This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 08/05/05
Poll Position
I suppose some comment on the election is obligatory, given that I
went on so much about it beforehand.
It is remarkable that we can still refer to ourselves as a
democracy when you have a party elected to govern with an outright
majority of seats on the basis of scarcely 35% of the votes cast, and a
bare 22% of the total electorate. Voting reform is urgently needed, or
else the turnout figures (very slightly higher than last time, due I'm
sure to the perception that this was going to be slightly more of a
contest) will continue to be low, as many people see their votes as
counting for nothing. It is imperative that we restore the health of
our system.
The actual result? Well, all in all, it could have been a lot
worse. Blair's majority is large enough to enable his government to get
things done without being sufficiently overwhelming to enable it to do
what the hell it wants. This may be the end for the proposed ID card
bill and (to some extent, at least) a restriction on New Labour's mad
impulse to increase private profiteering in the public services.
Although all that depends on being able to find thirty-odd Labour MPs
with a backbone - not necessarily easy. We must be watchful on this
front.
The Chicken Little act ("Vote Labour or else you'll get a Tory
government!") was never likely to succeed. The electorate has grown
too inured to wild claims from Labour to be fooled. The increase in
seats for the Liberal Democrats was quite welcome, although there are
problems with this, in that they did not succeed in depressing the
Conservative vote in most of southern England. This means that the
Tories are grabbing back seats which were theirs almost by Divine Right
in the 1980s, and also that the seats the Lib Dems do hold in
those areas are going to be particularly vulnerable to a further
increase in the Tory vote next time. Their swings and gains from Labour
were quite noticeable however, and the gain of Manchester Withington
must be seen as a spectacular achievement. But Kennedy and Campbell's
claims that we are now irrevocably in the era of three-party politics
have been heard before, and heralded only failure later.
One or two pickings from elsewhere:
I was sad to see Simon Thomas lose Ceredigion. I knew Simon
slightly at University, and he is a good man. I can't imagine what
possessed the Cardis to vote for a Lib Dem candidate who doesn't live
in the constituency and doesn't speak the native language of a large
proportion of its inhabitants. But then, Cardis are an odd lot. I know
- I lived among them for a while.
Peter Law's victory in Blaenau Gwent was, however astonishing it
may be to those ignorant of electoral history, not without precedent.
Back in the late 1960s, the Labour Party in nearby Merthyr Tudful
deselected its sitting MP S.O. Davies, ostensibly on the grounds that
he was too old (but really because he was pro-self-government - an
heretical opinion in the Labour Party in Wales in the age of George
Thomas). He resigned from the party, stood in the 1970 election as an
independent, and defeated the official Labour candidate, remaining in
office until his death in 1972.
George Galloway's victory in Bethnal Green And Bow was not that
much of a surprise, given that the sitting MP was pro-war in an largely
Muslim area. Galloway is a blowhard, but it should make for interesting
scenes in the House. One rare cause for being sympathetic to him was
the disgraceful way in which he was 'interviewed' by Jeremy Paxman on
Newsnight after his victory. Starting an interview with "What's it
like to have removed a black woman MP from the House of Commons?"
was unworthy, not least because it was irrelevant to the issues in the
election - why not ask how it was that the defeated Oona King had been
elected twice in a row by such a constituency despite being a black Jewish
woman? It would scarcely have been less insensitive.
So, there they all are, all 646 of them, pootling away for the next
four years or so, until they try to persuade us once more that we can't
live without them.
