The Economist it seems, will be summing this all up very well:
If an election were called next week, Britain might well end up with a Parliament for the next five years that is defined entirely by its views on claiming for bath plugs, rather than on how to get the country out of the worst recession in 70 years.
Take that, Cameron. And, in fairness, take that me. My immediate gut reaction was that a general election would be the best way of allowing individuals to ‘pass judgement’ on their own MPs and start again with a clean slate. Now I’m not so sure (although, to be honest, I just want rid of Brown, I’m not going to lie about that.)
The truth is that a new Government now isn’t going to fix anything. Rather than the simple approach of full online publication of expense claims, the virtues of Statutory Regulation as the Answer To Everything have once again been deployed to delegate decisions regarding MPs expenses to an appointed quango – someone else to take the blame if things go wrong. Ultimately full transparency is not being promised. We’re getting an ideologically driven fudge. Another Fucking Quango. Brilliant.
Alix Mortimer (is she the most influential Lib Dem Blogger? I know I’m terrified of her – which probably suggest she is) is in conspiratoral mood at the moment. It’s quite odd watching her transformation from blogger to full-blown campaigner, using whatever influence she’s accumulated to begin pushing a parlimentary reform agenda.
Then there’s Liberal Vision who are doing everything they can to turn Nick Clegg into, “Clean Up Clegg.”
Truth is that reform of Westminster and our whole system of politics is something that Lib Dems have always wanted but the rules of the game mean that it’s never been something we can seriously campaign on. It’s a ‘process’ story so therefore people aren’t interested. Yet here ‘the process’ is the story. It’s the only story (apart from yet more u-turns and “betrayals” of the “progressive movement” by Obama, something I will be getting stuck into sooner or later), in fact.
Alix is right. There’s never, ever going to be a better chance of getting reform, and an election now – one that managed to successfully dispel the anger – would go down in history as the Mother of all wasted opportunities for the Mother of all parliaments.
Alix said...
21 May 09 at 8:21 pm
Bwahahahahaha!
(Erm, any tips gratefully accepted…)
Darrell said...
21 May 09 at 8:21 pm
Charlotte,
We have to be quite clear about two things;
1)This Parliament cannot limp on for another year in a situation where the government has simply ceased to be and to be able to govern. God only knows how thin the next Queens Speech will be after the last one.
2)The endgame of any reform is their consent and endorsement of the people.
All of this points to an Autumn poll being a kind-of compromise between Cameron’s ‘next week if possible’ position and those who think Parliament should limp on for as long as possible….
Stu said...
21 May 09 at 8:35 pm
We actually needed an election back in November. Preferably November 2007, but 2008 would have done, too. That’s what I said at the time, I was right, and that’s what I continue to believe. If we have an election next week that’s good enough for me, but I would have preferred one last week or the week before.
I don’t think any general election will ever be fought on a single issue, and I definitely don’t think the next election – even if it happened next week – would be fought on expenses. No party has come out of expenses(-gate/-fence/-privet hedge) clean enough for that to happen.
I agree with Darrell’s point 2, as well – if you’re after constitutional reform, your aim is to convince the people, not to bring it in by the back door thanks to fortuitous electoral circumstances. Anything else would, of course, be utterly disingenuous.
Darrell said...
21 May 09 at 8:41 pm
Incidentally, Charlotte what will you say if Labour deposes another leader and imposes another un-elected Prime Minister on us? That we should still wait…?
Charlotte Gore said...
21 May 09 at 8:45 pm
That’s not going to happen though. Brown will never stand down, never admit failure. It’s why he won’t call an election early either, it’s just not in his own personal self-interest to give up being Prime Minister.
But if they did change leader we would need a General Election. I mean, I *want* a General Election. And really… if you think about it… I don’t think the current news agenda is really going to change the result either way. We’re getting the Tories no matter what, or if things go really badly wrong we’ll have another 5 years of this crap. I dread to think.
Darrell said...
21 May 09 at 8:53 pm
Charlotte,
It could well; his lieutenants are not looking loyal, the government is set for another brusing defeat over Royal Mail and what better way to sate the publics blood lust than a public deposition of the PM himself?
If I was in the Labour Party and in say, Millibands position id be thinking exactly along those lines but maybe i’m just evil
Bloody execution, call an election on the poll bounce that follows and rally the core vote with a traditional Tory baiting message.
asquith said...
21 May 09 at 9:03 pm
Yes- imagine if Brown clung on to leadership of Labour, even in defeat?
I would regard that as a disaster- I can’t imagine myself voting Labour, but I don’t share in fantasies about their extinction which many right-wingers do.
There’s little doubt now that a Cameron government would be socially conservative & authoritarian- even though they will probably have to give way on totem issues like ID cards & such they’re going to follow the same shite on drugs & various other unpopular causes in a way that panders to their base.
You could say the opposition will come from the yellow corner- but then, there are more than enough on the decent left who need some form of political home of some form.
Jennie said...
21 May 09 at 10:29 pm
“There’s little doubt now that a Cameron government would be socially conservative & authoritarian”
Would suit Darrell then
HUGE round of applause on #bbcqt for the audience member who brought up PR, and the young lad who objected was clearly a spotty tory oik. The young lad in the audience, that is. Not William Vague.
Mark Reckons said...
22 May 09 at 12:23 am
I am torn Charlotte. I want rid of Brown and this decaying Government but I am concerned that if we have an election and the Tories get a decent majority then they will perceive it as largely job done. Then with the expenses all being published online and a few MPs having either resigned or been kicked out by the electorate they then consider it their right to carry on with pretty much the same system.
I would hope that public anger would not assuage so easily but elections can have a cathartic effect and the electorate might be fatigued and want to move on. They might feel the new government is the change that was needed.
So we need to fight tooth and nail right now. It may be the only chance we get in this political generation. Alix is spot on about that.
Darrell said...
22 May 09 at 12:30 am
As is known I am definatly not in favour of socially authoritarian conservatism :d.
On the point Mark makes; well I would simply say this; who seriously thinks Team Brown is going to bring in these kind of reforms? The only circumstances under which it would would be if they thought their precarious grasp on power depended on it; and that will only happen consequentially if the Labour MP’s calling for it are strong enough to group together and willing to kick their government over it.
However, even if they did that would in itself probably bring the whole House of Cards crashing down, so…..
Niklas Smith said...
22 May 09 at 12:09 pm
The Economist leader (link here) is probably right that an immediate election would not be a good idea. One reason to wait (at least for a couple of months) is that the Telegraph has not yet exposed all of the MPs it claims have abused the system. And once they’ve done that, we need to work out whether all of their claims are true…
But I do think the Economist is wrong to argue that: “The same yes-but-not-now logic applies to the calls for constitutional reform…. You could re-engineer great swathes of Westminster — bring in an elected House of Lords, introduce a Bill of Rights, design open primaries for MPs, scrap the first-past-the-post electoral system — and it would not make a shred of difference if the people elected were left in charge of claiming their own expenses amid a ‘course-you-can-chum’ culture.”
On the contrary, as Mark Thompson brilliantly pointed out, the electoral system is part of the problem. The Rahm Emmanuel logic of “never waste a good crisis” (quoted in the Guardian’s “A New Politics” supplement (pdf) makes me slightly queasy, but so much trust has been lost that more drastic reforms are needed to restore public confidence in the way we are governed. When you add the excellent cases for PR, an elected Second Chamber and a humbled executive the logic becomes compelling.