Don't hold your nose on election day. Vote for fair votes.

     When things go wrong in British politics they don’t half go wrong.  The collision near the launch of Labour’s final poster campaign on Friday was a headline-writers gift:  The Car Crash Election.  The final mishap in the worst Labour election campaign since 1983, when the late Michael Foot - a man of great intellect but little popular appeal - led the party to its worst defeat in half a century. Who’d have thought that Gordon Brown, one of Labour’s brightest young stars in 1983, would lead a campaign that compares unfavourably with that? 

   I recall Footie, with his stick and fly away hair, stomping round the country from botched photo-opportunity to heckled speech.  Manfully trying to defend “the longest suicide note in history” as the Labour manifesto was called.  He scarcely seemed to know where he was most of the time, and nor did his aides. But he never lost his dignity.  He might’ve got in a muddle with his microphones, but Footie wouldn’t have dismissed a loyal Labour supporter as a “bigot”, even in private,  and he wouldn’t have testily blamed his staff.    Nor would Foot have abased himself, and demeaned his office, by turning up with the world’s media in tow to beg for Gillian Duffy’s forgiveness.  (One of the explanations for Brown’s “bigot” remark, by the way,  was that he had thought Mrs Duffy had said “f@@king immigrants” not “flocking immigrants” - to which you can only say: that’s a flocking ridiculous excuse.)

    The 1983 general election almost destroyed the Labour Party and the question this week is whether Gordon Brown could finish the job.  I don’t think he will, not least because our unfair electoral system is designed to prevent parties like Labour expiring through natural causes because people stop voting for them.  It props them up like cadavers in a Frankenstein beauty contest of the damned.   In 1983, Labour plunged to 28% of the vote, only 2% ahead of the SDP-Liberal Alliance.  But Labour  ended up with 209 seats in Westminster and the Libdems only 23.  It was a brutal result, which made a nonsense of democracy.    By rights, voters should have taken to the streets, as they did in Eastern European countries where the electoral systems were similarly rigged.   But they didn’t, Neil Kinnock came along, and the rest is history.  

   In 1983, Margaret Thatcher got a parliamentary majority of 144 seats on only 42% of the popular vote -  a spurious mandate which she used to devastate industrial Britain. Thursday looks like being every bit as perverse as 1983, even though David Cameron is never going to win a majority like that. The poll of polls seems to be suggesting a hung parliament with the Conservatives on around 300 or so seats;  Labour coming second with 200 plus;  and the Liberal Democrats having to make do with under a 100 seats, despite winning more votes than Labour.  Any such result will be an outrage.  As someone put it: we can’t go on like this.  I find the alphabet soup of AV, STV, AMS as tedious as the next man - but after this election  something must be done to make this country a democracy. Actually, I suspect that the death knell for the present system tolled mid week when voters realised that that Labour could come third in this election and still win the most seats in parliament.  Never! Never! Never!

     But as the hours and minutes tick away, Labour are telling anyone who’ll listen that the way to achieve democratic change is to vote, not for the party of electoral reform, the Liberal Democrats, but for Labour.  The logic is thus:  If the Tories win, and the Liberal Democrats come second, Nick Clegg will have no choice but to support David Cameron.  It may be a hung parliament but if Labour is third there could be no chance of a Lib-Lab alternative.   A vote for the Libdems, then, is a vote for David Cameron.  Ergo, to give the Nick Clegg a sniff of power, and to halt the Tories in their tracks,  you must hold your nose and vote Labour.  Hasn’t Gordon said that Labour now accepts electoral reform?

    This argument is too clever by half.   For a start, Labour’s promises of electoral reform are generally forgotten the moment they gain power - they promised a referendum, remember, in 1997.  Even if Brown comes second in terms of seats, there is still no chance of a Lib-Lab coalition.  The British people will not accept a party that has been  defeated in an election hanging on to power. Nick Clegg would still have to let David Cameron form a government and, here’s the twist, so would Labour.   Yet, the democratic reality is that Labour and the Liberal Democrats will have an overwhelming majority of the votes cast on Thursday.  In any proportional system Britain would long since have had a stable coalition of the progressive forces of the centre left. 

 And right now, an overwhelming vote for the Liberal Democrats is - in England at least - seems the best way of demonstrating the central point: that Britain cannot be called a democracy so long as the number of seats in parliament bears no relation to the number of votes cast.  

  The time for holding noses is over.  Some Scots will vote  for the SNP to register their discontent on Thursday.  More are likely to vote Liberal Democrat.    This is not 2007, and the issue in this general election is not who governs Scotland, but how to reform Westminster.  Of course,  the vast majority of Scots will continue to vote Labour, as they always have,  especially in the West of Scotland, where hatred of the Tories is the driving force.  I fully respect that.  However, in those seats where it counts, I hope people will at least consider voting tactically for whichever party seems most committed to change. 

    

   We have one chance:  to end of this rotten, corrupt and unfair electoral system, which has deformed our political culture. Which has allowed leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, with inflated majorities in parliament on 43%  or 42% of the popular vote, to push through policies like the Iraq war and the poll tax that the majority of British voters never wanted.  Voters have an opportunity to make themselves heard on Thursday:  Let’s open our mouths and scream. 

Clegg: The knives are out.

 I don’t know - you turn your back for a few weeks and what happens? they go and break the mould of British politics. Again.  It sometimes feels like I went to sleep and woke up in 1983, the last time the Liberal Democrats -  or rather the SDP-Liberal Alliance -  were in mould-breaking form.  Didn’t quite happen back then of course, even though they won 26% of the general election vote against Labour’s 28%.  Our iniquitous electoral system awarded the SDP-Liberals just 23 seats against Labour’s 203 -  showing just how the Westminster electoral system serves to keep the two big parties in power.

   Will it be different this time? Well yes, I think it just could be - if only because of the loathing of so many British voters for the Westminster way of politics. The mood really is ugly out there; party workers on the doorsteps all testify to it.   Voters are furious and desperate for a change; for a chance to kick at the whole corrupt, sclerotic and incestuous Westminster system.  If the Libdems can surf this tide of resentment, then the mould could, perhaps, stay broken. 

    Of course, a lot hangs on Nick Clegg’s performance in tonight’s edition of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (you choose).   Can Superclegg on Sky repeat his performance in last week’s ITV debate, which propelled the Libdems into a solid second place in most UK opinion polls ?  Or could he turn out to be the Tim Henman of British politics?  Well, it shouldn’t be too difficult for Clegg since his performance wasn’t actually all that strong last time, as he himself has conceded.  The Liberal Democrat leader apparently had to console himself with a lonely cigarette after he left the ITV studio because he thought he’d lost. 

    It wasn’t Clegg’s delivery, which was competent but sub- Obama, but the fact that he wasn’t Brown or Cameron that was his real strength.  Clegg seemed to many viewers to be the best available boot to use on the backsides of the big parties.  The fact that he was new (to most people), less polished and even a little geeky was a positive advantage.  People don’t want folletted smoothies or speak-your-stats machines any more. They want someone who sounds authentic, real, more ordinary, even a little confused.  These are confusing times. 

   They probably liked the general sound of Clegg’s policies as well.  Not renewing Trident, bashing bankers, scrapping the Lords - what’s not to like?  Stricter rules on parliamentary expenses, fairer electoral system, scrapping the Barnett Formula (ok, we’ll draw a veil over that) abolishing Labour’s illiberal anti-terror laws, which make it potentially illegal to wear tee-shirts criticising Tony Blair. But I don’t believe it was really Liberal Democrat policies that made the difference - most people are too sophisticated these days to pay much attention to election manifestos which they assume are wish-lists or lies.  They just want someone they think they can trust, or who might cause an upset. Someone who isn’t a product of Westminster; a politician who isn’t a politician.  

   And the great problem for Clegg tonight is that people are beginning to realise that a politician is exactly what he is.  In fact, Clegg is a classic career politician - a former lobbyist and political bag-carrier who became an MEP before he stood for Westminster.  We’ve learned a lot about Mr Clegg this week- that he’s half Russian, half Dutch; that Louis Theroux was his fag at Westminster school (allegedly); that the ex-Conservative minister Leon Brittan thought he was a natural Tory.  Clegg it emerged, has claimed £84,000 on parliamentary expenses to do up his second home,  including paying chaps to prune his fruit trees.  According to the Daily Telegraph, he has been accepting donations into his personal bank account, a practice the former parliamentary standards commissioner, Sir Alistair Graham, has described as "irregular". 

    Conservatives warn that he is a supporter of the euro who wants an amnesty for long-term illegal immigrants,  and intends to release 60,000 prisoners. The Daily Mail claimed he'd compared Britain unfavourably to Germany under the Nazis.   My own view is that this assault on Clegg’s political character largely misses the point.  British voters are more liberal than politicians give them credit for.  They don’t really hate Europe and immigrants; welfare scroungers or foreigners. British are generally decent moderate souls who want to hang bankers and politicians from the highest lampposts, but in a nice way. 

     David Cameron will certainly target Clegg’s europeanism and his unilateralism in tonight’s foreign affairs debate, as will Brown.   But the most serious charge against Clegg is that a vote for him is really a vote for Brown or Cameron; that his destiny is to let the Tories or Labour back in. Clegg insists that he can ignore “desperate” Brown and crawling Cameron - but the electoral reality is that, on present showing, the Libdem leader will have to help one or the other into office even if Clegg doesn’t want a formal coalition.  Indeed, the Libdems may have no choice but to allow Cameron the chance of forming a government, if only because the Tories will probably have the largest number of seats and it will seem perverse to keep Brown in power after his rejection at the polls. Recall how the Scottish Liberal Democrats found they just couldn’t keep their former coalition partner, Jack McConnell,  in power in Holyrood in 2007 after Labour lost to the SNP. 

   It is of course grossly unfair that the Liberal Democrats should lose out just because their votes are evenly distributed across the country. If we had a fair system, it would be the Liberal Democrats who would be looking for third party support.   If nothing else, this election should be the death knell for the First Past The Post electoral system,  which has perpetuated the old party duopoly.  I’m tempted to say that electoral reform alone is a good enough reason for voting Liberal Democrat in this election. 

      Why, even Alex Salmond, said as much in at the SNP manifesto launch when he urged voters to back the LibDems to ensure a ‘balanced parliament’.  He meant in England, of course - in Scotland the latest Ipsos Mori poll puts the SNP  ahead of the Scottish Libdems.  But a lot of voters in Scotland are likely to draw the logical conclusion and vote Libdem in marginals like Edinburgh South or Aberdeen South.   When Alex Salmond promised to deliver 20 seats in Scotland at the general election we didn’t realise he meant Liberal Democrats. 

      

Terrible Tavish

The Liberal Democrats never do things by halves. They prefer to do them by quarters and fifths. As on alcohol pricing which seems to be wrong in Scotland but right in England. And on the constitution, where the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, Tavish Scott has called for radical constitutional change to save the Scottish economy. But not TERRIBLY radical change. The Libdems want taxation and borrowing powers for Holyrood to allow the Scottish government to finance a bold green job creation programme to counter the recession. But this is not to be confused with the SNP’s call for tax and borrowing powers and its counter-recessionary Green Deal. Oh no - that would be secession.

And don’t think there should be any kind of referendum on the Calman Commission on the Constitution, when it finally delivers the constitutional blueprint. The Liberal Democrats are utterly and completely opposed to referendums - except, er, in England and on Europe. The party is committed to a referendum on constitutional reform in Westminster, including reducing Scottish representation, in the first year of any Liberal Democrat administration. They also called recently for a referendum on withdrawal from the European Union. No, I don’t understand it either.

The Scottish Liberal Democrat antipathy toward a referendum in Scotland has never made much democratic sense, so perhaps we should welcome the fact that Tavish Scott is no longer ruling one out “for all time”. Though he isn’t ruling it in either. The idea appears to be to prevent the issue from denying the Liberal Democrats the option of forming a coalition with the SNP after the next Scottish election. The Libdems have finally realised what everyone else has known for years, that the Nationalists are actually intensely relaxed about delaying the referendum on independence. This may not be unconnected with the fact that they would almost certainly lose it, as the latest YouGov poll confirmed at the weekend. The whole point of the referendum policy was to liberate the SNP from the independence commitment - to put it into the long grass - while Alex Salmond got on with the business of governing in the Scottish parliament.

But in May 2007, Tavish Scott refused even to talk about a coalition unless the SNP abandoned its policy of a referendum on the constitution - which Salmond clearly could not do. It was an emotional spasm which now seems to have passed. Though I’m not entirely sure what has changed to clear the way for this historic compromise. Tavish and co could have remained in government; instead they opted for the wilderness. And the wilderness is a cold and lonely place.

Just consider a typical senior Liberal Democrat who is not getting any younger and yet feels he has much to contribute. He was an able minister for eight years in the Liberal-Labour coalition, and was rarely off the airwaves. Now he is, if not forgotten, then largely gone from public view. It is immensely frustrating to be a politician and not have any power. The Liberal Democrats knew what they were for back then: free personal care, tuition fees, reform of local government. Now they just don’t matter; they are the lost tribe of Scottish politics.

So, the Libdems have got to make themselves matter again, and the only way to do that is to get some kind of foothold on power through an alliance. But could it be that they are opening the way for the SNP just at the moment when the door is closing on Scottish nationalism? The latest YouGov opinion poll places Labour back in the lead in voters’ preferences for Holyrood for the first time in two years. The Nationalist minority government is becalmed, discarding manifesto promises like a sinking ship dumping cargo to keep afloat. Following the credit crisis, the whole idea of small nations with big banks trying to go it alone is discredited. Perhaps the Liberal Democrats should be making up with Labour again and looking to re-establish the partnership that delivered their greatest hits?

Well, certainly, the SNP is discovering that it is not immune to what they call “mid term blues” in Westminster - the slough that governments fall into half way through a term of office as the novelty wears off and they lose popularity. But Labour isn’t in a position to open the champagne quite yet, and the Libdems are wise to be circumspect. The financial crisis is only now transforming itself into an economic one, and Scotland is still behind the curve, as they say in the city. In places like Edinburgh people are still buying expensive cars and paying ludicrous prices for houses, like Wile E. Coyote who has run off the cliff but hasn’t succumbed to the force of gravity yet.

As the Liberal Democrat finance spokesman Vince Cable has warned, there is a 10% to 20% cut in public spending on the way, as the government tries to salvage the ruined public finances. This is going to be devastating to an economy like Scotland’s which is dominated by the public sector. The SNP Finance Secretary, John Swinney, is equally gloomy and has reportedly called on ministers to draw up a “doomsday budget” involving cuts of £2.3bn in spending on schools, hospitals and other services. The key question in Scottish politics for the medium term, therefore, is who gets blamed for the economy: Westminster, as the SNP wish, or the Scottish government. The Glenrothes by-election, and some opinion polls suggest that voters are disinclined to blame Gordon Brown. On the other hand, Alex Salmond remains by far the most popular leader in Scotland.

The battle of the cuts is unresolved. However, after this weekend I think one thing perhaps is resolved: the constitutional question. All the Scottish parties accept now that the Scottish parliament needs more powers to tax and to borrow - the difference is only one of degree. It’s devolution max all round. Independence is lying in the long grass, in a field far away, as the SNP increasingly confine their demands to “more powers” to deal with the economy. Tavish Scott yesterday called for “a true home rule parliament”. And, in time, it looks as if that is precisely what we are going to get. Though I’m not entirely sure that Gordon is on board.