Mixed Blessings and Mixed Feelings

It's just before 10am on Friday morning and, as I sit here, the Conservatives have 291 seats, Labour 247 and the LibDems a mere 51. It's been a mixed night, with all the parties taking some comfort and some pain. What has happened?

Labour
have no mandate. Gordon's main source of comfort is that there has not been the anticipated meltdown. Labour are still the main party of opposition, at least in terms of voes cast. However, the warning signs are still there: the reasons for some of those votes are more worrying, if only because the party's ABC strategy seems to have (just) worked. This is one reason why Labour can claim some sort of victory: they haven't won, but the have prevented the Conservatives from gaining one. Many potential Lib Dem voters did switch, and many waverers still saw Labour as the best means of preventing a Conservative victory under the current system. And Ed Balls held his seat, but Charles Clarke didn't; this was quite amusing.

Conservatives
are the largest party, but they have no mandate either. Because over 60% of those who voted didn't want a Cameron-led Conservative government. Given the buy-in from the right-wing press and the power of the party's marketing machine this time round, that must be a worry for them. Cameron said today that the people want change. This may true, but people clearly don't seem to have much of an appetite for the kind of change that they are offering. After investing so much in David Cameron' presidential posturing that must ring some alarm bells in Conservative Central Office. If they can't deliver a knock-out punch in the current circumstance will they ever manage one?

Liberal Democrats
are, of all the parties, the most disappointed of all. One voter in 4 liked what they were offering, but they'll end with barely 10% of the seats available. It's hard to see how this is in any way equitable. They certainly suffered from the Brown pincer movement, with many potential supporters going to Labour at the last minute to prevent Conservative wins. This certainly seems to have happened in some marginals that were key targets for the Cameron team. With the system as it is now, this is a persistent danger for them. And Evan Harris didn't make it in Oxford; a real shame. Lembit Opik lost his seat too.

Others
The Greens finally have an MP (in Brighton). The BNP has trebled its share of the vote, with half a million people gifting them their mandate. These numbers are [relatively] small, but still a source of major concern to anyone further up the evloutionary chain than a tree shrew. UKIP managed to perform respectably, though not spectacularly, which suggests they have a core vote but little else.. And Esther Rantzen didn't win in Luton; thank God.

What does it all mean?
Your guess is as good as mine. After all the hype, the turnout was still only 65%. This is very worrying. Engagement with the electorate hasn't really got any better, in spite of the media's attempts to portray this election as a game changer. Weirdly, everything and nothing has changed overnight. It looks like Cameron may get his coveted keys to Downing Street, but it also looks like he's going to be seriously constrained in what he'll might be able to get through Parliament. Even with Unionist support he's still going to fall short of a majority. And his refusal to countenance electoral reform may yet come back to bite him hard. The problems with polling have also shown that something needs to change there too, and there may yet be legal challenges to results.

Another source of depression is that the media have fallen into the Presidential trap, predicating the campaign's coverage on the public personas of the party leaders. It has given them a nice, tidy narrative to package and run with but other campaigning and, more importantly, many of the issues, have been hidden in the perfect storm of the cult of personality. It's only going to get worse now the debate genie has been unleashed, when the focus isn't on what was said, only who won the debates. Then there was last night. The TV coverage was awful, with the Beeb using a hailstorm of hyperactive graphics in the style that were presaged back in the 1990's by The Day Today. It was still funny seeing Teresa May extrapolating a Tory victory fomr the swing in Sunderland South just before 11 o'clock though; this is the reason why coverage like that is rapidly become a one-note joke. Channel 4 had a brave stab at something different but I'm not convinced it really worked, more's the pity.

Meanwhile, in Whitby and Scarborough, the sitting Conservative was returned with an increased majority, though it was heartening that the Lib Dem candidate (even though finishing third) was pretty close to a deeply uninspiring Labour candidate. The BNP managed to poll 1445 votes but still lost their deposit, thankfully.

What this election has shown is the public's dissatisfaction with the current system. In spite of the much-trumpeted importance of this plebicite, a third of those eligible still didn't think it important enough to register a vote. The anger is clear to see, but the political classes seem to be either oblivious or indifferent to it. Something does have to change and this election is perhaps only the first sign that some sort of shift is coming, however slow and painful.

Eve Of Destruction

Well, here we are. It's the day before the election and, as yet, no one seems to have a clue how things are going to work out. The campaigning is getting pretty frantic now, with Cameron running the night shift and Brown working into the early hours too.

Reports are saying that anything upto 40% of voters are still not decided who to vote for tomorrow. The campaign hasn't helped though. The Presidential, ahem, sorry Prime Ministerial Debates have sucked the oxygen out of the campaign, with the focus being entirely on the leaders. For the Conservatives this has been interesting, with the man who wants to run the economy, George Osborne, keeping a lower profile than a convicted pædophile out on licence. For the LibDems, it means Vince Cable, a positive asset, has had a peripheral role. And for Labour has been that the focus has been on Brown, who is simply not a TV era politician, however able he might be (and I think he is very able). It also seems, unfortunately, that the debate format will be here to stay; they are easy for the media to package and analyse, concentrating not on the policy questions, but only on who won, when the 'victory' can be gained in such superficial ways.

The most worried must be Cameron's Conservatives. Form such a dominant position a year ago, they are in severe danger of not even being able to form a government, if polls are to be believed. Why? Personally I think it's because there's no enthusiasm for the amorphous 'vote for change' ticket his party have adopted. There is nothing there, like pulling the curtain in Oz to find the charlatan behind it. In a traditional setup, the Conservatives should be at least 10 points up in the polls now. But they're not. From a marketing point of view it's very interesting what has happened. They have run with making Dave look all presidential, like Barrack Obama, bashed us over the head repeatedly with the 'change' theme, the rolled-up shirt sleeves sand the stage-managed plackards and posters that try to make things look like the momentum of the Obama campaign exists here. They so want him to appear like Obama it hurts.

But he doesn't. Charlie Brooker's description of him as an avatar is all too accurate.

On Radio 4's Today programme this morning, John Humphrys mused that the election has turned out to be less 'cynical' than commenttors were expecting. But I don't think that's true either, and it links to the relative coolness with which Cameron has been greeted by the voters. We, as an electorate, are deeply mistrustful of the whole political process. The slickness of the Cameron campiagn is obvious to us all and, after a decade of the tricksy Blair, we are rightly on our guard when we see such things. And then the governemnt are deeply unpopular, with a leader who doesn't do the flesh-pressing that Cameron does and looks terrible in front of thecameras but is forced to do it, looking increasingly grim and desperate. No wonder Clegg's Liberal Democrats have made people look again, which is the single good thing about the debates as far as I can see.

For all the Cameron talk of Broken Britain it's not Britain that's broken (bad as things are), it's Britain's politics. And people are rightly and righteously angry about it. Perhaps this election is the tipping point where people become tired of what has gone before. I hope that this is the case, but experience suggests that will really happen is a flurry of sound and fury before things settle into the same dead pattern as they did before, with the increasingly professionalised, careerist political class moving further away from those they seek to govern. It will be sad for us if this is the case, but, if we are not prepared to do anything about it when the chance comes, it is all we deserve.

Hail The New Puritanism

It's not often that I find myself disagreeing with Stephen Fry quite so vehemently, but on this occasion I really can't understand why he claims that the current row over MPs' expenses is 'not important'. It is important. Very important. Why? Well, here are some reasons:

1. For years, Parliament have tried to presuade the public that most of our longest established professions, like medicine, teaching, academe and the law are not capable of regulating their own behaviour. One by one, each of them has been given an external and 'independent' body to which they must be accountable. The one seeming exception to this is, oddly enough, Parliament.
2. As a result, seeing honourable members on our TV screens constantly using the excuse that these claims were within the rules are a bit rich considering they themselves wrote them. Where's the outside scrutiny? Quis custodiet custodies? And even then, some MP's are stretching these rules well beyond the point where Hooke's Law might break down.
3. Seeing footage like George Foulkes attempting to throw a smokescreen over the whole sorry business was an attempted (and wholly unsuccessful) act of sophistry. OK, so BBC newsreader/journalist Carrie Gracie arens £92000 a year. And yes, this is about 50% more than a basic backbencher's salary. But any expenses she might claim are certainly not as generous as those doled out to MP's, nor are they so laxly waved through on a misplaced assumption that they are reasonable. The audit trail is more rigorous and accountable. Apparently, the Fees Office warned the Speaker about this issue some time ago. What did he do? Diddly-friggin'-squat, that's what.
4. On Saturday, Margaret Moran, the MP for Luton was questioned about her arrangements regarding second home allowances and spending on a house in Southampton. One of the justifications she gave was this:
   

   "Any MP has to have a proper family life, they have to have the support of their partner.
   
   "It is all within the claims policy and that's why I'm angry about this because not only has it been very stressful for me and my family, it gives the incredibly misleading impression that somehow we've been dodgy, that we've been fraudulent or we've been corrupt. Nothing is further from the truth."
   

   What precisely makes her any different from the many people who spend long periods working away from home? They don't get the chance to claim for multiple homes, or flip between them for convenience. In fact, if she was so bothered about her family in Southampton, why the fuck did she want to be an MP in Luton in the first place? Just a thought.
5. And now of course we have the wholly unedifying spectacle, as the BBC's Nick Robinson calls it, of My Shirt's Hairier Than Yours. Part of Cameron's insane rush to appear utterly moral is caused by his politican's finely tuned and innate sense of crass opportunism, part of it caused by the knowledge that his own party are really no better because it is a cross-party problem with the entire culture of Westminster itself.
6. But now we get to the meat; all through this, it has been claimed that Parliament 'understands the public anger on the issue' Well, clearly they don't, judging by both actions and words. And the reason is the major problem: our political class has become so distanced from the people they represent that they are no longer even aware that what they are doing is somehow, at best, hugely insensitive during a recession where some people are struggling to even keep one roof over their heads, at worst large scale fraud of the sort which they have spent a deal of time piously berating the banking sector (though not undeservedly as it happens). MP's may complain that £64000 a year is not enough. Indeed, compared to many in higher-powered London jobs it isn't. But you know what? It's still at least twice what most of their constituents earn each year, and more in many cases. And those constituents don't have the lovely expenses cushion to break their fall either. Most people understand that MP's do have some reasonble expenses, but there is a difference between making reasonable claims and what too many are doing now: taking the piss. It has to stop.
   

All Apologies

I was wandering through the supermarket at lunchtime and just happened to see a copy of the Sunday Post, which had a story on its front page about Jermey Clarkson, following up the story earlier in the week about his remarks about Gordon Brown and his subsequent apology.

After the Sunday Post's article, we are now very much clearer on JC's position. He was sorry for mentioning the one-eyed thing, didn't have a problem with the Scots per se, but would 'never apologise for calling him an idiot'. You've got to laugh.

However, as usual, the press response to what was, after all, a joke was utterly hysterical. And the sight of George Foulkes on BBC News wondering why he wasn't being sacked were unedifying to say the least. Perhaps George, you might concetrate on something slightly more pressing than someone telling a joke in Australia you didn't like very much.

But of course, the tabloids have scented blood. Currently they're on the backs of anyone who utters a single word that is not utterly devoid of wit or personality. Remember, these are the same tabloids who routinely use their pages to spout some of the most malodorous effluvia. Clarkson, for example, hasn't said anything that any staff writer at the Sun or Daily Mail hasn't committed to paper previously. For the tabloids to then scream at the likes of Clarkson (or even Carol Thatcher) for being intemperate is quite hllariously hypocritical.

Besides which, if you look at what he said, you'll notice that JC called Gordon Brown a "one-eyed Scottish idiot". At this point it's probably easier to point out that the first two of these words are adjectives, describing the third word, which is a noun. And I don't think that there's any necessary correlation between adjectives one and two; the fact that he is monocular is not connected to him being either Scottish or an idiot. That is merely cheerful happenstance it seems.

And they didn't really mention what he said about James May and Frenchmen. Both of these things were also funny.

But there you go, that's the press for you. We deserve everything we get because enough of us still buy and consume their shit.

Perhaps We Need A Recession

As I ruminated on David Milliband's rather transparent positioning as a leadership candidate I thought about a wider issue: after only a year in the job, Gordon Brown is beset by difficulties and a skittish party who may be willing to dump him if they think Milliband might give them a dead cat bounce. But would a man who looks more like a spoddy sixth-form prefect than a cabinet minister be any better to lead Labour and the country? In all honesty: no. And for all those fawning over Cameron right now, try to think what the Conservatives would do about the economy that would be materially different to what's happening now. Got the answer yet? Nada. Diddly squit. How could they when they are singing from broadly the same ideological hymn sheet?

But that isn't even the principal issue, That is the short-term, consumerist attitude we see in the wider economy now pervading all the way through into all areas of our political life. So we're having rough times? Change the Prime Minister! It's what makes Cameron's constant bleating for an election annoying, because I didn't hear him shouting for one in 1991 when he was working with Norman Lamont at the Treasury. It's just an appeal to the short-termism of the electorate,hoping we have the memory span of goldfish. Unfortunately, many do.

But the politicians and their marketing machines, which treat politics as just another product to be pushed, have been complicit in this. We have also (many of us, though by no means all) to have had the good fortune to benefit from a reasonably strong economy both locally and globally. I have some sympathy for Brown in this respect now that the wind has changed. And I do tend to side with his opinion that we are better placed than many to cope with it.

And this is where I hit my real point: our featherbedding and I-want-it-now attitude have not prepared us for circumstances where things are rather harder. It has been at least fifteen years since the economy went through anything like this. Those who might recall Black Wednesday might consider that complaining about having interest rates around the 5% mark is rather different from having them at 15%. Instead of a traditionally British stoicism in the face of changing circumstance, we seem to have created a nation of people who throw a tantrum when their divine right to make a profit in any way threatened.

And that is the reason for the title of this post; maybe we do need a recession to shake us out of this coddled, complacent feeling that things will, can, only get better. Perhaps we need to be reminded of the fact that we don't have a god-given right to expect to make money, that house prices can go down as well as up and that our comparative prosperity doesn't come for free: it needs to be paid for somewhere down the line. Welcome to the payback...