Reflections on the Final Prime Ministerial Debate

Posted by Dr Simon Parker

The final prime ministerial debate took place in the impressive surroundings of Birmingham University’s Great Hall—although the carefully chosen local audience did not appear to contain any students or lecturing staff. Was this a portend of what the next government had in store for UK higher education I wondered?
Certainly the message from all three of the party leaders as they debated the economy was unless you work in a school, a hospital or a police station don’t assume you will have a public sector job in five years time. Further, if you are lucky enough to keep your job forget any thoughts that your salary may keep pace with inflation or that you will be able to retire when you expected to on the pension you were promised.

This was not going to be a cheery “things can only get better” debate but rather—“if you elect him or him things can only get worse”. On the “sick men of Europe” Cameron went straight for the Lib-Lab solar plexus —“Let me tell you one thing I wouldn't do: with Greece so much in the news, I can guarantee you that I would never join the euro, and I'd keep the pound as our currency”, carefully avoiding mention of the fact that Germany’s Euro-based economy was the only one with deep enough pockets to bail-out the Greeks while the Bank of England is nervously gripping the threadbare towel of its AAA rating.

Earlier in the week “the much respected” Institute for Fiscal Studies (it says here in the BBC’s editorial guidelines) announced that all three political parties were not telling voters how they intended to tackle the vast continent of debt they had not pledged to cut or offset through tax raises. As elephants in the living room go—this was a pretty large one—ranging from 75% of the ‘elephant, what elephant?’ component of the Liberal Democrat manifesto to just over 80% of Tory plans to nearer 90% in the case of Labour.

One of the serious flaws of the partitocratic prime ministerial debate format is that highly experienced interviewers—and they come no more experienced than David Dimbleby—cannot disrupt the conspiracy of silence/audience dumb show that these spectacles have become (although Dimbleby did attempt to ‘clarify’ a non answered question that he was clearly irked the leaders had managed to duck). Had the leaders faced a genuine interlocutor rather than each other’s mild rebukes, the elephant denying non-recognition pact might have been broken by the following aperçu from the IFS:

Labour & Liberal Democrat plans imply tightest sustained squeeze since April 1976 to March 1980 and spending cuts as deep as Conservative plans imply not delivered over any sustained period since Second World War.
Brown’s “shock, horror” warnings that the Tories will take £6 billion out of the economy this year was calculated to distract attention from the fact that Labour plans to take as much as £52.4 billion “out of the economy” in the next five years, the Lib Dems plan to cut £46.5 billion and the Tories an eye-watering £63.7 billion. Neither Clegg nor Brown took the opportunity to point out that Cameron plans to pay for every 4 out of 5 pounds worth of debt in spending cuts and only 1 in 5 through increased taxation. This will impact massively and disproportionately on the poor, people on benefits and those employed by the public sector and those who are reliant on public services. As the IFS pointed out, when Ken Clarke was Chancellor in 1993 the Tories pledged a cuts to tax raising ratio of 1:1, Labour’s will be 2:1 and the LibDems eventually 2.5:1.

In pointing out that the banks will benefit from a 3p (one assumes in the pound) cut in corporation tax and that millionaires will disproportionately benefit from increasing the threshold on inheritance tax, Brown attempted to paint a picture of the Cameronites as “the same old Tories”. The best Brown could come up with is “I think this is unfair”, while Nick Clegg offered to switch taxes from the rich to the less well off so that more money could go back into the pocket of the questioner—a woman called Adina who lamented the fact that in her view Brown’s government is taking more and more from the average worker's payslip.

Clegg suggested that the way that we might get out of this mess was to all grab a paddle and to stop rowing in opposite directions, and as in Bristol, the yellow worm headed for the top of the screen at Nick’s suggestion of a Council for Financial Stability. The public like consensus-style emoting and are unimpressed by negative personal attacks that both Cameron and Brown engaged in—especially on the subject of immigration—where mention of the Clegg ‘amnesty’ has become a ritual opportunity to engage in a bit of populist group mugging of “soft touch” Nick.

“I agree with David on this”, intoned Brown in full anti-anti-bigot mode, “because I can't see how you send out anything other than the worst possible message if you give an amnesty to people who've come here illegally”. Suddenly wanting to stop any more foreign people living here or to complain about the jobs, houses, and benefits that the ones who were here (no doubt illegally) were denying “good families” like Mrs Duffy from Rochdale was not “ridculous” or “bigoted” but common sense.
Not to be outdone, Cameron warned that if the Liberals had their way the 600,000 people who were living here illegally “would be entitled to bring a relative each into our country”, as the ghost of Stechford could be heard faintly whispering, “Two and a half million votes David, two and a half million votes…”. To be fair Cameron did not promise to pull up the drawbridge to Fortress Britain, but he was determined to drop it only once a year and pull it up really quickly if that nice retired diplomat from Migration Watch tells us Britain is full. Clegg, despite being beaten-up by his adversaries was not prepared to join them by “agreeing with Gillian”. In a rare moment of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, Clegg rounded on Cameron and insisted that the cap would not apply to the 80% of foreigners from the European Union, whom Mrs Duffy seemed to be most concerned about.

“Yes or no, do 80% of immigrants come from the European Union, which wouldn't be affected by your cap? Yes or no? Clegg demanded.
“It's affected by having transitional controls”, Cameron hit back, “I've answered your question. You should answer mine”. Er…well not quite, since transitional controls apply to candidate countries, not to ones already in the EU. Only UKIP and the BNP are offering withdrawal from the EU and even UKIP aren’t planning forcibly to repatriate the EU nationals who are already living here.

On the subject of jobs there was a general consensus that the loss of manufacturing was a major disaster for cities like Birmingham. Cameron stated that “in the last 13 years, we've lost 60,000 jobs in manufacturing”, and then said, “We've been losing manufacturing industry faster than the 1980s”, Perhaps he is too young to remember the first Thatcher government though he did admit—“It's been a complete tragedy.” We need to rebuild by, “…investing in our science base and making sure great universities like this are producing the scientists and entrepreneurs of the future”. Suddenly a ray of sunlight shone through the stained glass of the Great Hall, was this the knight in shining armour Britain’s universities had been praying for? Let’s check the manifesto shall we….here we are, it says the Conservatives will “Work to improve the way that universities are funded so that students get a fair deal, disadvantaged young people don’t miss out and researchers get the funding they need…” Marvellous! I now have the perfect line when my kids ask me for more pocket money—“I am working to improve the way your allowance is funded, but owing to the £67.5 billion cuts that we are going to have to make in the next five years you can’t have it just yet”.

All three leaders had rehearsed their lines well and disappointingly there were no more own goals. Just to be sure Dave, Nick and Gordon couldn’t rip their radio mikes off quick enough by the end of the show. According to various ‘instant polls’, Cameron had come across better than the other three but Clegg also clearly had another good night and managed to get several all important nods of approval during the occasional cut aways to the questioner. Brown on the other hand, came across as troubled and off his game, despite trying to win audience sympathy with the “as you saw yesterday, I don't get all of it right” quip. Even Mandelson in full 1,400 rpm spin mode in the post-debate interview looked tired and dispirited. Gordon Brown may know how to run an economy but he certainly doesn’t know how to run an election, whereas Cameron and an impressively slick Tory election machine clearly do. Lord Kinnock has smelt that kind of defeat before and has already admitted that the gig is up.

The great challenge for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats is whether they can persuade sufficient numbers of Labour voters to dump Gordon in the marginals in order to stop the Tories gaining an overall majority. Despite all the fanfares and hoo-hah, it seems that the prime ministerial debates have taken us back to exactly where the election started—Labour are the underdogs and are expected to lose, the Lib Dems will improve their share of the vote but will struggle to improve their share of the seats, and the Conservatives remain the party to beat with the prospect of more than half the House of Commons seats turning blue on May 7th moving towards near evens odds. It’s going to be a fascinating election night!

Coalition Making Dutch style

Posted by Dr Rob Aitken

The Conservative party political broadcast portrays a hung parliament as producing an endless round of self-serving politicians haggling over the spoils and failing to govern effectively. This is undoubtedly Tory scaremongering as they are afraid they will not achieve an overall majority that they took for granted. However, it also reflects a lack of experience in negotiating stable coalition governments in balanced parliaments, despite the recent experience in Scotland, Wales and local government. In contrast in the Netherlands, like most European countries, coalition governments and coalition formation are regular features of politics without it seeming to cause the sort of political meltdown that the Tory’s portray.

After a Dutch election – the next one is due in June – a senior politician is appointed by the Queen as an informateur. The informateur meets with all party leaders to discuss their policy priorities and their views on potential coalitions. The informateur then reports to the Queen on what group of parties is most likely to be able to form a stable government and key areas of policy similarities between them. The informateur then leads a process of negotiation between the parties to form the basis of a coalition government. Once the basis of a governing agreement is reached the Queen appoints a formateur to put together a government. While coalition negotiations take place, the existing government remains in office as a demissionaire government without the power to initiate new policy.

Coalition negotiations take a number of weeks or months, as the aim is to produce a detailed programme of government for the next four years. This covers details of spending plans, major policy initiatives and even agreements on how the government would respond to changing economic circumstances – eg the balance between tax cuts and spending increases if the economy does well (or vice versa). Once the politicians have reached agreement on a programme of government each party then calls a national conference. Each party has to agree to allow their politicians to enter a coalition based on this programme of government. Only then does a new government take office.

There are two important points here. First, that there is a shared understanding of the process and (informal) principles of coalition formation. Second, that the aim of the negotiations is to form a stable government based on an agreed four year programme. This can take a little while but has the advantage that the government takes power with a clear programme of government that has been agreed and approved by the parties involved, not just politicians in dark rooms. Furthermore this is a government based on parties that won the backing of a majority of voters in the election unlike any British government since the Second World War.

Coalition Government and Electoral Reform: Some Theory and Practice

Posted by Tom Flynn, Politics PhD student

So much of the election debate (particularly in the main stream media) has been around the issue of a hung parliament, and the subsequent coalition that would be required to form a Government. Nick Clegg’s recent revelation, that he’d refuse to prop up a Labour Prime Minister if the Labour Party finishes third in the popular vote, therefore throws up a number of very interesting possibilities. It might, of course simply mean that we’ve totally misconstrued what Nick Clegg said. It is quite plausible, for example, that he was signalling to the Labour Party that should the Lib Dems finish second, then it would be a case of the former joining the latter in government – meaning Clegg himself might demand the position of Prime Minister, supported by a few high profile Labour ministers in some key roles. Of course, if this were to happen, it’s difficult to imagine Gordon Brown himself taking a lesser position in government – leading almost certainly to a Labour leadership election.

Or perhaps the reason this is all so surprising in the first place is because it’s been difficult to see a Lib Dem/Conservative coalition in the face of Cameron’s point blank refusal to look at the voting system used in general elections. And this is the real point of this entry – to address the misunderstanding of how electoral systems work that politicians, the media, and commentators appear to have fallen prey to.

I’ll break the argument down into a number of sections.

SOME REALITY
1. The Liberal Democrats want proportional representation because they (quite correctly) realise it will lead to an increase in the number of seats won by the smaller parties – themselves included. They also believe in changing to a voting system known as STV (single transferable vote), which is one of several systems that involve ranking candidates in order of preference rather than simply marking X next to the one most preferred.

2. The Conservatives reject any idea of proportional representation, as they believe it will remove the link between ‘the electorate and the MP’.

The current perception is that these positions are entirely contradictory – and that a compromise would be impossible. Therefore how could Nick Clegg possibly form a Government with the Conservatives? This assumption though, is based entirely on a conflation of preferential voting and proportional representation.

SOME THEORY
Let me illustrate the difference with an example.

Constituency A has the following results from the 2005 general election:

Conservative: 45%
Labour: 25%
Lib Dem: 17%
Green Party: 13%

Now, under the current system, the best strategy for the Labour party would be to persuade all Liberal Democrat and Green voters to switch to them, in order to beat the Conservatives. If the argument is successful (as it often has been), we might end up with the following result:

Conservatives: 45%
Labour: 55%
Lib Dem: 0%
Green Party: 0%

The problem for the Liberal Democrats and Greens has traditionally been that many of its supporters have accepted such arguments, leaving the smaller parties unable to challenge for seats effectively.

Consider the same situation under STV. Under STV, votes from the least-preferred candidates are ‘transferred’ to more-preferred candidates until an overall winner emerges. Let’s assume that the majority of voters have the following preference orderings:

Conservative Voters: Conservative > Lib Dem > Labour > Green
Labour Voters: Labour > Lib Dem > Green > Conservative
Lib Dem Voters: Lib Dem > Labour > Green > Conservative
Green Voters: Green > Lib Dem > Labour > Conservative

Now let’s see what happens:

Greens get knocked out in round one, which gives:

Conservative: 45%
Labour: 25%
Lib Dem: 30%

Labour are then knocked out in round two which gives:

Conservative: 45%
Lib Dem: 55%

In short, preferential voting has delivered a result that seemed impossible under single preference voting.

Back to Reality
What is important for this argument, of course, is that this result has nothing to do with proportional representation. STV can be deployed within single constituencies – maintaining the link between MP and the electorate, whilst at the same time also going some way to addressing the problems that smaller parties face with tactical voting. STV does not guarantee proportionality of parliament overall; it is just a different way of choosing the individuals within it.

The question is this: will Nick Clegg and David Cameron realise this, and come to a compromise on electoral reform – making a Lib Dem/Conservative party coalition a possibility?

Discover what your MP’s been asking: free access to parliamentary records between now and the election

Posted by Kirstyn Radford, Politics Librarian, J.B Morrell Library



The University of York Library already subscribes to legal databases from this host, but we haven’t previously had access to the Parliament service. Follow the instructions on the website below to register for a personal account for the duration of the promotion.

The Justis Parliament database provides a single cross-searchable interface to House of Commons parliamentary questions and debates, parliamentary papers (both official and unpublished) and a legislation tracker allowing you to follow the progress of a bill. Of course the bulk of this material is already free-to-access from the UK Parliament website http://www.parliament.uk/, but you may find the Justis interface faster and more intuitive for searching and saving results.

You can access Justis Parliament:
Directly at www.justis.com/freeparliament/
or at nearly a thousand public libraries in England – ask yours if it’s taking part.

With an archive back to 1979 – further than any other electronic public repository of this material – Justis Parliament provides the most intuitive route and the only single-entry point into every element of Hansard and numerous other governmental archives. Justis Parliament gives users the chance to:

• See all MPs’ parliamentary questions and answers


• Keep an eye on Bills going through parliament


• Get the lowdown on Select Committees and debates


• Refine your searches like no other database, helping separate the relevant from the irrelevant.
  
  Go to http://www.justis.com/default.aspx or http://www.justis.com/freeparliament/and start your search today!

Three new coats of constitutional paint

Posted by Dr John Parkinson

In the wake of the expenses scandal, every political party is trying to pitch itself as the solution, not the cause, of our allegedly-broken politics. Each party is proposing constitutional reforms. How do the ideas of ‘the Big Three’ measure up?

Much of the detail in the proposals is like shuffling the deck-chairs on the Titanic. Take the Labour proposal of the Alternative Vote. This is not a step towards ‘democratic renewal’, it’s a relatively minor reform to what will remain a constituency-based, party-controlled, first-past-the-post seat allocation system. Australia has AV, yet I don’t see anyone holding up Australia as a model of democratic virtue and public probity. Why? Because just like in Britain, two parties have a lock on the Australian House of Representatives and thus on government. Their party-system is driven by internal factional allegiances and external links with business or unions, not constitutency demands. AV might allow voters to vent spleen at a particularly nasty candidate, but most voters choose not to exercise that choice, and follow party-issued ‘how to vote’ cards anyway. Even if they all thought things through, AV does nothing to alter the fundamentals of FPP power politics.

Take further devolution or local control policies. The Conservative and Lib Dem manifestos are full of this stuff, and the Labour manifesto (rightly, in my view) attacks that as a ‘free for all’ in which local elites grab control of public services. But Labour’s ‘Total Place’ agenda does precisely the same thing, and continues a decade-long trend of overloading localities with responsibilities that they neither want nor need. What people want is a local hospital that is clean, accessible, and provides a good service; they want to know that their local school is delivering pretty much the same quality as the one down the road. They don’t want to have to move down the road, or pretend to be good Anglicans to get their kids educated C of E, or set up their own neighbourhood school. All three parties pursue a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow called ‘Choice’, and keep failing to notice that they deliver only pseudo-choices, or that choice fails to deliver what people want. They are not getting any closer to the rainbow, and never will.

Other ideas are equally weak. Lowering the voting age to 16 will not magically increase the system’s legitimacy; indeed, it might lower it in the eyes of older voters. Creating local referendums will simply hamstring local councils, and one wonders why, if referendums are good enough at the local level, are they not good enough at the national? What’s good for the goose appears not to be good for the gander. Electing the Lords will not magically remove a major source of unfairness if it continues to be subservient to the Commons; and either way will introduce a new field for party politics.

Big change needs major shifts in the institutional architecture. Proportional representation; perhaps equal representation in the upper house; more coalition government; an elected Lords but only with greatly enhanced scrutiny and review powers, not the lapdog presently proposed; regional and local government with proper legislative and tax-raising powers. What is being offered is portrayed as if it’s going to make those big changes. Rot. They are new coats of paint on an increasingly-dilapidated house.

Professor the Baroness Haleh Afshar OBE on the panel for the BBC Radio York General Election debate!

Haleh was on the debating panel alongside the three prospective parliamentary candidates for the York Outer constituency. This was a live programme in front of an audience invited by the BBC from around North Yorkshire. You can listen to the debate at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p007jxb5#synopsis

Reflections on the second prime ministerial TV debate

Posted by Dr Simon Parker

If the theme of the first prime ministerial debate had been ‘I agree with Nick’, the story of Thursday night’s encounter in Bristol and indeed the entire week’s campaigning since Clegg’s first triumphant performance in Manchester was ‘Let’s Get Clegg!’. That morning’s Daily Telegraph claimed that payments to support a research assistant when Nick Clegg was Home Affairs spokesman had been paid into his private account by three registered Liberal Democrat donors was a taste of the beastings that Clegg can expect from now until polling day. While the Daily Mail dedicated its entire front-page to Clegg’s “Nazi Slur on Britain”. “I have gone from Churchill to Nazi in less than a week”, complained the leader of Britain’s “Yellow Peril”. An ironic comment given that the great war hero warned voters that voting Labour in 1945 would be equivalent to voting for the Gestapo. Plus ça change…

No stranger to damaging stories involving donations and loans from wealthy friends, Lord Mandelson entered the studios of Radio 4 to decry the ‘disgusting’ attacks on Mr Clegg orchestrated by the Conservatives’ answer to Alastair Campbell – former News of the World editor Andy Coulson. Mandelson was at pains to point out that he abhorred everything that the Liberal Democrats stood for and that Mr Clegg was a very bad thing, but smearing one’s political opponents was not what British democracy was all about. Semi-colon, dash, open square bracket, close square bracket as my Twitterati friends might say.

4.1 million viewers (more than 5 million less than last week) tuned in to watch Sky News anchor Adam Boulton referee what promised to be a far more heated contre temps than round one. And so it proved—‘Get real, get real’ jibed Mr Brown at Clegg’s plans to postpone spending an alleged £100 billion on a replacement for Trident. Citizen Dave got irate at some Labour “scare-mongering” about making the elderly pay for prescription charges. “Will he withdraw the leaflets?” Cameron angrily intoned. “What about the eyes, the eyes aren’t in the manifesto”, retorted Brown. Teeth, pills and glasses have been a staple currency of British politics ever since Aneurin Bevan resigned from the Cabinet over the introduction of charges for dentures and specs—but at least as Tony Benn memorably remarked the “pershhonalities” were now fighting on the “isshues”.

How we pay for the need of the elderly is always a key “isshue” for although they may not tweet, the over sixties vote at four times the rate of the young (didn’t Marx once write something about the tradition of all dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living?). So as well as promising to maintain the free bus pass and TV licence, Cameron pledged to allow elderly householders the right to stay in their own homes and their descendents the right to inherit them. This will come as welcome news to the Shadow Chancellor whose own personal inheritance could cover one sixth of Osborne’s planned emergency budget cuts.
The opening discussion on Europe took a predictable course—Gordon and Nick are broadly in favour of ‘Europe’. David and his party are generally against, but they don’t want to leave. Nick wants to hold a referendum so that we can all leave, but he would like us to be a lot more European. Gordon thinks that referendums on European membership are a bad thing but a good thing if they allow the Alternative Vote system (assuming it results in the election of more Labour MPs). At the end of the day, as Nick Clegg reminded a rather worried looking Eurosceptic builder from Bristol, membership of the EU is basically a choice between straight bananas or more paedophiles.

A question not unrelated to the visit of Pope Ratzinger and the Catholic Church’s beleaguered attempts to ‘move on’ from the abuse of children in its care. All three men welcomed Benedict XVI’s visit and condemned the Church’s policies on homosexuality, embryo research, and contraception in almost equal measure. The one rare point of consensus in the evening was when Gordon Brown said that it is a very good thing that we no longer treat gay people as if they should have less rights than straight people. The other two leaders nodded their heads in approval. This in itself was a remarkable moment. Who would have thought, even 10 years ago, that the three parties representing over 90% of the popular vote would have unanimously agreed on reproductive rights and gay equality?

The consensus was short lived, however, when as if in homage to Mr Cameron’s 40 year old black seafarer from Portsmouth, Sky News found a woman who had herself been an immigrant 11 years ago but thought perhaps there were too many people like her here now. Cue a series of near identical responses to last week. Clegg wants border police and exit controls. Gordon Brown promised to get rid of foreign chefs and ‘surplus’ overseas students (as the comedian Mark Steel would say – nasty foreign students coming over here, propping up our underfinanced universities, paying money to British landlords, and buying goods in British shops—who needs them?). Both Dave and Gordon rounded on Nick for declaring an amnesty for clandestine migrants who had been here for many years who could be paying taxes to the Treasury instead of extortion to criminal gangs. Brown thought this would act as an incentive to more illegal immigration, Clegg challenged Brown to say what he would do with the estimated 1 million already here. Brown’s answer appeared to be “deport them all”. “But you don’t know where they live”, retorted Clegg, uncharitably. Brown’s rueful smile suggested that with the aid of Google Street Maps and a network of drones, the UK Border Agency was working on a solution to that very problem.

The most interesting part of the evening, however, was when a questioner asked whether the candidates would welcome a hung parliament. Cameron, who had prefaced many of his remarks with “If I were to be the next Prime Minister…” did not quite threaten the fiscal Armageddon and plagues of locusts that Ken Clarke assured us would follow anything less than a thumping Tory majority, but he joined with Gordon in insisting that when it comes to Westminster government—one is company and two’s a crowd.

The more sociable Mr Clegg offered the hand of friendship to both sides, in the knowledge that political cooperation is not seen as such a bugbear by most voters, and indeed focus group viewers were ‘dialling up’ as the Lib Dem leader espoused the benefits of a ‘war council’ to tackle the financial crisis and to continue with Labour’s inter-party working group on care for the elderly (which will double as the House of Lords reform committee). But the hard-to-get Mr Cameron was having none of it—on the subject of keeping Trident and nuclear power, he didn’t agree with Nick he agreed with Gordon. Clegg’s new found political friendships appear to have faded quicker than a cloud of volcanic ash.

Given his much more assured performance on Thursday night, Labour will be hoping that by jabbing one-twos at his opponents, Brown will have established the Tories as too much of an economic risk and the Lib Dems as too much of a security liability. Conservative supporters can take heart from the fact that their leader came across as much more prime ministerial than in the first debate, and more sure of his ground—especially on national insurance as ‘a tax on jobs’. The Lib Dems knew that this debate was all about consolidating last week’s dramatic poll gains, convincing the public that it is now a genuine three horse race, and that Clegg has the leadership qualities and electoral support needed to be a potential prime minister. It is because Clegg has managed to sustain his initial pace that the election race is still wide-open, and why the final debate next Thursday looks set to play a decisive role in the outcome of the general election.