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Ajouter un commentaireAs the election campaign progressed, journalists and politicians alike freshened up their knowledge on the rules laid out by the unwritten and ultimately flexible Constitution in order to determine who was in the right to seek power first, with, hilariously, the Queen effectively in a position to call someone to govern.
Denied a vote
The shortcomings of the British electoral system reached such an apex this year that even carrying out the election was a marked failure . Over 1,200 people were denied a vote as the reporting officers in charge at some election stations planned badly and spectacularly misjudged turnout. Queues stretched out the door in the evening in several constituencies around the country, as lack of staff and in some cases, ballot papers, meant the after-work rush was not dealt with. As required by law, doors closed at 10pm on the dot, and voters who had been waiting sometimes for hours were turned away. In Chester, the polling list had missed out 600 people, and in Sheffield Clegg was obliged to apologise personally for the shambles created.
The beauty of the ludicrously simple form of democracy called First-Past-the-Post is that it generally manages to ignore around two thirds of the votes cast. In Fermanagh and South Tyrone the Sinn Fein candidate won by a majority of 4 – yes, 4 individual votes - whilst after a tie between Conservative and Labour and four recounts, the local election result in Great Yarmouth (also held on May 6) was decided (as election rules allow) with the returning officer producing a pack of cards and announcing the winner was whoever pulled the highest card. Why bother with voting at all when we could just watch all candidates fight it out over a game of poker ? Overall, the Liberal Democrats increased their share of the vote but not their seats, and in Scotland Labour won resoundingly, with the Conservatives securing one paltry seat – both results not mirrored in the overall outcome.
Results
So to the results : Conservatives - 306 seats, Labour - 258, LibDem - 57, others (including Plaid Cymru and SNP) – 28. The number of seats needed to secure a majority government is 326. So despite Brown being the most unpopular Prime Minister since the conception of democracy and lending the others helpful support by blundering from one PR disaster to another during the campaign ( notably Bigotgate ), with the country in economic meltdown, the Tories did not win. Neither did the LibDems, whose feet were firmly returned to the ground after the balloon of Cleggmania burst when they failed to secure more seats than at the last election when no-one had heard of them . The result, therefore, was unclear. In the words of Lord Ashdown “the country has spoken, but we don’t know what they’ve said” .
Despite his small percentage of seats, it was indeed Clegg the Kingmaker as all parties sought to find a way to form a coalition. Brown as incumbent Prime Minister had first dibs on an attempt, but took one look at the ragtag group of nationalists he would have to team up with and batted it to the Tories. Cameron, no doubt realizing that with huge economic cuts looming, a minority Tory government could lose both voter and Commons support very fast, offered a deal to the LibDems– albeit after a speech in which he discounted any concession on the main LibDem policies. . Brown responded by resigning as Labour party leader, thus opening the way for Labour negotiations with the LibDems.
Horsetrading opened, with Clegg jumping between the two main parties and being described by ex-minister David Blunkett as “behaving like every harlot in history” . Additional secret back rooms had to be opened to accommodate all the plotting and wrangling.
As negotiations continued, the media grappled incredulously with the concept of coalition, seemingly unfamiliar with its presence in Germany, the Netherlands or anywhere else in the world. The BBC’s David Dimbleby will be filing for overtime until the next election after presiding over endless days of rolling news coverage without any discernible development. Meanwhile the utterly impartial Sky News presenter Adam Boulton no doubt wished he’d caught up on sleep before offering Labour aide Alastair Campbell a fight on live TV .
Finally the Tories and LibDems announced the first coalition in the UK for 65 years. Differences were firmly muzzled under tight smiles as the road to power was cleared. Cameron searched for new jokes as he was reminded he had previously said his favourite one was Nick Clegg .
The civil service dusted off the LibDem policy papers it had previously binned to find points of convergence. And LibDem supporters who had voted for them in order to keep the Tories out howled their disappointment. Uncharted territory indeed. Although once the coalition had been agreed, the sight of Messrs Brown and Cameron trotting off to Buckingham Palace to ask for permission to resign and govern respectively merely resembled a strange and very British pantomime.
A clunky slogan conjuring up chunky images - “a Big Society matched by big citizens” – heralded Cameron as Prime Minister with Clegg as his deputy. Five members of the 24 strong Cabinet are LibDem and the final coalition terms were announced on 20 May. Initial positive moves are the scrapping of ID cards and tighter controls on surveillance. Decidedly bad news for further European integration is the appointment of William Hague as Foreign Secretary .
Electoral reform
This year however, electoral reform was finally on the agenda. With fairer voting the keystone of LibDem policy, during negotiations both the Tories, who are stringently against reform, and Labour tripped over each other to offer the LibDems promises on referendums and new voting systems. AV, AV+, STV and numerous other abbreviations were bandied about as an attempt to secure a fairer system. Groups such as the Electoral Reform society and 38 Degrees helped to galvanise public opinion and maximise the opportunity presented by a hung parliament, organising more than 1,000 people in a demonstration outside the negotiation office to petition for a “Purple Revolution” on the electoral system. The coalition deal ended of course in a compromise, with a referendum planned on AV, the most watered down form of PR. Tories will be free to vote and campaign against it, thus ensuring that even this small step will most likely not be approved. Not yet “the biggest shake up of democracy in the UK since the 1832 Reform Act” as promised by Clegg Although presumably when he promised this he had forgotten about the introduction of universal suffrage in 1928.
Happy White Men
Ah yes, universal suffrage. One element was notably absent in the 2010 election : women. Not one of the parties featured a prominent female candidate, with the Labour party sidelining all the female politicians from its Cabinet for the campaign and diverting focus from the 191 female candidates it had standing. In the second TV debate a female questioner seemed to confuse Brown for moment when he stated : “Women – and you are one of them ...” Perhaps the media coverage, focusing ad naseum on the respective wives and their outfits, made him forget that there were also women who were allowed to talk in public .
Or perhaps he was wondering why all three debates were presented by a man, or why every television channel sought fit to make their entire election coverage male. In the BBC’s coverage on the night, the only role given to a woman was to occasionally press a screen displaying incoming results. Political comment it was not, but every game show needs an assistant.
Not that the Cabinet sought to reverse this : of 24 people, only four are women. Both leaders are 43 year old white men and by the looks of things, would like to be surrounded by the same when they go to work. Only one woman, Theresa May, has a prominent position as Home Secretary as well as Minister for Women and Equality. That’s Theresa May, Equalities Minister, who has voted for stricter abortion legislation and consistently against gay rights, and didn’t feature in the campaign at all. One of the other lucky four was Sayeeda Warsi, an unelected peer who has become Minister without Portfolio. But she is female and Muslim and was surely a last-minute necessity when the diversity of the Cabinet became clear .
To have a government in 2010 with women forming just 22% of the Commons and 14% of the Cabinet is depressing and does nothing to boost the UK’s position at 52 in the international league table of women’s representation – about level with the United Arab Emirates and below Afghanistan. Judging by the current appointments, it looks unlikely that a Con-Lib coalition will seek to change this.
Good news
But before we become too disheartened, there was definite good news. Caroline Lucas became the first Green Party MP. The extreme right-wing BNP crashed and burned without gaining a seat, though not as literally as Nigel Farage, the virulently Eurosceptic UKIP leader, whose plane crashed on election day when, with fitting symbolism, his campaign banner became entangled with the propeller. Neither he nor his party won a seat.
With the future of the coalition uncertain, the Labour party can now elect a new leader and regroup in the hope of a shaky coalition and an early election. On the other hand, the country can hope that the necessities of working in coalition ensure both Tories and LibDems keep one another from implementing their crazier ideas. On the topic of Europe in particular, the LibDem influence may help contain the most Europhobic Tory backbenchers when their eyes start bulging at the thought of Eurofederalists coming to steal the pound. It may not be change we can believe in, but at least it’s change.
Headline photo : Prime Minister’s Office, flickr.com
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