by the Liberal Democrats”.

Is there anything interesting to say about Andy Burnham, or anything to report that reflects well on him? He’s one of those people who has largely flown under my radar. I remember seeing him on telly a few years ago, when he was reasonably new in some not insignificant job or other, and being underwhelmed, but since I don’t really get my political news from the TV, and I don’t follow the minutiae of Government policy, he’s basically passed me by this last parliamentary term or so. So: any Andy Burnham-related thoughts and observations would be more than more than welcome.

UPDATE [25.5.10]: Jamie K has more.

If you were marking examination papers on nineteenth century British political history, what mark would you give someone who described the 1832 Reform Act in these terms?

[It was] landmark legislation, from politicians who refused to sit back and do nothing while huge swathes of the population remained helpless against vested interests, who stood up for the freedom of the many, not the privilege of the few.

And what comment might you be tempted to write in the margin?

Pinched from Hopi Sen, who grabbed it from the Downing St website:

Time to revisit some of the predictions I made before polling day, to see how they stack up in light of events…

Concerning the outcome, I wrote that “my hunch… is that the Tories are going to win fewer than 300 seats.” Well, they made it to over 300, though not by much, but what was really wrong with my guess at the Tory seat-count was that the assumptions I was working from proved to be quite wrong. I thought both that the Lib Dems would win all their seats, and make inroads into the Con-Lib marginals and that the Labour vote would be much less resilient in the Con-Lab marginals – and in the end things were the other way around: the Lib Dem “surge” failed to materialise, and in the end they lost ground to the Tories; while the Labour vote held up pretty well, and the party was able to hold on to 250+ of its seats.

Thinking about the prospect of a hung parliament, then, I said that I thought “a Tory minority government seems by far the most likely outcome”, and that a coalition government “seems implausible”. I gave three reasons: first, the parties hate one another; second, that the Lib Dems were an unbalanced formation, “with the activists to the left of the MPs, and the MPs to the left of the bulk of the Lib Dem voters”, and that this would work to paralyze the party in tricky political manoeuvrings; third, that the Lib Dems’ rules – the so-called “triple lock” – for ratifying a deal would mean that the other party leaders would be reluctant to try to deal with them.

Obviously, I was spectacularly wrong here, apparently on all three counts. First, there really doesn’t seem to be any significant animosity between the Tories and the Lib Dems, but rather the love-fest we’ve been witnessing over the last few days. Second, the initial analysis of data about how people voted seems to have more Lib Dem voters identifying with the centre-left rather than with points further right. (Though I still think that the votes the Lib Dems were chasing most energetically were right-of-centre votes in Lib-Con marginals.) And, third, as we saw today, the “triple lock” was terribly easy for the leadership to get through – I was following the #ldconf tweetfeed earlier today, and apart from one special conference delegate denouncing the coalition as an attack on the Welsh working class, there seemed to be general approval of the leadership’s behaviour, and achievements, over the last week-and-a-bit.

I think the clue to my general wrongness may come, though, in what I went on to get more or less right. I said that I thought that “if there’s a hung parliament, all the party bosses will be acting in a risk-averse kind of a way” as “they’ll all be nervous about a second general election”. But I was imagining that the Lib Dems would be gaining seats in the election, and that a Tory party that had failed to secure a majority would be unwilling to deal with a party that felt itself on an incoming tide. In fact, of course, the story of election night was Lib Dem failure, to the extent that the Lib Dems were sufficiently afraid of the prospect of that second general election that they were willing to countenance transforming themselves into, in effect, the left wing of the Conservative Party in order to avoid it. I thought that this kind of fear would get in the way of two parties making a deal; in fact (as Charles Kennedy confirmed in today’s Observer), it seems to be what made it possible.

Happily, my final paragraph of speculation proved to be spot on – “obviously it won’t turn out” as I forecast, I said, before going on to denounce three specific bits of punditry as fantasy politics: the prospect of a deal on PR, Clegg becoming Prime Minister, or the so-called “progressive alliance” beloved of the Toynbee tendency in the punditocracy. So, at least I got something right.

Like many other people, I thought Evan Harris was safe in Oxford West and Abingdon. There was a reason for thinking he might not be: the constituency boundaries had been redrawn to include less of Oxford and its student-heavy city centre, and more of the outlying Tory villages, but I was inclined to discount the importance of this. In general, the Lib Dems looked good in the polls, and, in particular, polling in marginals suggested that their vote was holding up well against the Tories. Harris’ majority was a healthy 7,683. And the Conservative candidate clearly looked like a bit of an idiot. So, as I say, I thought he was safe.

If I’d really thought he was in danger, I might have voted tactically on the day to try and save him. After all, I’m a not-terribly-tribal tribal Labour person (just as Andromache – who left a dead mouse in our bed this morning – is a not-terribly-wild wild animal). I voted in the Compass ballot to endorse the issuing of a statement in support of anti-Conservative tactical voting, and, more generally, I think the Lib Dems are a less toxic political formation than the Conservatives. If politics really were just about choosing between them, then it wouldn’t be difficult to choose.

But I voted Labour instead, and I learned later in the evening that – basically – it’s people like me who denied Harris his victory. Harris lost by a minuscule 176 votes, and there were almost six thousand Labour votes, so only 3% of those Labour supporters had to switch their votes, in order for him to be safe. And, as time passes, I’m more and more glad I cast the vote I did.

I’ve heard that on election day, the Lib Dems were sending their local activists into Oxford East to help defeat the local Labour MP Andrew Smith, thinking that Evan Harris had the OxWAb election in the bag. And Labour supporters in OxWAb who might be tempted to vote for the Lib Dems need to be clear about this. If we cast an effective anti-Tory tactical vote in this constituency by voting for Evan Harris, what we are doing is helping to provide support for the Lib Dem anti-Labour campaign in the next constituency along. It’s much better for the Labour Party in Oxford that OxWAb is highly marginal between the Lib Dems and the Tories, and that this constituency sucks in as much campaigning effort as possible from the Lib Dems, so that we can concentrate on the important stuff, like winning Oxford East and controlling the City Council. (And, yes, both goals were achieved in Thursday’s election.)

There’s a tweet going round that reads like this:

A curious statistic: Oxford’s combined vote: LD: 41087 Con: 33633 Lab: 27937. One Con MP, one Lab MP. #electoralreform

On the face of it, that’s not a bad argument in support of some kind of reformed voting system — and, in general, I support some kind of reformed voting system. But appearances can be misleading. The Lib Dem raw total, for example, includes both those Labour supporters who cast a tactical pro-Harris vote in OxWAb and those Tory and Green supporters who cast a tactical anti-Smith vote in Oxford East. And so on. We live in a system that encourages tactical voting, as first-choices will so often not be available – so it’s tricky to use the numbers thrown up by that system straightforwardly as evidence for its unfairness.

What we can say is that a set of elections were held on Thursday in Oxford – in two parliamentary constituencies and in every ward for the City Council. The parties fought the elections on the same terms as each other, and under the same rules, and all of the local parties had plausible aspirations: the bigger parties to win parliamentary seats, and the Greens to win seats on the City Council. Those local parties pursued particular tactics and strategies to try to maximise their electoral gains, and the choices they made shaped the outcome of those elections. And those elections threw up a very clear winner — the Labour Party — and a very clear loser — the Lib Dems. The Oxford Lib Dems misunderstood what was going on around them and they over-reached, making a set of bad political choices. They thought they could win everything, and instead they won nothing. And, yes, the voting system has punished them, but not – it seems to me – unfairly.

I’d reach for the language of hubris and nemesis, but these are the Lib Dems we’re talking about, and for them (especially today, of all days, as they engage in talks with the Tories to put David Cameron into Downing St) the appropriate language isn’t that of tragedy.

It’s comedy: hahahahahaha.

What if Gordon Brown were to refuse to talk to the Lib Dems, and then were to meet the new parliament at the head of a minority Labour government, in order to present a Queen’s Speech that was organised around great big chunks of the Lib Dem manifesto — including generous dollops of all four “steps to a fairer Britain”: “fair taxes”, “a fair chance for every child”, “a fair future”, and “a fair deal”, with the last to include PR along the lines of the Single Transferable Vote?

In those circumstances, would the Lib Dems dare to vote him down? And wouldn’t the Tories basically be snookered? And wouldn’t we get pretty much all the benefits of the “progressive alliance” that the Polly Toynbees of the world fantasise about without any of the major difficulties (i.e., having the Lib Dems as part of a coalition)?

It might not be the best way forward for the Labour Party. I can see a strong argument for making sure that the Party ends up in opposition. And obviously just having the Lib Dems vote with the Labour government doesn’t quite solve all the problems of parliamentary arithmetic. But if Brown decided he wanted to stay as Prime Minister, why not do it this way? It’d certainly be fun to watch.

From “William, Prime Minister”, by Richmal Crompton (1930):

“Do shut up int’ruptin’, said Henry, “I’m tryin’ to tell you ‘bout this gen’ral election. There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ‘em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ‘em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by taking everyone’s money off ‘em and there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves.”

From “The Social Contract”, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762):

The English people thinks it is free; it is greatly mistaken, it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as they are elected, it is enslaved, it is nothing. The use it makes of its freedom during the brief moments it has it fully warrants its losing it.

Those seem to me to be the two most important reflections. Am I missing anything else?

In today’s number one soaraway Sun:

SIXTEEN Page 3 Girls in all their glory represent the very image of freedom in this country.

But if Labour or the Lib Dems win the election, this could be the last time they are allowed to pose together.

MPs Harriet Harman and Lynne Featherstone will move swiftly to change the law and ban Page 3 forever.

Our national treasures – who even enjoy the Royal seal of approval from our future King Prince Charles – will be no more.

And at a stroke the very liberties that put the Great into Great Britain will be torn asunder.

The radical ideas of the 17th-century philosopher John Locke helped shape our freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and, later, America’s Constitution.

Lib Dem frontbencher Featherstone was cheered by women’s rights activists when she declared she would “love to take on Page 3″.

But our Poppy  said: “The basis of Lockean thought is his theory of the Contract of Government, under which all political power is a trust for the benefit of the people.

“His thinking underpins our ideas of national identity and society. Please don’t let those who seek to ban our beauty win. Vote to save Page 3!”

Poppy isn’t the only page three lovely who has immersed herself in the classics of modern Anglophone political thought.

Katie has opined that, “As the sixth US president John Quincy Adams said, ‘Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.’ My thoughts entirely.”

And Hollie “thinks Gordon Brown’s hated NI rise shatters the three basic laws of economics”. She said: “As guru Adam Smith wrote in his seminal The Wealth of Nations, they are: a free economy, free marketing and laissez-faire government. That means Hands Off, Gordy.” [via WJ]

So this morning the intertubes is all excited about the prospect of what they’re calling on Twitter the #torycoup.

Roughly speaking, the idea is that in the event of a hung parliament, David Cameron isn’t going to wait patiently for Gordon Brown to deliberate at leisure over his future as prime minister, but is going publicly to declare victory and demand “the keys to Number 10″ (which is a funny expression, as the famous front door to 10 Downing St doesn’t have a keyhole in it); and that he’ll be cheered on in doing this by the rightwing press. The normally very sensible Sunder Katwala sets out the argument and the evidence over here, and a version of the argument has also been posted over here.

Count me as seriously unimpressed.

There’s a lot wrong with the British constitution, but one of its virtues is that things get made up as we go along. There’s something absolutely bonkers about lefties – of all people – getting all precious about the ways in which the Cabinet Secretary’s memo about the proper procedures in the event of a hung parliament might not be followed to the letter, or worrying that – my goodness! – the Queen might be drawn into political controversy. How undignified!

People are making analogies with the presidential election in the United States in 2000 — but what was striking then was far more the spinelessness of the Dems rather than the unscrupulousness of the Repugs. The bottom line is that politics is about power, and if the Tories are the only ones willing to play hardball, then – bluntly – good for them.  If the Queen discredits herself along the way by being pressured into being openly partisan, then that’s a good thing, as it’ll work to hasten the end of this stupid monarchy.  And if voters disapprove of what the Tories are doing, then they’ll punish them when they get the chance. That’s democracy.

There’s a fun discussion taking place on a friend’s facebook page about which operatic characters remind us of the party leaders in this year’s election.

I’ve gone for Gordon Brown as Wotan [Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen], the powerful, one-eyed brooding figure who’s made the running in the past, but now has a few problems and can’t work out how he can rescue his agenda without screwing everything up (and, as he sees it, at least, risking the end of the world), and who is doomed to fade into nothingness.

Nick Clegg is Don Carlos [Verdi: Don Carlo(s)]. He thinks he’s a romantic hero and a great crusader for political liberty, but he doesn’t really understand the nature of the game he’s playing in, and will ultimately get screwed over by more ruthless participants. (I’ve only a hazy memory of the plot of this one, so apologies if this isn’t getting it quite right.)

And David Cameron? It’s a tricky one, but I reckon he’s Escamillo [Bizet: Carmen]. Superficially attractive,  but really a shallow, arrogant, pompous arse — though one with the considerable advantage of being the only major protagonist still alive and not in police custody at the end of the drama.

Obviously, it’s the Lib Dems that have made this election both interesting and enjoyable. If it were just a straight Lab – Con fight, then we’d be seeing the formation of a Conservative government with a large majority, and to the extent that that outcome’s not really on the cards, we the (substantial majority of the) people have good reason to be grateful to the Liberal Democrats.

That said, I’m finding it hard to see how the party will be able to do well out of the parliamentary shenanigans that are likely to follow. In the first place, there are the kinds of considerations laid out in this post from Brian Barder, which walk us through what the apparently agreed constitutional sequence of events is going to be in the event of a hung parliament. Now, I’m not so concerned about this kind of thing, as I think Brown is likely to quit fairly promptly in the event of a heavy defeat, for the inter-related reasons of not wanting to come across like Ted Heath after February 1974, and not wanting to doom Labour to an even worse defeat in a second general election, having visibly tried and failed to hold onto power after coming in third. But until he quits, the political initiative rests with him; and as soon as he quits, it passes over to David Cameron. People write as if it’s the choices that Clegg makes that will prove decisive after Thursday; but he’ll only ever be reacting to agenda set by others, and “screwing over the Lib Dems” will always be pretty high on those agenda.

If the Lib Dems were a clearly disciplined parliamentary force, and if Clegg were clearly a superb parliamentary tactician, then things might be different. But not even Lib Dem propagandists pretend that either of these is true. The Lib Dems are less centralised than the other parties, which suits them well when it comes to local campaigning, but this will be a source of weakness in a serious political fight at Westminster. And another of those things that isn’t being discussed much is this, that if there’s a hung parliament, the Lib Dems will be under sustained political pressure for the first time in their 20+ year existence, and there’s no reason to think that they’ll handle it at all well. (They can’t even get enough of a grip to run Oxford City Council, for goodness’ sake; it’s just fanciful to think they’ll somehow begin to function effectively as a political force when the stakes are about a billion times higher.)

So on the most straightforward reading of the situation, if there’s a hung parliament, Clegg’s bluff will be called. He can threaten to bring down a Tory government in a vote on the Queen’s Speech, but he’ll only perform if there’s reason to think that the Lib Dems will do even better in a second general election — and if I were David Cameron I’d be relishing the prospect of fighting all those Lib Dem / Tory marginals again in those circumstances. So what’s Clegg to do – if he isn’t to waste what ought to be the best Liberal opportunity since the Second World War? Answers in comments, please.