On the same day that David Cameron and arch-Blairite former Home Secretary, John Reid, shared a platform to denounce AV, the Evening Standard came out against voting reform, patronising the electorate by basing its flimsy argument on the crazy notion that AV is so much harder to understand. I wonder what’s so hard to understand about ranking candidates in order of preference. Most semi-intelligent people have learnt how to count to five by the time they reach 18. Then again, perhaps the Tories implicitly accept that right wing voters are inherently stupid and that’s why they’re so scared of electoral reform. It might also explain why the BNP are equally opposed to AV.

Meanwhile, with a few honourable exceptions, the Greens are out in force campaigning for AV. As Waveney Councillor Graham Elliott reports:

In Waveney I know several people who voted for their THIRD choice candidate in the 2010 general election in an attempt to keep the Conservatives out. They knew their first choice (Green) would not win and they also knew that the Lib Dems (their second choice) were weak in Waveney and the contest was really a two-horse race between Labour and the Conservatives. They therefore voted Labour which was their third choice. Under AV they would have been able to vote 1 for Green, 2 for Lib Dem and 3 for Labour with no increased risk of letting the Tories in. This is just one specific example to illustrate why the current system doesn’t work. Far too many people vote to keep a party out rather than vote for they believe in. AV will allow a more honest expression of voters values.

From my time campaigning with Elliott, back when I used to live in Suffolk, I’ve come to realise that he’s one of those people whom if they’re on your side, you’re probably on the right one. And if it’s a choice between the Greens, Ed Miliband and the Lib Dems vs. The Tories, John Reid, Nick Griffin and the Evening Standard, I think it becomes clear which side has the moral highground.

Of course, as Reid’s appearance with Cameron shows, the debate does cross party lines. But, increasingly it seems, it is running along ideological ones. With a few obvious exceptions, the left are falling behind AV and the right are coming out against it. No one wants to have Nick Clegg on their team, I admit, he’s the spotty fat geek with asthma we got lumbered with because nobody picked him. But set him aside for now. The referendum isn’t about kicking Clegg – we can wedgie him in the changing rooms come the next election – this is about setting the direction of our democracy.

We can go forward or we can stand still forever. It’s time for those on the left who, for whatever genuine and principled reasons they have, have come out against AV, to look around them and see who’s playing for their team and what their agenda is. It’s time for them to ask themselves, whose side are they on?

The Liberal Democrats are set to merge with the Conservatives before the next general election. A lasting alliance between the two coalition partners has been the topic of some speculation since the Oldham by-election campaign kicked off and polls indicated the Lib Dems could barely hold onto second prize in a beauty contest with Jabba the Hutt and a syphilitic testicle, let alone their seats at the next election. But conclusive proof came in an interview Nick Clegg gave to the Evening Standard this week.

“Let me be absolutely clear once and for all,” Clegg said. “The Liberal Democrats will fight the next election as we did the last – as an independent political party in every constituency in the county.”

Well there you have it folks. We all know what Clegg means when he wants to be absolutely clear and pledges not to do something. Expect the Liberal Democrats to no longer exist as an independent political party by the next election. And if they don’t manage to do it themselves, maybe we could help them along.

Clegg pledges with characteristic conviction never to join a Conservative government:

I know that the next few years will be tough, very tough for some, but I also believe that the changes we make – empowering you, trusting you, listening to you – will make the public services a more rewarding place to work. I know there are a minority in the trade unions who will deliberately misrepresent what this government stands for because they are spoiling for a fight. Please don’t allow their political motivations to push you into doing the wrong thing for the country. We do not want to take you on. We want to take you with us.

Image: David Spender/flickr

-          Extract from Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander’s Lib Dem conference speech (quoted by the BBC), which he’s delivering as I write.

So…according to Mr Alexander, public sector jobs are going to be more rewarding because workers are going to be ‘empowered’ and ‘trusted’ more. Presumably this is meant to make public sector employees so happy that the lack of more tangible rewards like pay rises won’t be an issue. Oh, and anyone who decides to get involved in industrial action because they oppose the government’s cuts policy can be safely ignored – they’re definitely a minority and they’re ‘politically motivated’ (which I think means something like ‘motivated by something more than mere naked self-interest’, but I’m not entirely sure). They probably love going on strike. You don’t have to go to work, you might get a nice brazier to stand around…it’s a fun day out for all the family!

A slew of recent polls have shown the Lib Dems with a massively reduced vote share – generally around 14-15%, as compared to the 23% they got in the general election. This would wipe them out in Parliament, assuming electoral reform doesn’t pass (and sadly it seems unlikely to), which would be a shame for those of us who think a two-party system doesn’t make for healthy democracy. But when you hear statements like the one above, it’s hard not to feel that the Lib Dems deserve all they get.

Like most readers of this blog, the Budget made me pretty angry – the VAT increase and tighter controls on benefits combined with the cut in corporation tax make a complete mockery of the claims that this Budget was ‘progressive’ in any sense, and millions of the poorest and most vulnerable people in this country will be worse off because of it. But this has been said by any number of people with far more expertise than me in great detail already, so I don’t intend to go over the same ground. What I want to write about is the overwhelming desire I have, now that a supposedly centre-left party is colluding with Tories to bring in the most regressive economic measures in decades, to grab every soi-disant leftie I know who voted Lib Dem and shout ‘Is this what you wanted? Is it? Osborne’s going to be able to do everything Thatcher didn’t have the guts to do, and you helped it happen!’ in their smug self-deluding faces. But I want to write about it because I don’t think that reaction’s justified, no matter how strong its appeal might be. Yes, a blue-yellow coalition was always a possibility under a hung parliament, and one that those voting for the Lib Dems should have borne in mind. But that’s all it was; a possibility, not an inevitability. And in any case, it’s hard to judge people too harshly for turning away from Labour when you consider so much of the record of the Blair and Brown governments.

First, consider the actual election result. Thanks to the random vagaries of our electoral system, no one could have predicted the result we got. A hung parliament was always quite likely, of course, but the specific result of a hung parliament where Labour and the Lib Dems didn’t have a majority between them wasn’t something anyone predicted. And it’s because of this result that the Lib Dems didn’t really have many options open to them other than getting into bed with Cameron and friends; remember that Labour was pretty openly against Alex Salmond’s suggestion of a centre-left ‘rainbow coalition’ and that pretty much no party save the Tories really had the money to fight another election campaign (which would have been the likely result of a minority Conservative government). There weren’t many options open to the Liberal Democrats after the election, and none were appealing.

As for those who actually voted for the Lib Dems, it’s easy to criticise them in hindsight, now that we know what we do about how things turned out. But equally there were a hell of a lot of good reasons for people to turn away from Labour, and – given our first past the post system – not many credible alternatives in most parts of the country. The reforms to jobseekers’ and disability living allowance being introduced now are atrocious, but we shouldn’t forget that the benefits system was already pretty damn draconian – a point made by our own Dan during the election campaign and more recently by Laurie Penny at the New Statesman. Then there were the attacks on civil liberties (and for all the hateful shit the coalition’s doing, we can at least be thankful that ID cards and the vetting and barring scheme are on the way out), the privatisations, the corruption, the utter failure to do anything meaningful about climate change, the warmongering…it’s a familiar list, and one that could be made a lot longer. I voted Labour because my local MP was opposed to most of that, but if I lived in an area where that wasn’t the case I’d find putting a cross next to that red rose logo on the ballot paper a lot harder to stomach.

Laying the blame for the coalition’s failings at the feet of those who voted Lib Dem is easy and very tempting. It was, in retrospect, a serious error. But it was an understandable error, and what’s more, it’s an error that many Lib Dem voters are now recognising. The left cause won’t be helped by going on about it. Right now we need to do everything we can to minimise the damage the government’s going to do to the social fabric of the UK. Turning on each other over past differences really isn’t going to help.

Well, it happened. Not quite as anyone had been expecting, but it happened. The moment we’ve dreaded for the last three years.

David Cameron is the new Prime Minister.

I can’t say I will be sorry to see Brown go. I can’t say New Labour didn’t deserve to lose this election. I can say I will be sorry to see the country run by Cameron.

I wonder now how all those Lib Dem voters – genuinely, and quite rightly, believing that they were voting for a party to the left of Labour – will be feeling now that Clegg has placed the crown on Cameron’s head. The Lib Dems have always been famous for flip-flops, shifting to the left when trying to attract disaffected Labour voters, swinging to the right with the next manifesto when hoping to scalp the Tories. But I never thought I would see them enter into a coalition with the Conservatives.

It goes without saying that the Tories won the election. Like it or not, they have the moral right to govern. A Lib-Lab pact would have had little legitimacy without the nationalists on board and Caroline Lucas was correctly keeping her hands clean.

In actively choosing to prop up a Conservative government and give them the majority they need to survive in power, the Lib Dems have betrayed their supporters and they may well suffer for it. Whilst a Prime Minister’s first duty is to statecraft, a leader’s first duty should be to his or her party, to their manifesto and to their ideological compass. If Nick Clegg does not achieve full PR through this deal, then he could very well be seen to have turned his back on them.

New Labour betrayed its working class supporters even before they got into power, but at least the country knew it. People backed Labour for the last 13 years without any illusions. There was never any question of socialism, it was dead from the moment Tony Blair took charge and had been dying even before then. But Lib Dem voters across the country who put their cross in a box they thought meant progressive change should be feeling rightly incensed that the people they elected are now in government with the Tories.

But then, as the country should quickly be realising, Saint Clegg is just a politician and far from finding himself above hypocrisy.

“The Conservatives’ commitment to this kind of reform [civil liberties] is just paper thin,” Nick Clegg told me in an interview with The Third Estate last year. “I don’t think anyone should take them seriously on the rights of the citizen while they retain their commitment to abolish the Human Rights Act.”

Of course, for the rest of us, we should be breathing a slight sigh of relief. A Conservative government was almost preordained three years ago. We should be thankful that they failed to achieve a majority and that they will have the constraints of coalition placed on them. The Lib Dems may prove a moderating influence. It looks likely that the Tory inheritance tax reform will be scrapped and Clegg’s party will get its way on the £10,000 starting tax rate – both of which are very welcome developments.  The Alternative Vote system is nothing to cheer, but at least the issue of electoral reform will remain in conversation as long as the Liberal Democrats are in government. Meanwhile, we should be thankful that both the Tories and the Lib Dems are committed to scrapping ID cards and that neither party will be as abysmal as New Labour on civil liberties.

A spell in opposition may be just what Labour needs right now. If it uses this time to reconnect with its roots, to bring ideology and class back into politics and to elect – not crown – a genuine left wing reformer who will turn his (unfortunately it’s unlikely to be her) back on the Blairites and the Brownites and their vain squabbles over nothing of any significance, then it has a chance to re-emerge as a strong and necessary party again that has learnt the lessons of its past. On the other hand, it will probably elect David Milliband as its leader. In which case, it deserves to lose the next election as well.

Either way, the lefty blogosphere will have two battles in the coming months. The battle against the Tory cuts and the battle to rid ourselves of the last ugly vestiges of the New Labour regime, a poison that has done far more to entrench the values of Thatcherism than the Conservatives ever could.

The fight-back starts here!

Now that Brown’s promised to step down, it’s looking increasingly plausible that our next government will be a centre-left coalition of some kind. No doubt if this actually happens the rightwing press will go into a frenzy about how illegitimate and unfair it is for the Tories not to get into Government, but they can safely be ignored. Despite what many, including Salman on this very blog, have been claiming, a party which got 36% of the vote and 46% of the seats is not entitled to run the country if there’s a majority coalition who are willing and able to give it a shot instead. The Tories tried and failed to get majority support, so they should stop whinging and get used to the fact that nearly two thirds of the country made it very clear that we don’t want them in office.

But the problem, as so many have pointed out, is getting enough support in the Commons for an anti-Tory alliance. There are 650 Commons seats in total, but what everyone seems to have forgotten is that Sinn Féin (who have 5 MPs) don’t take up theirs. This means that a coalition would need 323 MPs or more to have an effective majority, not 325 as some people have been claiming. The breakdown in seats for the left of centre and liberal parties is as follows:

Labour and the Lib Dems have 315 seats combined, so they need 8 more for a majority. The SNP and one party out of Plaid and the SDLP would do fine. This shows that it’s doable, at least in principle. But a coalition – or even an informal agreement – between four parties like this probably wouldn’t hold together for long, especially given how rude Labour were when Alex Salmond suggested precisely this. So my solution? Form the coalition, but for as short a time as possible. Try and hold it together for just long enough to bring in the change our political system’s been crying out for. Just long enough to ensure the Tories never get to impose their bastard rightwing policies on the left-leaning majority of us again. Just long enough, in short, to bring in electoral reform. As I’ve said before, I’m agnostic as to which version of electoral reform we should favour (though Reuben’s arguments against AV are pretty convincing), but it needs to happen and needs to happen soon. And once it’s in place? Call another election. Yes, I know it’ll be difficult to get people out on the streets campaigning so soon after this one, but at least with some kind of PR in place everyone’s vote would actually matter at last. And how much better would it be for an uneasy four(or more)-party coalition like the one I’m proposing to split at a time of its own choosing rather than to disintergrate from petty infighting? It’s a long shot, I know. But I think it’s our best hope.

Ok, perhaps he’s not wrong about everything, but Reuben wrote an article yesterday with which I have several significant disagreements. My main problem with his assertions stem from this cringe-worthy little paragraph:

In places like Cambridge – where they grabbed a seat last time – they seemed to get the vote of those who treated voting as an exercize [sic] in political self expression, or a parade of their moral conscience, rather than a practical attempt to determine the future. You know, those self indulgent tossers opine, with great moral gravity, “I couldn’t possible vote labour”. With a change of government on the cards – and at a time when politics will really save people of [sic] fuck people – I expect people to really, actually vote for who might form the next government – i.e. Labour or the Tories.

Whilst Reuben is right to say that the Lib Dems, perhaps unfairly, capitalised on an anti-war vote which will be far less pronounced in this election, I believe he is gravely wrong to characterise people who refuse to vote Labour for moral reasons as “self indulgent tossers”. Aside from being patronising, he is missing out on the bigger picture. Firstly, if we ever want the political system to change, and for long-term progressive reform to take place, we cannot afford to blindly follow a system which forces us to choose between the lesser of two evils. Politics should not be about who we don’t want to run the country, but about who we do. It is not, in my view, wrong to vote Labour in all cases. There are some very good Labour MPs and candidates out there who, despite the transgressions of their party, despite the wars, the privatisations and the systematic crackdown on civil liberties, deserve the support of left-wing activists. Nor, in all cases, is tactical voting a bad move. However, by telling people that they must vote Labour simply to keep the Tories out, we blunt a powerful tool for reforming the political system. Moreover, we reinforce the sense of disenfranchisement that is precisely the problem with politics at the moment – a sense of alientation in which people perceive they have very little choice in who runs the country and that their views are not being represented in a so-called representative democracy – a disenchantment which, far more than immigration figures and tabloid scare stories about asylum seekers eating our hamsters, has led to the rise of the BNP. As George Monbiot told me in an interview with The Third Estate last year: “As much as I dislike and am disgusted with the Tories, I think you have to vote for what you think is right. And if you cling onto something bad for fear of something worse, no one will end up with the government they want.”

Secondly, Reuben’s thinking relies on a similar faith to Tony Benn’s, that New Labour is a transient thorn that can be plucked if socialists re-join the party and work for change from within. I respect this view, but in translating this to a call to back Labour in an election regardless of circumstance, I think it only exacerbates the problem. New Labour is not a transient thorn. Its intelligent, educated and very middle class architects made a calculated, and very correct, decision that they can afford a sharp swing to the middle ground because whatever they do, their core support of left-wing voters will back them come what may. As long as they believe they can get away with that, New Labour will remain entrenched and the British working class will find nothing more than a few empty platitudes, whilst internationally it will continue to follow a line that is dangerously neo-conservative confident that as long as they remain moderately better than the Tories domestically, their left-wing supporters, who turned up on every demonstration opposing invasions and ID cards, will continue to put their cross in the right box come election time. Yes, you heard it here first folks, the Iraq war was Reuben’s fault! This is precisely why moral decisions must play a part in deciding who to vote for. This is why cold pragmatism gives everything we have struggled to resist in the last decade an easy ride. It’s not self-righteous to say I can’t, in good conscience, vote Labour. It’s just self-aware. Nor is it a matter of placing my own morality above the good of the many. There are a great many Iraqi orphans who would agree with me. By voting for who I want to run the country, rather than who is most likely to run the country, I am thinking of the bigger picture.

So you see, this is why Reuben is wrong about everything. Also, and this is perhaps the most fundamental point of all, whilst kids up and down the country were running round the playground playing ‘It’, Reuben was playing a game called ‘Had.’ I rest my case…

Guest post by Guy Aitchison

It is time for those who want a new politics to work together for change

With the party conferences over and MPs returning to Westminster today following their 82-day break, now seems like a good moment to reflect on the crisis that engulfed the political class during the early summer months and how they have responded.

At the height of the Great Expenses Scandal party leaders made a great show of telling us how they knew exactly what was wrong with our political system and how to fix it, competing to outdo each other with ever-more radical constitutional solutions to voters’ loss of trust in the system.

Gordon Brown promised far-reaching democratic reform, informing us that he was a long-time fan of constitutional campaign group Charter 88 and making noises about a “a written constitution”. David Cameron called for giving “power to the powerless” and talked of fixed term parliaments and new powers for constituents to recall MPs. Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, pointed out that he had long distinguished himself with calls for reform of a “rotten” Westminster system and demanded that an urgent list of constitutional changes be made in “100 days”.

At the time, some in the commentariat were asking what on earth constitutional reform has to do with abuse of expenses. But the impulse to respond to public anger with proposals to re-distribute power was the correct one. It involved the recognition that anger over expenses was about more than simply duck houses, moats, dry rot, and other abuses, however petty or extravagant: it was symptomatic of a much deeper disconnect between the public and politicians that has been building for years.

For a long time, people in the UK have been switching off from formal politics. Voter turnout at the last two general elections in 2001 and 2005 was at a historic low of around 60%. This disengagement doesn’t arise from apathy or satisfaction with the status quo, as the Power Inquiry, which carried out the largest ever investigation into people’s attitudes to British democracy several years ago, concluded. It arises from feelings of powerlessness and a sense that parties and politicians are all the same.

Public outrage reflects a much deeper sense that our political system is dysfunctional and in crisis and that our insular and self-serving political class just don’t give a damn. How else to explain disastrous decisions like the Iraq war executed with total contempt for popular opinion, the vicious attacks on our civil liberties, the pathetic surrender to the banking system, and the total failure to face up to the challenge of catastrophic climate change? The disjuncture between what needs to happen on the big challenges we face and what our closed political system will permit is massive.

What is to be done?

Several months on from this crisis, as we enter a new parliamentary term with a general election in sight, any small hope there briefly was that the managers of our stale two-party system would bring about change has been disappointed. The political class are once again hoping that voters’ anger and disgust will give way to disillusionment and resignation allowing them to keep the whole sorry show on the road a while longer.

I was at the Labour and Tory party conferences, in the main hall and at the party fringes, and you could almost hear the sound of brush strokes sweeping the crisis and the earlier promises of change under the carpet.

Brown’s speech to the Labour conference offered a cowardly mixture of fudges and half-measures that will please no one. The Prime Minister promised a referendum on electoral reform – but not until after the next election and even then only on the Alternative Vote system which wouldn’t move Parliament any closer to being proportional. He talked of a new right for constituents to recall errant MPs – but only when voters are given permission from their political masters on high. And one hundred years after Parliament decided to reform the Lords, Brown committed to “remove the hereditary principle” from the second chamber, re-stating Labour’s position in their manifesto of twelve years ago.

David Cameron’s speech to the Tory party conference was a master class of rhetoric promising a lot but offering little of substance. He clearly wants people to think that he “gets it” when he says that the expenses crisis “reflected something deeper…the sense that people have been left powerless by big government”. Spot on! But apart from some vague references to “decentralisation”, “transparency”, and “accountability” there was nothing on how he plans to reform a political system which, by his own admission, is “broken”.

These paltry offers to the electorate confirm that we simply can’t trust politicians to deliver the reform that’s needed. With less than a year until the next election, all of us who want a new politics should focus our efforts on ensuring that the next Parliament is a reforming one.

This will not be easy. It’s almost a law of nature that once politicians take power they are reluctant to give it away.

We need an intelligent and demanding citizens’ movement organising outside the parties and the formal structures of political power, calling for change and holding politicians to their promises.

It is with this goal in mind that the Rowntree Trusts have launched Power2010, a unique campaign that will give everyone a chance to have a say in how this country should be run.

In the first phase of the campaign, Power2010 is asking the public for their ideas for how we change politics. Everyone is encouraged to get involved and contribute their own ideas by going to the website at www.power2010.org.uk.

All the ideas submitted will then be considered by a panel of randomly selected citizens drawn from across the UK who will decide a list of options to be put to the public vote.

The five ideas that receive the most votes will become the Power2010 Pledge, which candidates of all parties will be asked to commit to at the next election – in public meetings, on the door step, by email and letter; as often as possible by as many people as possible.

It is time for those who want a new politics, one that is open, honest, and responsive to the needs and interests of the public, to work together for change. If we join forces and act now we could get a reforming parliament and a new politics out of the next election.

Guy Aitchison works for the Power2010 campaign. Before that he was deputy director of the Convention on Modern Liberty. He blogs at openDemocracy’s UK blog, OurKingdom.