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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Davos Cameron

‘The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas’ …or something like that. It’s been running since 1971, and has an annual meeting at Davos in Switzerland - a meeting that David Cameron attended this year, his first attendance as prime minister.

In this capacity Cameron authoritatively mentioned the budget for growth that the government will be announcing in about eight weeks: ‘Those who argue that dealing with our deficit and promoting growth are somehow alternatives are wrong. You cannot put off the first in order to promote the second. Average government debt in the EU is almost eighty per cent of GDP.’ The nice thing about giving a speech is that you can put words into your hypothetical enemies’ mouths, and make those words much easier for yourself to knock down than in real life. What about those who aren’t actually arguing that tackling the deficit and promoting growth are alternatives, but suggest instead that they can solve each other – promoting growth to deal with the deficit?

The coalition’s method is to focus first on reducing the deficit, hopefully with the least amount of damage done to the potential for growth. Of course, while pitching for business interest at Davos it was growth that needed to be sold, rather than deficit reduction. Cameron’s sentences thus came out with the emphasis reversed. His government would prioritise growth through its choice of cuts - welfare is cut to pay for transport, and tax increases focus on what people spend, rather than hiking taxes on jobs. As for Europe, we should all cut back on regulations to small businesses: our entrepreneurs, our lifeblood.

Carefully deployed oxymorons-that-aren’t: budgets for growth, cutting back to invest in innovation – it’s not that Cameron’s saying every cloud has a silver lining, but rather he’s having every cloud labelled: ‘silver lining holder.’ It’s pruning a shrub so that it might grow more vigorously in the next season. Yes, a gardening metaphor for politics and the economy – Chauncey Gardiner and Being There. It’s the same thing: vacant man spouts political nous. Everything has its season, after the winter comes the spring. It’s tough but it will get better. Yes, thanks Dave.

Nick Clegg was in Switzerland too. While Cameron gave the Forum deep cuts, Clegg’s cuts were measured: ‘I understand that people, psychologically, when they hear about it, think it's already happened. The vast majority of cuts haven't been introduced yet... They will be imposed gradually over a four-and-a-half-year period.’ It was all about defending the cuts, and ensuring that we all know how confident the coalition is about sticking to them, and to their economic policy in general. On the Friday Chancellor George Osborne told the Forum that we must ignore the ‘siren voices’ urging against the cuts. This is the same phrase he used about a year ago at the Mais lecture at the Cass Business School, City University London. This at least proves that both Osborne and the sirens have been consistent up to now. Coupled with the cuts is an easing of the tax burden on businesses, or rather a promise to achieve the ‘lowest rates of business taxes in the western world.’ Inspiring stuff, though bare in mind Osborne’s audience at Davos.

The World Economic Forum affirms business, tells it that it does a good job, and that, in doing a more profitable, efficient job for itself, our respective populations will be better off materially and otherwise. Those speaking who are in politics are trying to sell their country’s attractiveness to international leaders in business and finance. Obviously the meeting was slightly more interesting this year because the pep talk and inspiring pro-business sound bites had to be reconciled with the ‘it’s a choppy road to recovery’ and ‘we can’t let bankers off the hook for this mess completely’ policy admissions of each country’s spokespersons. Cameron and Osborne confidently offered several explanations as to how the coalition’s cuts wouldn’t affect new investments or opportunities for business - those routes to successful and safer economies and societies.

This meant addressing the recent news-making finding that the economy contracted by 0.5% in the last three months of 2010. The bad weather was cited; it was the wrong type of Christmas shopper (pansies who stay indoors when it snows), and the recovery was always going to be choppy, as the prime mister said. If the downturn continues, however, the deficit reduction plan might be tweaked slightly, what former George Osborne advisor Ken Rogoff calls a ‘slower plan A.’ Channel 4 News’s Faisal Islam noted that. He interviewed Osborne at Davos on Friday, and pointed out that ‘Osborne is also a bit of an Austerity Pin-up for many Americans here who feel that the US government is not getting to grip with its ballooning deficit.’

In the great gamble on who’s in the right over tackling the economic situation those Americans may well be vindicated in their opinion of Osborne. For the moment, however, the British media use a different view of America to contrast with the coalition’s policies. The US government’s perceived reticence to cut, along with America’s superior growth figures for the close of 2010 prove too tempting to ignore. This from BBC journalist Olivia Lang’s live feed from the Forum on Friday (Lang had just wondered if Cameron’s confidence had rubbed off on US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner): ‘1100: But that's perhaps all he's picking up from Cameron. Making deep cuts in spending, Geithner says, "is not the responsible way" to bring down state deficits.’ Ooh, burn.

Whether or not Cameron, Clegg and Osborne did us proud at Davos remains to be seen. Actually, does anyone really care? Does it matter if our prime minister, deputy prime minister and Chancellor succeed or fail in apologising convincingly enough to the banks (for coming down so hard on them, in regulation and rhetoric, for their part in the economic downturn)? Did they really convince as to how humble and sorry we are for biting the hands that feed and drop us a few crumbs in the process? Did the message get across - that this tough economic climate and jobs market will be that much easier to bear if we know that banks and business are interested in coming to our country in droves, or more likely in unimaginative flat-pack office developments?

I’m sure business is capable of deciding for itself, without any governmental sales pitch, which countries to use or ditch in its operations.

Away from the banks, business and Bono crowd, the World Social Forum’s alternative, alter-globalisation discussions and answers will be heard in February, at Dakar.

Bunnies can and will eat humble pie

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I often think it's comical How nature always does contrive That every boy and every gal That's born into the world alive Is either a little liberal Or else a little conservative

Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘When all night long a chap remains,’ Iolanthe, 1882

We are two weeks into our coalition government, and it is very refreshing; the weather is scorching, the children are playing and the Dailies are printing pro-government cartoons again (“If Cameron says ‘I told you so’ one more time…” say the cartoon European leaders on a sinking 1 euro coin. Sunday Express, 23^rd May). The coalition’s Programme for Government came out last week, and yesterday our new Chancellor George Osborne faced his albatross of debt, introducing the cuts to be made across government. Finally, the Queen opened the new session of parliament today, and made her speech outlining the government’s plans.

The sun is not quite shining out of the backsides of our new government, but equally they have yet to be compared with the stuff that more commonly comes out of that area. The coalition seems to be a corrective government at present, with the country set to make its difficult recovery under their careful helm. But to get here required a fascinating, if dismally reported, mess of politics and base level human behaviour.

I was genuinely intrigued about the uncertain consequences for our country’s government, now that the most recent batch of traditional ‘bad as each other’ complaints about the main parties had resulted in nobody winning hearts and minds at the election. Instead of exploring this, I had to watch election night coverage that was poised to examine the swings, clearly refusing to allow the already mooted hung parliament to deter the normal practice of analysing patterns.

Irrelevance isn’t irredeemable though. Channel 4’s Alternative Election Night might not have offered the satirized results coverage I had hoped for, but the BBC rose to the challenge with its wonderful, self-parodying boat party. The satire was so spot on that some viewers complained, imagining that the banter barge was a genuine segment of the Election 2010 programming. Bruce Forsyth’s offering was so so bad, it’s funny that it appeared on the next day’s Have I Got News For You (but not, it seems, the clip of Ian Hislop, well into the early hours, with his hair looking pwned.)

Channel 4’s show had some excellent Charlie Brooker comments, ‘Gordon Brown played by a haunted elephant’ for one, but the programme had much more of Jimmy Carr (admittedly I chuckled at something he added to a point about Geoff Hoon: ‘And traditionally voters have been put off by total fucking cunts’). As it turned out, much of the programme’s political humour was kept to laboured one-liners, all with about as much political savvy as a balding toothbrush.

In fairness, political savvy wasn’t abounding that night. The BBC’s Nick Robinson valiantly forwent sleep to do what he always does - telling us what the party leaders were likely to be doing, and likely to be thinking about while they might be doing it. He noted how interesting it was that Peter Mandelson had chosen that particular word in the interview we’d just seen - perhaps it meant that something Nick had surmised earlier might possibly have been likely at some point after all.

The BBC’s trump cards were actually Peter Hennessey and Vernon Bogdanor, historian and professor of government respectively (David Cameron is a former student of Bogdanor’s). They added more detail - and qualifiers - to the oft-touted precedents for this election: hung Parliament in 1974, and what Ted Heath/Jeremy Thorpe/Harold Wilson were doing at the equivalent of this moment back then. David Dimbleby was wry in places, clearly nonplussed by what his earpiece was telling him to announce: ‘oh look, Nick Clegg’s Leylandii,’ ‘and we’ve got to cut to another shot of David Cameron’s car going along the motorway.’

The night was a void in both politics and political coverage. A media that over-analyses the parties’ daily doings - and the electorate’s opinions of the same - sets too much store by trends in voter intentions and perceived perceptions of the parties. Neither parties nor media could explain why our votes hadn’t produced a majority. Surely that is more of a real change to the country’s recent politics than any presidential copies, like leaders’ debates or the bottom up, grassroots makeovers that the parties’ upper echelons have only a half-arsed awareness of.

Over the weekend there were official Liberal Democrat-Conservative meetings, and unofficial Liberal Democrat-Labour meetings. Old passageways - the footprints of Henry VIII’s reign and the Palace of Whitehall - afforded discreet exits and entrances from Downing Street via the Cabinet Office, and made for cracking titbits for Radio Four political features. With little else to go on, the media got even more over-imaginative during all of this:

Don't stitch us up, Tory MPs warn Cameron... but Osborne may have to be sacrificed to seal the deal

General election 2010: I'm still expecting a Conservative minority government

The secret of Dimbleby’s 16-hour stint? Honey

The lack of reportable action temporarily broke the regular 24-hour news cycle treatment of politics. The rushed, controversy-seeking news bulletins that normally scrutinize political stories – where party spokespersons have to deny everything that is happening - were replaced by nothing: standby reporters outside on the grass. The key figures - the party leaders and ‘their people’ - could convene out of view, daring the media to find a scandal to report.

After Gordon Brown nearly stood down on the Monday, we had a further 24 hours of the exciting possibility that the four-day stale election outcome was still up in the air. Then all alternatives and speculative combinations were forgotten as Gordon Brown left Downing Street to go to the palace. The cars of Brown and then Cameron were followed around London in bird’s eye view like the earlier generation of GTA games. Cameron goes to see the Queen, some wag takes a picture and iZaps it to the media – much to the dismay/awe of Peter Hennessey (unprecedented look at a meeting no one has ever been privy to), GTA back to Downing Street, speech, off sod, over.

The Independent noted Nick Clegg’s stated surprise at the abruptness of Gordon Brown’s resignation. Aides had apparently described several calls between the two, where Clegg had urged Brown to delay his departure: ‘Eventually, an exasperated Mr Brown told him: ‘Nick, Nick, I can't hold on any longer. I've got to go to the Palace. The country expects me to do that. I can't hold on any longer. Whatever happens, I'm going to the Palace.’ The suggestion is that the Liberal Democrats wanted Labour to hold on to power, because - with Labour still an alternative - the Conservatives would be more obliging to Lib Dem conditions for a coalition. The Indy was keen to point out that Clegg’s current surprise clashes with his previous comments about seeking a deal with the party with the most votes. ‘It would be preposterous for Gordon Brown to end up like some squatter in No 10’, he had said back then.

Juicy stuff, but slightly in competition with all of the current juicy stuff about Liberal and Conservative MPs being upset anyway - because of the compromises already made. Presumably, if Clegg had had Labour as a threatening rival bidder for a bit longer, the Conservatives would have ceded so much – practically turning into Liberals themselves - that call me Dave would have ended up assassinated (and perhaps not just politically) by disenchanted, embittered and deranged party right-wingers. Now we are supposed to be waiting for the coalition government to tear itself apart – watch those backbenchers.

But then David Cameron and (according to Cameron) Nick Clegg can and will eat humble pie over comments said about each other prior to the election. Well why not -it’s easier to be humble when you’re the PM or Deputy PM; you’ve got a far bigger sense of self-worth to endure a denting than lesser beings, whose self-esteem might be rubbed out completely by a similar eating of own words.

Personally, instead of fragmentation I’m waiting for a good, pun-inducing policy hash up, which is surely far more likely. For instance, the coalition’s programme says: ‘We will stop the deportation of asylum seekers who have had to leave particular countries because their sexual orientation or gender identification puts them at proven risk of imprisonment, torture or execution’ [1]. I can already see the stock picture of Dick Emery or Are You Being Served’s Mr. Humphries grinning back at me from the Daily Excess - illustrations for a statistically dubious article about LGBT immigrants camping out in the nation’s beauty spots.

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[1] HM Government, The Coalition: Our programme for government, (London; Cabinet Office, 2010) p.18.