UK News

Lib Dem party structure “tailor-made for trouble”

Liberal Democrats are proud of the democratic character of their party. The members have sovereign rights over party policy, proposing, amending and debating motions at their two conferences a year.

But is that the best way to run things now the party is unexpectedly in government? Historian Dennis Kavanagh thinks not. The structure of the party is tailor-made for trouble, he told a fringe meeting at the LibDem autumn conference in Liverpool on Sunday.

It has an elaborate constitution that suited a party that didn’t expect to get into power, for people who don’t want to take decisions and would rather have debates, he said.  As a result, the structure gives dissidents a lot of room to cause delay when they don’t like a policy the leadership – now in the cabinet – wants to adopt.

Kavanagh sets out his case in this short video clip recorded after the event, a meeting of the Liberal Democrat History Group.

Kavanagh, Emeritus Professor of Politics at Liverpool University, has co-written histories of  every general election since 1974, the latest being “The British General Election of 2010″ (published by Palgrave Macmillan) with Nottingham University’s Philip Cowley.

How long can the negotiations go on?

It should have been all over now. But no, we’re on day five and no one really seems to know which way things are going to go.

All over Westminster, people are looking tired. Journalists, politicians, aides and most of all the 24-hour news anchors.

You only had to watch Sky News’ Adam Boulton going at it with former Blair spin doctor Alistair Campbell live on air on Monday night too see that tempers are clearly getting frayed.

So how much longer? Nick Clegg says soon but nothing seems imminent. The LibDems are still talking with Labour. They may talk more with the Conservatives too.

“It’s too early,” said one Conservative source. “It”s finely balanced,” said a Labour one.

In the meantime, huge numbers of reporters are staking out Portcullis House, the new adjunct to the Palace of Westminster.

But it’s slim pickings. David Cameron walks through. So does George Osborne. But for now they’re just waiting too.

Third-world voting system in UK? No, not really

The airwaves have been filled with comments from furious voters who were unable to cast their ballots last night. We Brits think we can go around the world lecturing other countries on how to hold democratic elections, they say. But we can’t do it ourselves! We’re no better than those third-world countries!

I certainly wouldn’t want to minimise the frustration of the hundreds of people who wanted to vote and were not given a chance because of administrative mess-ups. I would be absolutely livid if it had happened to me.

Still, it’s worth putting things in perspective. Despite the hitches, Britain’s election was extraordinarily well-run compared with what goes on in so many less fortunate countries around the world.

The last time I covered a major election was in Nigeria in 2007. Now THAT was a truly awful election.

In many parts of the country, polling stations failed to materialise altogether. Even the president of the senate, the third most important person in Nigeria according to the constitution, was unable to vote in his home state of Enugu for lack of a functioning polling station.

A friend of mine who was acting as an independent observer in the state of Kogi said she arrived at a polling station at 11am to find there were no ballot papers in sight. When she queried this, she was told that every single person in the ward had already voted. There was no one in sight and the result, giving a huge win for the ruling PDP, was already agreed.

In Delta state, the number of people reported to have voted for the PDP was greater than the total number of residents of the state.

from Photographers Blog:

A break in choreography on the campaign trail

On tightly-choreographed campaign trails there aren’t many photo moments that haven’t been carefully planned beforehand by spin doctors, so when Gordon Brown made an impromptu visit to a hair salon in Oldham, there was a ripple of excitement.

Such unscripted moments create great opportunities for photographers because they offer a glimpse of reality and inject a human element into often monotonous days of speeches, handshakes and platitudes.

Brown had been pressed into visiting the Academy hair salon by owner Sue Fink, a brassy woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer when she collared Brown at a community centre. Brown, appearing embarrassed, mumbled his consent.

So Brown’s entourage traipsed over the road to the salon, where his minders – clearly wary of straying from pre-arranged programme – tried to stop the press entering. Fink was having none of it, throwing open the salon door and inviting them all in.

The spin doctors needn’t have worried; it was a rare moment in which a chuckling Brown, warmed by Fink’s good humour, offered a genuine flash of the human being that he often struggles to project.

from Matt Falloon:

Brown soldiers on

If a car slams into a bus stop just yards away as you launch a last-ditch election offensive, you might be forgiven for thinking that the gods are not on your side.

But even after the nightmare week British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has had, such portents of doom have little visible effect on the self-proclaimed underdog in this, one of Britain's most closely fought parliamentary elections for 25 years.

Brown and his cabinet colleagues, unveiling campaign posters in a windswept car park on Friday when the sound of screeching brakes made everyone jump, ploughed on with their attack on the centre-right Conservatives, warning that a vote for the opposition would put British economy and families at risk.

"You have got to have this inner reservoir of resilience to fight back when anything happens to you," the Labour leader told students later in an athletics hall at Loughborough university. "That's what I've got to do in the next few days anyway."

Even a man who has survived two coup attempts from within his own party since taking over from Tony Blair in 2007 could not have expected such bad luck in the days before the May 6 election.

Behind in opinion polls for much of his three-year tenure at the top, this was meant to be the week Brown fought back.

The third, and final, televised leaders' debate was on the economy -- a godsend for a man who helped spearhead the response to the global financial crisis and served as finance minister for a decade before taking over from Tony Blair in 2007.

Debate novelty wears thin

Thank God it’s over! The magic was certainly gone in the last of the three TV debates. Or perhaps we have just become too accustomed to this particular reality show which just seemed unexciting after the excruciating embarrasment of watching Gordon Brown being forced to apologise to a pensioner after he was overheard calling her “bigoted”.

The economy was meant to be in focus. But we heard nothing from any of the three party leaders we have not heard before. Labour’s Gordon Brown asked the public to trust his judgement. He called it right in the banking crisis and the economy cannot withstand spending cuts right now.

Conservative David Cameron, voted winner in two separate polls, repeated his line that action had to be taken on the deficit now and raising National Insurance would hurt the economy. And the LibDem leader Nick Clegg repeatedly reminded us there was a third way.

But people have seen him non-stop for two weeks now and the seeming freshness that gave his performance a shine in the first debate was gone. The three clashed also on education and immigration but on the really big issue of how they would actually bring down a budget deficit running at over 11 percent of GDP — there was no more detail at all.

Instead, Brown abandoned trying to cosy up the LibDems. He lumped them together with the Tories, raising the spectre of a coalition between the two. Cameron no longer referred to the prime minister as Gordon, preferring his title almost each time. And Clegg stood in the middle, saying a vote for him would not be wasted. The governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King is reportedly telling friends that whoever wins the election will probably put his party out of power for a generation — so harsh are the spending cuts to come. Maybe third place Brown is the winner after all.

Twitter users turn on Brown after “bigot” gaffe

We’re still waiting to find out if Gordon Brown’s gaffe in Rochdale yesterday (if you missed it, he called a 66-year-old, lifelong Labour voter a “bigoted woman”) does serious damage to his party’s performance in the opinion polls. What is certain is that it was the first serious blunder of the election campaign and the shockwaves were immediately visible on micro-blogging site Twitter.

Throughout the election run-in U.S. research firm Crimson Hexagon has been conducting exlusive research for Reuters.co.uk — archiving all UK political tweets and analysing them for positive and negative sentiment. The three main parties have each experienced ups and downs throughout the campaign. Not surprisingly, we saw a spike in positive Liberal Democrat tweets  following Nick Clegg’s impressive performance during the first leaders’ debate, while positive sentiment towards David Cameron’s Conservatives has dwindled since we started analysing tweets on March 22.

But we have seen nothing as dramatic as the surge in anti-Labour sentiment which followed Brown’s confrontation with pensioner Gillian Duffy yesterday.

The graphic below shows anti-Labour tweets rising to 42 percent, up from 15 percent the previous day. Anti-Tory tweets fell from 23 percent to 14 percent, while negative LibDem tweets fell from 9 percent to 5 percent.

Twitter user @sara_sands posted: “Just when you think Gordon Brown couldn’t sink any lower, he insults an elderly lady. What a disgrace.”

After the PM went back to Duffy’s house to apologise in person, @greensdiary said: “Dear Gordon Brown: why do you not process the ability to apologise properly?” Another user, @Clairabell, simply said: “Gordon Brown – fail.”

from The Great Debate UK:

Fears of UK hung parliament may be overstated

-- The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --

Fears of a hung parliament following the UK's general election may be overstated. With Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, Britain's third largest party, performing well in the first prime ministerial debate, sterling has received a mild knock. Investors do not like the uncertainty that goes with a hung parliament. While many European countries are used to coalition government, the UK is traditionally a two-party system - with government swinging between Labour and the Conservatives.

Added to this uncertainty is the fact that none of the three parties has come up with a credible plan for cutting the government's deficit, which stands at 12 percent of GDP. One fear is that valuable months could be lost in horse-trading over forming the next government. Another is that a minority government could embark on a populist, but expensive, programme to prepare the ground for a second election later this year.

The hung parliament scenario is really two sub-scenarios. In the first, the party with the largest number of seats would govern on its own. This is probably what would happen if the Tories were the largest party. Such a government might well be unstable.

The second sub-scenario is a majority formed through a coalition with the LibDems. This is more likely if Labour emerges as the largest party. That's because it has offered to change the system for electing MPs - something the LibDems and their predecessor parties have wanted for decades. Indeed, during Thursday's debate, Labour's Gordon Brown several times dangled this olive branch.

A formal "Lib-Lab" pact would still need to come up with a credible deficit reduction plan. But arguably this would be easier with a coalition that had been supported by over 50 percent of the electorate. What's more, if it did not have overall power, Labour would have a ready-made excuse for abandoning pledges made in its manifesto, which would otherwise tie its hands in confronting the deficit.

If there is a hung parliament, it will be better to hang together than hang separately.

Was it the worm wot won it?

My colleague Ross Chainey has blogged about how Nick Clegg emerged as the winner on most measures from last night’s TV debate. But there’s another battle going on in this election — that between traditional broadcast and new-fangled social media.

“In real terms last night was the triumph of broadcast media over digital media,” the head of digital at one of the parties told me this morning.

That’s perhaps unsurprising given that the event was the dream broadcast event. But there’s a more nuanced view of the new media landscape — one that sees  important interplays between the worlds of traditional and social media. It’s argued that this is the fundamental insight that the Obama campaign used to such devastating effect in 2008. So, with this in mind, how well did social and broadcast media play together last night?

There was a lot of focus on Twitter. The aggregation and analytics service TweetMinster says there were 184,396 tweets from 36,483 tweeters with an average of 29 a second during the debate. That’s three times the number involved  during the Newsnight interview with  British National Party leader Nick Griffin earlier this year.

But that pales into insignificance against a peak-time TV audience of 9.9 million.  TweetMinster puts the size of the political Twittersphere at about 50,000. Those  hoping for a surge in new entrants to political tweeting were probably disappointed last night.

One thing I thought was interesting was how quickly ‘I agree with Nick’ emerged as a trending topic on Twitter as tweeters noted how David Cameron and Gordon Brown used the same language in referring to the Liberal Democrat leader.

Following the Twitter stream reminded me of how hard it was to navigate the #iranelection hashtag last summer when the Iranian protests started — it was impossible to keep up. The Labour Party, which has put more into Twitter than the other parties, created a filtered feed of tweets for its own homepage to help followers sort the wheat from the chaff.

“Heir to Blair” Cameron seeks progressive mantle

David Cameron caused consternation among many Conservative supporters in 2005 by claiming that he was the “heir to Blair”. He learnt his lesson and has steered clear of that comparison ever since, although as this election campaign unfolds there are signs he remains rather more “Blairite” than many in the Conservative rank and file would like.

Survey after survey of Conservative candidates for parliament show that Margaret Thatcher is their number one political hero by a long margin. But when Cameron was asked on the Today programme to name the best British prime minister of the 20th century, he didn’t hesitate for a moment before saying it was Winston Churchill. An uncontroversial choice perhaps, as millions of Britons would probably also single out the wartime leader, but there will have been loyal Conservatives out there disappointed that Cameron did not pick their heroine.

Cameron has always trod a fine line when it comes to Thatcher, a figure who continues to polarise public opinion like no other, 20 years after her downfall. He never loses an opportunity to repeat his mantra that “there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state” — a direct reference to her much-quoted assertion that “there is no such thing as society”. It’s a carefully calibrated comment from Cameron, signalling to centrist voters that he is a totally different proposition from Thatcher, while reassuring traditional Tories that he shares her commitment to “rolling back the frontiers of the state”.

What will those traditional Tories have made, meanwhile, of Cameron’s column in today’s Guardian, a newspaper they scorn as a symbol of the New Labour-loving “chattering classes” they so abbhor? Cameron used the column to argue that in a “strange reversal”, Labour under Gordon Brown’s leadership was now a reactionary force while his Conservatives were the new radicals. Will lifelong Tories have bristled at the suggestion that before he came along to lead them into the bright new world of Compassionate Conservatism, they were reactionaries?

It’s not hard to see what Cameron is doing. His party suffered three successive election defeats at the hands of Tony Blair, and he wants to reclaim the political centre-ground that was held for so long by the architect of New Labour. He wants to seize the mantle of progressive politics and appeal to voters beyond the Conservative heartland. “To Guardian readers everywhere, I say: overcome any prejudices you may have. We want to change our country, and we want to do it with your help,” he wrote.