UK General Election - May 7th 2015

[Gary J]

Unfortunately after a few weeks in 2010, when there seemed a chance of moving towards proportional representation for the House of Commons, the concrete of the status quo re-solidified. I fear the issue will not be revisited after the next general election.

[Gary J]

Clement Davies, the then Liberal Party leader, rejected Churchill's offer of a cabinet post in 1951. If the offer had been accepted, it probably would have been the end of the Liberal Party as an independent political force. The refusal of office permitted the Liberal Party to resume (modest) growth later in the decade and beyond, not least in the Scottish Highlands.

The Liberal Party in 1951 was much weaker than the Liberal Democrats today. The Party had been in almost continuous decline since the split in 1916 (with only minor revivals in 1923 and 1929). Of the 6 MPs elected in 1951, three were from Wales (Davies from Montgomeryshire, Roderic Bowen from Cardiganshire and Rhys Hopkin Morris from Carmarthen) and two from England (D.W. Wade from Huddersfield West and A.F. Holt from Bolton West); all elected without a Conservative opponent. The one MP who had one a three cornered race, was the future leader Jo Grimond from the Scottish constituency of Orkney and Shetland. 

[Gary J]

There is no point in dropping Nick Clegg now. Whoever inherited the poisoned chalice would still be yoked to the Conservatives in the coalition. There is no sign that a new leader would significantly improve the situation.

It is better that Clegg suffer the defeat in 2015. He will then either lose his seat (so as to no longer be eligible to remain leader under the party constitution) or more or less willingly resign. Either option would cause less damage to the long term party interest than a pre-election civil war.

The question of who the next leader will be can be postponed to the next Parliament. It will largely depend on who retains their seat. My personal tip, assuming Scotland does not become independent, is former Chief Whip and current Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael  (Orkney and Shetland). He is the most likely Scottish MP and coalition cabinet member, to survive into the next Parliament.

However I have always supported a losing candidate in Liberal/Lib Dem leadership elections, so I may not be the best person to predict what will happen.

[Gary J]

There is no Liberal Democrat front or back bencher who would be a credible new leader before the general election. 

For better or for ill, Nick Clegg will lead the Liberal Democrats into the election. Until we know the outcome of the election, we will not know if the Lib Dems will need a new leader and if so who is available to be chosen.

[Gary J]

I have identified one Speaker defeated at the polls since the Union. Sir Richard Onslow (a Whig politician who had represented Surrey since 1689) was defeated in the 1710 general election. He was Speaker from 1708-1710. Speaker's, in that period, were partisan figures who were by no means certain of retaining the chair in a new Parliament but it was still an unusual event for one to lose an election.

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As the election had been a Tory triumph, Onslow had no hope of being re-elected Speaker.

[Gary J]

The problem of England continues to be intractable. Creating an English Parliament leads to the risk that the First Minister of England would do to the Prime Minister of the UK what Boris Yeltsin did to Mikhail Gorbachev.  Federal type states do not work very well when one member of the Federation is stronger than all the others combined.

The attempt to square the circle by dividing England into regions did not work. The Labour government (as represented by John Prescott) promoted a devolution revolution for North East England. The people of that region rejected the idea. If an area like the North East did not approve a Regional Assembly, no part of England would.

However, if Scotland remains in the UK and gets the promised devo max, perhaps the UK constitution will have to be changed in quite a major way. The politicians may have to bite the bullet and risk an English Parliament. The UK Parliament could be left as a federal or quasi federal legislature with quite restricted powers compared to the national parliaments and assemblies.

[Gary J]

The Labour and Conservative Parties are both seeking to redesign the British constitution with minimal regard to principle and maximum attention to partisan advantage. It may be that some half baked plan will be adopted before the general election or during the next Parliament. Most likely the whole exercise will prove to be as futile as House of Lords reform and everybody will give up the idea of major reform for English government, for another generation.

Neither party wants to create a proper English Parliament, elected on its own by some form of proportional representation, similar to what exists in Scotland.

The Conservatives want English votes for English issues, with the representatives of English constituencies only voting on the English legislation. Possibly they may create something called an English Parliament, but really it would just be part of the UK Parliament. Official Conservative policy (as so far invented by D. Cameron) does not seem to envisage splitting the UK and English executive governments.

Party advantage - more often than not the Conservatives could hope to have concurrent UK and English majorities. If Labour have a small UK majority, the Conservatives may hope to gridlock the system by exploiting a Conservative English majority. That would leave the UK government having to accept and administer its opponents legislation, unless it advised the monarch to exercise the Royal veto over bills for the first time since the early 18th century. Parliament has no power to override a Royal veto, so this situation might lead to a bit of a constitutional crisis.

Labour (official policy) is to call for a constitutional convention (which looks like it would be wholly dominated by the Westminster politicians with little or no input by the general public). This will put off constitutional change at Westminster for years. It may be that the hope is that the issue will be less pressing by the time any report is agreed (if one ever is), so that the next government can ignore it. Labour is prepared to agree to what sounds like an English grand committee to debate English legislation, but is not willing to agree that MPs from the rest of the UK should not participate in the final decision on a bill.

Party advantage - Labour keeps some control in the UK Labour, English Tory majority situation. The government, in that situation, might not be able to pass legislation it wanted but could block legislation it did not like (without breaking the very strong convention against use of the Royal veto). So another form of deadlock.

[Gary J]

Phony Moderate.

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There also some other members in a House of 650 (minus Sinn Feiners not taking their seats), who might provide some additional chances of negotiation.

There is some sort of constitutional convention that politicians have a duty to provide the Crown with an administration, so as to avoid troubling the electorate with too frequent new elections. Given the numbers suggested, no stable majority coalition seems likely. 

However the Labour Party seems better placed than the Tories to form a minority government, which might either through formal confidence and supply agreements or informal understandings and case by case negotiations, keep things together for at least six months or possibly longer. 

As the Conservatives would be busy disposing of Cameron and the Liberal Democrats would not be keen on the expense and risk of a quick second election, it is probably only the SNP who would vote against the government in the short term. Labour could then arranges a dissolution at the time of its choosing (not as easy now as before fixed term Parliaments, but not impossible - would the opposition really vote against a dissolution when they could not put together an alternative administration with a majority).

[Gary J]

Shouldn't it be the Lib Dems who are the oldest political party anyway, since (no matter what date you put it at) the Tories/Conservatives split from the Whigs?

The history is quite complicated. I will try and summarise it, but you will appreciate that many books have been written about aspects of the history. I am just attempting my own summary of what I have read without citing particular sources in this post.

1. Tory and Whig parties came into existence during the Exclusion bill debates in the 1680s. The Whigs wished to exclude the catholic Duke of York (later King James II of England) from the succession to the Crown.

2. King James II was eventually overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89. Members of both parties accepted the new situation, apart from the Jacobite wing of the Tories.

3. From the Glorious Revolution until the Hanoverian succession in 1714, comparative cohesive parties competed for royal favour and in the frequent general elections of the period.

4. King George I distrusted the Tories. From 1714 until 1760 just about any politician who aspired to executive office had to associate himself with a Whig faction. There were still Tories in Parliament, but the old disputes gradually became irrelevant.

5. When King George III came to the throne in 1760 politics was organised around faction supporting prominent political leaders. Some, like Lord North, might be from families with a Tory tradition. Others like the Duke of Newcastle might regard themselves as Whigs but it no longer mattered. People from both traditions belonged to each faction.

6. Politics began to again re-crystallise into parties, more significant than mere factions, in the late 18th and early 19th century. During the Revolutionary War, most politicians supported William Pitt the Younger. Pitt's followers, at the time, were known as the Pittites but in retrospect were the core of what became known as the Tory Party. Ironically some prominent Pittites, like Pitt himself and the Duke of Portland, called themselves Whigs.

7. The small number of opponents of Pitt, led by Charles James Fox, became the core of the 19th century Whig Party.

8. There continued to be factions created, in the early 19th century, but they increasingly tended to be distinctly Tory or Whig. By about 1820 the two parties were fairly cohesive. There were some factions swinging between the two parties until the late 1850s. In the 1830s and 40s the Tories came to be called the Conservative Party and the Whigs (and associated groups) were informally described as the Liberal Party. The Whigs, joined with Peelite Liberal Conservatives, Radicals and some Irish Opposition politicians to create a formal Liberal Party in 1859. The Protectionist wing of the Conservative Party then became the only organisation claiming to be the heirs of the Tory tradition.

9. The Whig aristocratic families mostly broke from the Liberal Party over Irish Home Rule in 1886. The Liberal Unionists, including the few remaining Whig Unionists, formally merged with the Conservative Party in 1912. The 1859 Liberal Party eventually merged, in 1988, with the SDP to create what is now the Liberal Democrats.

10. The continuity between the 17th century Tory Party and the modern Conservative Party and the 17th century Whigs and the Liberal Democrats, are both dubious. However if the Conservatives can claim succession from the Tories, I do not see why the Liberal Democrats are not the political heirs of the Whigs.

[Gary J]

I am in the Slough constituency. Nothing to see here - safe Labour win.

[Gary J]

When the Liberal Party were a major party, they supported first past the post. After 1922 the prominent Liberal, David Lloyd George, was reported to say that if he had known the future he would have strongly supported PR in 1918 and as the Prime Minister he could have made sure that it passed.

Conversely when Labour was a third party it had supported PR, but once it had reached major party status party opinion rapidly changed.

[Gary J]

Presumably if Lib Dem pressure in 2010 had got a PR referendum, it would have faced exactly the same Tory misrepresentation as the AV referendum did. At least there is still the remote chance that at some future date PR will re-emerge on to the agenda, which would have been prevented if a PR referendum had been lost.

[Gary J]

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AV is much simpler than any system of PR. The pro AV campaign probably failed to explain it adequately. It also failed to provide an emotional case for why people should support it (ie the Tory fat cats do not like it, so it must be good).

If the AV system was perceived as self serving for Lib Dems, then the anti-AV campaign did succeed in making an emotional case against the change.

In fact many Lib Dems were distinctly lukewarm about AV because it was an inadequate move towards change/fair votes, which would have provided minimal benefit at best and might have been less favourable to the party than FPTP in other circumstances. Certainly AV would have been less favourable to the Lib Dems than any form of PR.

However in an environment where there are multiple medium sized parties, an argument based on antipathy to any one of them is less likely to be persuasive than if there was only one which seemed likely to benefit. If we continue to have a series of inconclusive elections then electoral reform may eventually come back on the agenda.

[Gary J]

Ed Milliband's principal rival was his older brother David. David's reputation has risen because he was not elected, but I always thought that Ed was better at simulating normal human behaviour than David was. No doubt if David had been elected, the general opinion now would be that Ed would have been the better option.

The other candidates for the Labour leadership were Ed Balls (now Shadow Chancellor), Andy Burnham (former Health Secretary now shadowing the job) and Diane Abbott (a black London MP who appears on television a lot).

A truly dreadful field. I would not have voted for any of them, even if I had been a Labour supporter. However, if absolutely forced to choose, I would concede that Ed was the least worst of them.

Mind you the recent Conservative and Liberal Democrat leadership candidates have not been much better. I think all UK parties had better quality leaders in the past. At least they usually tended to have been prominent political figures for a lengthy period, during which they had done things and stood for something more important than winning the next election.

[Gary J]

Helsinkian, the parliamentary representation of the Isle of Wight has long been a problem. The electorate for the Isle is an awkward number, too big for one average size constituency and too small for two. In view of the strong preference of the islanders not to have part of the island attached to a bit of southern Hampshire across the Solent, the Boundary Commission was left with an awkward decision in each boundary review.

Under former laws, about Parliamentary boundary changes, the decision has been to have one oversized constituency. Under the present legislation, when the boundaries are next redrawn, the Isle of Wight will be divided into two undersized seats (as it is treated as a special case and is not subject to the normal rules).

[Gary J]

Helsinkian, there is still time to nominate another candidate. In the UK you only need the signatures of ten electors to nominate a parliamentary candidate (a proposer, a seconder and eight assentors) apart from paying a £500 deposit and filling in a few forms. You can deliver a nomination paper to the local constituency returning officer between the publication of notice of election and the close of nominations.

I am taking dates and times from the Combined Timetable for elections on 7 May 2015, which the Slough returning officer has issued, based on the Electoral Commission guidance.

Parliament is to be dissolved on Monday 30 March. A writ (a royal command to elect a member to the new Parliament) will be sent to each returning officer.  The writ is received on Tuesday 31 March. The returning officer then has to publish a notice of election, which must be by 4 pm on Thursday 2 April but may be earlier. The close of nominations, which is a very rigid deadline, is 4 pm on Thursday 9 April. If a prospective candidate has not delivered valid forms by that time, they will not be a candidate in the election.