York students and Politics staff in combined call for fair votes.

On Saturday afternoon (16 May) over 150 people gathered to hear local MP Hugh Bayley, Dr Simon Parker and Professor the Baroness Haleh Afshar (from the University of York Politics Department), Liberal Democrat Councillor Christian Vassie, Green Councillor Dave Taylor, and a speaker from the University of York branch of People & Planet make the case for a reform of the electoral system and for the re-democratisation of parliament.


York Central MP, Hugh Bayley declared himself to be a long term supporter of electoral reform and in particular of the alternative vote option. He criticised the new coalition government for proposing to change the rules so that government business could be carried on with only 45% of the votes of the House of Commons and urged constituents to lobby him and other newly returned MPs to ensure that the public are given an early opportunity to ditch first past the post.

Dr Simon Parker told protesters that the battle for a democratic and representative parliament which the Chartists launched nearly 200 years ago is still to be won, and the fact that Westminster now contained a lower proportion of female MPs than Rwanda was a scandal. Councillor Dave Taylor for the Greens called for a genuine choice of alternatives and pointed out that the two party monopoly crowded out policy alternatives that the public often prefer in a 'blind testing'. Christian Vassie, for the Liberal Democrats warned the audience that the right wing media would attempt to sabotage the fair votes movement in order to protect the exisiting system. It was therefore important to keep the fair votes campaign in the public eye and convince sceptics that it can lead to better as well as fairer government. Several attempts had been made to secure the attendance of the Conservative York Outer MP Julian Sturdy, but without success.

The event was organised by first year PEP students Caleb Wooding, Ieuan Ferrer and Jamie Fisher and after an 'instant referendum' on preferred voting systems, a march took place through the centre of York where it returned to King's Square to hear Baroness Afshar urging supporters not to waste this opportunity of bringing about genuine political reform. She reminded the crowd that Britain was lucky that political change was still possible without having to pay for it in blood as the reformers in her native Iran have been forced to. Prof Afshar also declared herself to be in favour of a properly elected House of Lords - even though "it might do me out of a job!" she joked.

The York Take Back Parliament group is holding an organising meeting on Thursday 20 May in Space 109 on Walmgate from 7.30-9.30 pm to plan future activities and actions. All are welcome.

(Photos are from the Take Back Parliament Flickr pool. All credits are acknowledged and rights reserved)

Six Conspiracy Theories about the New Tory-Lib Dem Coalition

Posted by Dr Rajesh Venugopal

1. The Tories Ambushed the Lib Dems: The Tories cleverly lured the Lib Dems into a trap, offering them everything on paper, but little in practice. In reality, Clegg and Cable control nothing, and remain under the thumb of Cameron and Osborne respectively. Worse, the Tory offer on electoral reform (a referendum) is a trick designed to fail. Clegg cravenly sacrified his ideals, betrayed his followers, and bartered away electoral reform for an illusion of power. Just remember - the last deputy PM was John Prescott - and what was he in charge of (except punching voters)? Gotcha!

2. The Lib Dems Ambushed the Tories: This was a very Lib Dem coup. With just one-sixth of the Tory strength in parliament, the Lib Dems have gained disproportionate influence on government, cheating the Tories of their long-deserved victory and emasculating their agenda. The first Tory PM for 13 years is now hamstrung by a cabinet full of Europhiles and socialists. City bankers who paid for Osborne, but got saddled with Cable will think again before unburdening their wallets. The Lib Dems, who are now set to obstruct plans to cut spending or curb immigration, might, if not kept under close watch, get ambitious and replace ‘God Save the Queen’ with Dąbrowski's Mazurka.

3. David Cameron Ambushed the Tories: David Cameron’s unseemly haste to compromise and share power with Nick Clegg reveals his hidden agenda to gut the nasty party of its carnivorous core, and to turn it into a kinder, cuddlier, less ideological, and more herbivorous creature. As the hoodie-hugging, self-styled 'compassionate Conservative', he has always been viewed with suspicion by the retired Colonels in the shires, many of whom were alarmed during the first debate when he admitted that he had spoken with a black man (in Plymouth!). He will doubtless use the Lib Dems as an excuse to marginalise Thatcherite holdouts and justify a centrist path. Watch the letters column of the Daily Mail and Telegraph in the coming month for more details.

4. Labour Pushed the Lib Dems into Cameron’s arms: The Tory-Lib Dem alliance is a sly Labour plot to get the other two parties to fix the financial crisis, take the tough decisions, and absorb the public anger, while they sit back and watch (making pious platitudes about protecting the poor). As the Lib Dem deal team will tell you, Labour was just not interested in negotiating, and Labour outriders such as Reid and Blunkett talked down the deal as negotiations were in progress. Labour grandees, led by the Prince of Darkness, have calculated that the coalition will turn dysfunctional within a couple of years (Cable will be the first to buckle), and that their own party, reinvigorated with new leadership, would stand poised to recapture power after the Clegg-Cameron coalition collapses amid vicious bickering and plunging polls.

5. The Scots Ambushed the English: Cameron is the third successive prime minister that the Scots have imposed on the English. Tony Blair was born in Edinburgh to Scottish parents. Gordon Brown openly admits to being a Scot. And despite the fact that his name is a give-away, many have missed the fact that David Cameron himself is also of recent Scottish ancestry – his father is from Aberdeen. Scotland has just 8% of the UK’s population, but has mysteriously managed to stitch up the prime ministerial selection since 1997. Is it any mystery that the West Lothian question festers on?

6. Women Ambushed Men: The real power behind the Clegg-Cameron deal is the female vote. Media stereotypes and the X factor in politics have promoted inflated expectations among women voters of what male public figures should look and sound like. Can there be any doubt that it was the female vote that brought these two young, articulate, under-weight and telegenic men to power, rejecting the less telegenic Gordon Brown, Neil Farage or Nick Griffin? Most men groaned in disbelief when they saw the images of the Clegg-Cameron joint press conference on Wednesday, and found that it promoted a demeaning, unattainable and unhealthy ideal of masculinity, with attendant consequences for self-esteem and future political aspirations. David Miliband's soaring candidacy provides depressing evidence that Labour has also succumbed to this pressure of competing for the female vote in what is becoming the 'hunk' parliament.

Professor the Baroness Haleh Afshar OBE - on BBC Radio York this lunchtime!

Haleh will be discussing the new coalition government on BBC Radio York at 12noon today:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/york/programmes

The Coalition Government

Posted by Dr Andrew Connell

Look at how the Cabinet seats have been distributed between the parties. All the big and totemic spending departments- Health, Education, Defence, Home Office, Communities and Local Government, Work and Pensions, and Transport- are in Conservative hands. This government is going to have to make big spending cuts and this will give the Conservatives the maximum of control over them- although it is the Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury, David Laws, who will have the blood on his hands when the cuts come.

Now look at where the other Lib Dem ministers are. Vince Cable’s appointment to Business was perhaps more or less inevitable once it is accepted that he was not going to be Chancellor, and Energy and Climate Change, which Chris Huhne has been given, was an important department in the last government. But Deputy Prime Minister- Nick Clegg’s post- has usually been a more or less ornamental role and although the Scottish Secretary (Danny Alexander) may achieve a certain importance as a liaison with the SNP government in Edinburgh, since devolution the job has not been the almost mini-premiership that it once was.

These are the first peacetime Liberal/ Lib Dem cabinet ministers for nearly 80 years, and they are no doubt pleased to be there. But the jobs they’ve been given emphasise their party’s junior role in this coalition.

Over the Lib-Lab-Nat Rainbow…

Posted by Dr Simon Parker

If back around the time of my birth Harold Wilson could claim that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ we have just seen that yardstick disappear into the black hole of the space-time continuum that is 24 Hour Rolling News (or in the case of Sky News -Fight Club).

As recently as Tuesday lunchtime the Rainbow Coalition looked like it was heading for the Emerald City arm-in-arm with the Tin Man (Lord Mandelson), the Scarecrow (Ed Balls) and the Cowardly Lion (Lord Adonis) with Ed Miliband, ruby red slippers in hand auditioning for the part of Dorothy (don’t phone now because your vote won’t count and you may be charged a large subscription to the Labour Party).

I realised a deal was doomed as I woke to the cackling voice of the Wicked Witch of Westminster (played alternately by John Reid and David Blunkett)

“Ring around the Labour rosie, a pocket full of Blears! Thought you were pretty foxy, didn't you? Well! The last to go will see the first three go before him! And your mangy little Guardian bloggy, too!

While from North Yorkshire there blew an icy-cold tweet, it was the Hon. Member for Richmond warning us that he was on his way to Whitehall. The Munchkins of the media shimmered and swayed outside 10 Downing Street, while the BBC’s own Nikko the Monkey (ably played by Nick Robinson) declared that Mr Clegg was back on ‘his chosen path’—that being the YELLOW AND BLUE brick road and not that NASTY RED one which takes you to “the coalition of the defeated” in Munchkin City.

Interestingly, Alan Johnson suggested that the failure of the Rainbow Initiative had as much to do with the state of exhaustion and mood of defeat in the parliamentary Labour Party than the difficulties of the arithmetic. It is unlikely that a single policy area or ‘red line’ scuppered the Lib-Lab deal given that so many cherished Liberal Democrat priorities—from Europe to migration to Trident— have been sacrificed on the alter of the Cabinet table. But what finally persuaded Clegg’s team to walk away from a rainbow alliance, according to one senior LibDem source, appears to have been Labour’s refusal to make any concessions on civil liberties.

If true this suggests that either Labour’s negotiators badly misunderstood what Nick Clegg’s real ‘red lines’ were (one suspects that they were written on more than one piece of paper) or that the whole exercise was something of a charade to give the Browns time to finish packing.

The release of the coalition agreement shows what an ill-fitting suit has been cut from the remnants of the two parties’ manifestos, but there are little silver linings sewn into each section of blue serge to appease the LibDem faithful.

· On immigration—gone is the amnesty, and in comes the annual cap on migration, but child immigration detention is to be stopped (a policy change which I frankly never expected to see under a majority Labour government)

· On tackling the deficit—the £6 billion cuts package will go ahead but some of the money saved from “efficiency savings” will be put into job creation and green investment.

· On the Spending Review there was more common ground to begin with on pupil premiums and protecting NHS spending in real terms, as well as the ring-fencing of overseas aid to 0.7 of GNI. But the costly replacement for Trident will no longer be part of the Defence Review. The state pension will have the earnings link restored but the value of public sector pensions will be drastically reduced (a fight that Liberals and Conservatives are happier to have with the unions than New Labour would have been).

· On tax, Vince Cable gets his £10,000 starting threshold and the inheritance tax threshold will stay where it is for the time being. But the national insurance rise planned by Labour (aka ‘the tax on jobs’) is now history.

· The planned political reforms with the significant exception of devolution to Scotland, Wales and N.Ireland are more far reaching than any measures introduced during the 13 years of a Labour government. These include fixed five year parliaments (the next ‘planned’ general election will be May 2015), there will be a mainly or wholly elected upper chamber elected by PR, and there will be referendum on AV for the House of Commons.

· On civil liberties, the ‘roll back’ of Labour legislation and policy proposals is genuinely significant: ID cards are to go, the right to peaceful protest without being branded a terrorist is to be restored along with the right to jury trial. DNA data retention will follow the much stricter Scottish model, and libel laws will be reformed to protect freedom of speech.

· Europe is the one area of policy where the Cameron red line appears to have been drawn most heavily and emphatically. There will be no ‘ever closer union’ under a Lib-Con government and to emphasise the point a new act restoring the sovereignty of the UK parliament. The working time directive will be opposed as will the jurisdiction of a European Public Prosecutor. The one fig leaf left for the Lib Dems is a vague commitment to European dialogue on climate change and poverty reduction.

All this amounts to a new manifesto, and civil servants will be studying it closely to work out how, together with the first coalition cabinet since the Second World War, they can re-tool the Whitehall machine to deliver a challenging array of policies in the context of a financial crisis that one wouldn’t wish on one’s worst political enemies.

Although, as Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, unguardedly remarked, if the ‘winners’ of last Thursday’s election will be out of power for a generation—perhaps there really will be election gold over the rainbow once this little twister blows over.

Remember Gordon, just click your heels together and repeat, ‘there’s no place like Kirkcaldy, there’s no place like home…’

Gordon Brown's Resignation

Posted by Dr Andrew Connell

Gordon Brown’s announcement that he will resign the Labour leadership really comes as no great surprise. Whatever your interpretation of the outcome of the general election, his authority had been badly damaged by the result, and it would be hard to imagine Labour springing back under his leadership in another election at any time in the near future. There may, too, be personal reasons for his wishing to go now; in his sixtieth year (some fifteen years older than Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron), and with two young children, perhaps he sees some attraction in moving on sooner rather than later.

But his resignation undoubtedly removes one of the potential obstacles to a Lab-Lib agreement, and that, presumably, has been a decisive factor in Mr Brown’s timing. He has said that he will stay as leader until September to allow the Party’s leadership election process to run its course: but would that mean that he would stay on as Prime Minister for the first months of any coalition government? Not necessarily. Seventy years ago today (I am writing on 10 May) Neville Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister in favour of Winston Churchill in order to allow the formation of the wartime coalition, but kept the Conservative leadership until his death that autumn. A senior figure, acceptable to the Lib Dems but with no longer-term ambitions to lead the party- someone like Alan Johnson comes to mind- might if necessary be lined up as a caretaker prime minister until a new Labour leader could be elected. However, this is pure speculation. Nonetheless, this does make a Labour –Lib Dem coalition more likely than it was 24 hours ago- although it is too early to say whether it makes one more likely than a Conservative-Lib Dem one.

The Mother of all Hung Parliaments

Posted By Dr Rajesh Venugopal

For those (such as myself) who are more used to following elections and newly crafted election systems in post-conflict countries, the British electoral system often seems like a blast from the past. Westminster's first past-the-post, winner-takes-all system had many takers in the 1950s and 1960s, when the 'mother of all parliaments' was cloned in numerous decolonising Commonwealth countries. But it has distinctly gone out of fashion in the years since, and is frequently singled out in textbooks and lectures as a crude and flawed model of institutional design that produces lop-sided majorities, and that condemns any sizeable, but territorially dispersed minority (e.g. the Lib Dems) into perpetual under-representation and powerlessness.

In comparison, today's new democracies and post-conflict polities have voting systems that are state-of-the-art : Iraq, El Salvador, and Guatemala have various forms of party-list PR. Afghanistan has a single-non-transferable vote with multi-member constituency system. East Timor has a hybrid list-PR/plurality system. Closer to Westminster, the new legislatures that have sprouted since 1997 in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have all recognised the shortcomings of FPTP, and have all designed far more sophisticated ways of translating voter choice into representation.

I'm not going into a long excursus into the benefits of PR, or the myriad and mind-bogglingly complicated array of options for voting reform that exist out there. But what stands out is that the freak winner of these elections, in which all three major parties have reason to moan and mourn, has been electoral reform. Nick Clegg's pound of flesh can potentially transform British politics for years to come - most obviously because once it has been brought into being, a PR system will be difficult to dislodge. Opposition to PR would probably come from the Tories - but since the Tory vote share hovers in the mid 30's (and has been in slow secular decline since the 1950s), PR will make it very difficult for them to achieve the standalone majority they will need in the future to reverse PR and go back to the bad old days of FTPT. This is why a Cameron-Clegg marriage will be difficult to work out, and may end up rocky and short-lived.

What will a PR future look like in Britain? If it happens through a Lib-Lab coalition, we may end up with something like the AV plus system that the Roy Jenkins Commission recommended in 1998. That's a very difficult system to guestimate, but here for example, is a very crude simulation of what this election would have looked like if votes were counted under the Scottish AM system, which retains many elements of FTPT, so is far from radical (caveat: this assumes that the AM votes were cast for the same party as the constituency vote) :

Con 274 (306 actual)
Lab 228 (258 actual)
LibDem 99 (57 actual)
Other 50 (28 actual)

Both the Conservatives and Labour lose out under this system, but the Lib Dems almost double their count. It is in their interest not only to get some form of PR done quickly while they can, but also to pick a fight with their partners and precipitate mid-term elections right after so that they can benefit quickly from the gains of that new system. A coalition with Clegg would thus be bad for either party, but particularly bad for the Conservatives.

If this simulation exercise is repeated to see how previous Westminster elections since 1979 would have turned out under the Scottish system, the results are revealing. Only four out of the last eight elections would have produced a clear one-party majority (1983, 1987, 1997, 2001). Margaret Thatcher would not have won a majority in 1979 and Tony Blair would not have won a third term in 2005 - both of which sound like good reasons to implement this system without delay.