How to Create Merry Hell: An Informed Choice for Election 2015

In 2010 the UK budget deficit (also ‘UK net borrowing’) was around £148bn. It’s now at £90bn (the next highest (hm, ‘deficit’ …lowest?) figure from 1979 to pre-crash 2007 was £50bn). But that’s what’s chipping away year by year. We are still getting further into debt by an annual £90bn.

Total debt, the National debt, is rising and has been since 2003. It’s currently at £1.56 trillion. It goes up by £2bn a week. As a percentage of GDP it’s less scary – post war it reached nearly 250%; now it’s about 81%. It was about half that 10-15 years ago.

But back to the yearly budget deficit book balancing. At debatable levels of ‘need,’ we need £12bn of welfare cuts.

Pensions make up half of the welfare budget, and they are protected. So where are the cuts going to come from? Child benefits! At least we know where the leaks are going to come from – the Lib Dems.

Thursday Next

So what is it? Austerity and those shameless welfare cuts taken to yet more unprecedented levels under the Conservatives, ‘everything paid for without any more borrowing’ from Labour, just as long as you don’t expect a timetable, ‘everything paid for by leaving the EU’ from UKIP – or something,  ‘all the things Labour are scared of doing’ from the SNP,  Lib Dems in the middle, or no cutting at all from the Greens (spending and borrowing, in fact – working/earning our way out of debt).

What are the questions being bandied about? Are they, in all honesty, your questions, when it comes to voting – if you vote?

Why won’t they say what they are planning? Has the government been competent with the economy? Would Labour be any better? Is there any difference between what the parties are offering? Do you want an EU referendum? What does the NHS need? Coalition threats. Would Nicola Sturgeon really create a sort of American cholesterol affair – where everyone’s blocked by everyone else’s intransigence in the House/Senate?

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Will they/won’t they coalition options. Every leader and spokesperson’s giving love, hate and back again descriptions of their potential partners. Surely the oddest time to be making coalition threats is at the end of a five-year …coalition. In May 2010 the vibe of “no majority: it’s the end of the world and Jeremy Vine’s career as we know it” lasted right up to and through election night. Then the coalition started and we realized it’s more… ‘meh.’ We’re hardly milking fear of the unknown here.

But back then, because of all the apocalyptic wobbles and the tardy election outcome, the Lib Dems and Conservatives fought it out and, a year later, we got the compromise AV vote. That got a woeful response, with claims that everybody thought it was a terrible idea/was scared of it/couldn’t understand it. Though the BBC reckons it might have helped towards a Conservative victory next week had it gone through.

In any case, the polls aren’t predicting majorities any time soon. What is changing, exactly? Has the rise of the other parties taken votes away, preventing the snuggly, warm majorities the Conservatives and Labour once reached? Adding up the votes and seats for the ‘main two’ here:

1987: Con + Lab votes = 73.0% of the vote and 93.1% of seats (605/650)

1992: Con + Lab votes = 76.3% of the vote and 93.2% of seats (607/651)

1997: Con + Lab votes = 73.9% of the vote and 88.5% of seats (583/659)

2001: Con + Lab votes = 72.4% of the vote and 87.9% of seats (579/659)

2005: Con + Lab votes = 67.6% of the vote and 85.6% of seats (553/646)

2010: Con + Lab votes = 65.1% of the vote and 86.8% of seats (564/650)

[Guardian 30^th April]     2015: Con + Lab votes = 66.9% of the vote and 83.5% of seats (543/650)

Well, going down I guess (and they seem to have consistently shared 98% of the seats from the ‘40s to 1970 – before pretty Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberals started to show promise and then naughty old Shirley Williams and her Social Democrats broke free). But see: Tony Blair got a majority when Labour and the Conservatives only had 85.6% of the seats to vie for in 2005, yet there was no majority in 2010 when the parties shared 86.8%.

Labour won with 35.2% of the popular vote in 2005; the Conservatives didn’t win with 36.1% in 2010. Welcome to statistics.

And those winning figures – looking a little low? Remember GCSE level history and politics lessons, folks – first past the post can all too often mean that most people in the country don’t vote for the winning party. Blair’s best: 43.2%; Thatcher’s best: 43.9%; Churchill’s best: 48.0%. Welcome to democracy.

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Have a seat. The possible loss of single party majorities here is not so much about the smaller parties leeching votes. Like it or not, it’s the number of seats that counts, rather than the percentage of the popular vote (it’s not like Strictly or X-Factor where things modulate with the judges’ scores/choices or whatever). 86% of the seats has been more than enough to generate a majority government before. 83.9% of seats was all there was to be had in 1931, but the Conservatives got in by a landslide.

It’s really about the lack of a clear winner/loser between the Conservatives and Labour. 1931 saw the Conservatives win 470 seats and Labour …46 (admittedly that marks the last outright majority in an election. 1931, kids – granny wasn’t even born). 2015 currently looks to be: Conservatives 276 and Labour 267. Welcome to symmetry.

Perhaps it’s the crucial swing seats that have gone over to the other parties and pwned the chance of a Conservative or Labour win – but then that’s what was wrong in the first place.

“Although there will be 650 individual contests in the 2015 general election, the outcome will be determined in a much smaller number. In 12 of the 17 general elections since 1950, fewer than one-in-ten seats changed hands from one party to another. Even in the massive Labour landslide of 1997, some 70% of seats stayed with the parties defending them.”

Because they haven’t changed much it means they won’t change. So we won’t bother electioneering or reporting politics there as much – that feedback loop where the current situation becomes the cause of the current situation.

It’s like people who don’t vote: the parties don’t rely on those peoples’ votes and don’t put their issues on the agenda, so then those people don’t vote, so…

Thursday Next

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Informed choice. That’s got to be democracy. Let’s face it, a handful of soundbites and bad jokes from the respective parties’ giggling speechwriting pools isn’t doing very much to help.

Apathy. No winning majorities. It’s not because they are all the same. It might be because, once in power, policy gets hammered and flattered by legislative issues, circumstances and all the things that can crop up over five years – so every government turns out to be the same.

But there are differences between these parties and their many, many members’ hearts and minds, differences both generous, clever, noble, disingenuous, cynical and degenerate, and these are evidenced when they plan their manifestos. If you want to make a choice at the box-ticking stage it’ll only be real if you know what the differences are.

It takes minutes. Just run through a couple of apps. They ask a few questions and then give you your leaning towards each party based on their policies. There’s VoteMatch. There’s ISideWith. There’s Who Shall I Vote For?

Locally you can check through your candidates. And if you want to see your current MP’s track record then type your postcode into They Work For You. It’s nice and concise, too.

The apps/quizzes are also useful for showing what’s making the agenda and the narratives and questions policy gets formed around.

Cutting the deficit? Public service cuts? HS2? Skilled migrants? Tuition fees? Free school meals/winter fuel allowance? NHS/privatisation? EU? Capping emissions? Foreign aid? Bedroom tax? Zero-hours? Tax rates for rich? Capping rents? Help to buy?

And there are, perhaps, some surprises separating the parties:

No one should be imprisoned for possession of drugs for personal use

Do you support the legalisation of same sex marriage?

Should terminally ill patients be allowed to end their lives via assisted suicide?

Should the UK reinstate the death penalty?

Should the British Monarchy be abolished?

Answering the questions and getting my recommended parties, I was surprised by the percentage difference between the parties I tend to consider and the ones I do not – they are poles apart. The parties are answering policy questions very differently in their manifestos at least.

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Cynicism for a Social Age

Red Ed [Miliband]’s in a strop with the Mail […] what has made him vent his spleen — indeed, he has stamped his feet and demanded a right of reply — is a Mail article by Geoffrey Levy on Saturday about the Labour leader’s late father, Ralph, under the arresting headline ‘The Man Who Hated Britain.’

‘An evil legacy and why we won't apologise’ MailOnline 1^st October 2013

THE PAPER THAT HATES BRITAIN

Paul Dacre's pledge to ‘tweak the noses of the liberalocracy which effectively run Britain’ is a homage to his reactionary newspaper. So what does the Daily Mail really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who loves this country

On a hot summer day, a middle-aged paper made its way alone out from under a rock in Central London to mark a lifelong obsession.

Solemnly, it stood at the grave of a spinning Britannia and said, in its own words:

“The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage. The number of aliens entering the country through the back door is a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.” [1]

The year was 1938. The paper was the Daily Mail, a spiteful chancer that would flee from this story just a few years later to join in with the condemnation of the Nazi Holocaust.

The Daily Mail, today edited by Paul Dacre, died and went to heaven in 1968, soon after Enoch Powell gave his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. It was soon after scaled down to tabloid format, offering what might be termed ‘Cynicism For A Social Age.’ In this form, the venerated national moralizer and emetic continued to espouse its lifelong Populist cause, representing “the views of millions of ordinary Britons.”

One voice, however, noted how, in its attempts to control who ‘counted’ in this British population, the Daily Mail was vehemently pursuing a lost cause. It was that of a longstanding senior news reporter at the Mail. He did not mince his words.

“They phoned me early one morning and told me to drive about three hundred miles to cover a murder. It was a woman and her two children who’d been killed. I got an hour and a half into the journey, and the news desk called me on my mobile and said, “Come back.” I said, “Why’s that?” They said, “They’re black.” [2]

As Paul Dacre once commented: “Racism appalls [sic] me and I wish I could get more black and Asian reporters working for us, but they don't come into journalism.”

In the explosive interview, given to British Journalism Review in 2002, Dacre revealed how obsessed he was with maintaining his paper’s “conservative with a small c” legacy.

“I shall go to my grave believing that children need a father and mother and a stable upbringing. I am not saying that people who grow up in single families don't have wonderful mothers or wonderful dads, but I believe children should be conceived in love and, in an ideal world, have a father and a mother. The breakdown in that belief is responsible for a lot of the unhappiness in the 21st century.”

How proud his ‘family-centric’ Daily Mail must have been to hear him describe readers’ interests when responding to the Leveson Inquiry in 2011:

“The Hampstead liberal with his gilded life-style understandably enjoys the Guardian – a paper that deals with serious issues. But does he or a judge have any right to deny someone who works ten hours a day in a Sunderland call centre and lives for football, the right to buy a paper that reveals the sexual peccadilloes of one of his team's millionaire married players.”

Dacre mentioned his interest in football player’s peccadilloes just minutes after criticizing Daily Express owner Richard ‘dirty’ Desmond for having made his money from pornography. Meanwhile the Daily Mail’s ferocious defence of marriage is evident from articles like “I feel guilty for ogling girls in mini-skirts. Yet no one would call my wife a dirty old woman for fancying a handsome cricketer.”

The newspaper’s stance on liberals is uncompromising. “Leftie bishops, liberal judges, a biased BBC” were all listed in an article which attacked many of Britain’s national institutions by claiming they were dominated by liberals (such as former Conservative Party chairman Lord Patten, who was: “several degrees to the Left of what used to be called ‘Right-wing Labour’”).

Another article, this time attacking the cherished National Health Service, said: “Members of tribunals are trained to be concerned only with upholding the rights of perceived ‘persecuted minorities’. Their verdicts are guided by the doctrines of ‘sexism’, ‘racism’ and a litany of fashionable ‘phobias.’” Still another: “How Labour threw open doors to mass migration in secret plot to make a multicultural UK.”

This is the publication that profits from its position as the second best selling newspaper in a country whose non-white population is over 9 million.

As for the diverse country that buys it and pays its keep, the newspaper wrote in its RightMinds section in 2009:

“It is hard not to reach the dismal conclusion that a society faced with violence in pursuit of the goal of overturning Christian values and conquering Britain for Islam [The Mail referring here to a protest against Israel’s military action in the Gaza Strip] turns tail and runs away - while at the same time coming down like a ton of bricks on any expression of those Christian values which underpin British society, in the interests of ‘equality and diversity’.

This is the way a society dies.”

This geriatric distaste for the British character certainly didn’t stop the Daily Mail availing itself of the lucrative reportage there was to be had from praising the fine Olympic Games opening ceremony this country offered last year.

Indeed, while ignorance of popular opinion is a charge Paul Dacre usually aims at the ‘liberal’ press, his newspaper found itself doing just that over the Olympic ceremony.

One article called Labour’s praise for the inclusion of “Working class history, multicultural[ism], NHS, CND, gay kissing” ‘taunts.’ Another piece commented: “NHS beds dominated the infield for so long that it seemed more a political message than a tribute to our hardworking nurses.” The paper then had to admit that this comment was out of step with what ordinary people thought, “Still, Boyle’s £27million creation dazzled, winning him thousands of new Twitter followers by the second.”

How passionately the Daily Mail must have approved of its editor’s sinister admission that his ‘Lesson One’ was that “Brains and education have little to do with the craft of journalism.”

Dacre relished his own contribution to what he called “the chattering classes' dyspepsia with [Daily Mail owner] the Rothermere press,” adding that “no day is too busy or too short not to find time to tweak the noses of the liberalocracy which effectively run Britain.”

Such tweaks by the Daily Mail have included:

• The May 1993 “How Race Militants Hijacked a Tragedy” article that downplayed the racial issues raised by Stephen Lawrence’s murder. The case had apparently been “swept into a whirlwind of high-profile publicity organised largely by anti-racist groups on the short path towards the making of a cause.” [3]
  
  
• The claim in 2011 that gay Britons were becoming McCarthyites: “schoolchildren are to be bombarded with homosexual references in maths, geography and ­science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to promote the gay agenda.”
  
  
• The many snide digs at diversity, claiming that pride in and respect for Britain’s wonderfully varied population is a conspiracy hatched by a tiny liberal elite. This one from 2009: “'Diversity' is just another way of persecuting decent people trying to go about their daily business... The most intolerant people in Britain are always those who preach 'tolerance' most loudly.”

Paul Dacre himself, in his 2008 speech to the Society of Editors, declared: “The problem is Britain's liberal class – the people who know best and who really run this country – by and large hate all the popular press.”

He also made plain his disdain for what he called the “subsidariat” (media outlets paid for by subsidy), which, to his mind, were nothing less than a kind of old boy network. “Large parts of the media are increasingly populated by a privileged elite of top university graduates who, too often, have only ever operated in subsidised environments.” This included, as he later said at Leveson, the “high priests of the subsidariat,” the BBC.

“The corporation has all but seen off ITV's news services, both nationally and locally, has crippled commercial radio, is distorting the free market for internet newspapers and now, with its preposterous proposal for 65 ultra local websites, is going for the jugular of the local newspaper industry.  Lines must be drawn in the sand…

It is destroying media plurality in Britain and in its place imposing a liberal, leftish, mono culture that is destroying free and open debate in Britain.”

Given this tirade, one is entitled to wonder whether Paul Dacre’s anti-liberalism is actually fuelled by a giant-sized social chip on his shoulder, or dick on his forehead.

Or perhaps Stephen Fry’s “vile bastard” does indeed, against all the odds in a country with so much to be proud of and champion, choose to stand for everything that is wrong with Britain.

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[1] Daily Mail, 20^th August 1938.

[2] Nick Davies Flat Earth News, (London; Vintage, 2009) p. 371. [“The book, which began with a presumption of guilt, was itself a pretty sloppy piece of journalism, full of half-truths, anonymous sources, gossip and urban myths presented as facts, and the very selective reporting that it accused papers of employing.” – Paul Dacre]

[3] Paul Harris, Peter Rose, ‘How Race Militants Hijacked a Tragedy,’ Daily Mail, 10^th May 1993.