I argue urgently that we Lib Dems should not enter into any formal pact with anyone, but should remain in opposition to a minority Conservative and Unionist government.
I won’t pretend that last night was not horribly disappointing, as First Past The Post radically distorted our representation as usual. I went through this disappointment before, in February 1974 , in the election that first brought me in to political activity. Then, there was an even greater buzz about Jeremy Thorpe than there has been about Nick Clegg – and Thorpe was a spectacularly charismatic figure.
Third party politics really had seemed utterly dead in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Thorpe had inherited a parliamentary party that really could squeeze into a taxi, and Thorpe’s style, underpinned by Jo Grimond’s genuine radicalism, was an achievement more stunning than anything the Liberals or Lib Dems have managed since. It seemed to represent a re-ordering of the political system to accommodate the radical social changes of the 1960’s (and remember it was Liberal MP David Steel’s private member’s bill which liberalised abortion).
When Thorpe’s Liberal Party’s opinion polls rating during the first 1974 campaign hit the 23% level the Lib Dems gained yesterday, that was a quadrupling of support. When the actual percentage share at the ballot was 19.3% it was a huge letdown – and incredibly, 19.3% gave the Liberals just 14 seats – probably the most infamous result FTPT has ever delivered. 19.3% of the vote for 2.3% of the seats!!
That election morning was worse than this one. I had, age 15, worked almost every single non-school hour for 4 months leading up to the election, and had not slept for 96 hours, being out delivering leaflets. I shall never forget the burning sense of injustice.
The second election in October 1974 led to the Lib-Lab pact, which actually was highly succesful for three years in rescuing a near Greek economic situation. But the Liberals got no credit for it. The “Winter of Discontent” actually occurred after the Liberals withdrew from the Lib-Lab pact, but nonetheless the Liberals were swept backwards by Thatcherism in 1979.
That could easily repeat now. A Lib-Lab pact to claw back the dire economic situation would almost certainly be followed in time by a massive Tory backlash for keeping New Lab in power and losses of Lib Dems seats.
On the other hand, we have the scenario I blogged as tempting before yesterday’s vote:
a Cameron administration, with a tiny majority, propped up by some Northern Irish bigots, would inflict such pain on the majority of our society that, before falling after a few years, they would put the Tories out for a generation at least.
In so doing, they would greatly enhance the cause of Scottish and Welsh independence, and with the Lib Dems the second most popular party and the challenger in the large majority of Tory seats, the Tory demise would sweep in a radical change in more promising circumstances.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2010/05/crisis_is_a_gre.html#comments
I rejected this scenario in favour of a good Lib Dem performance yesterday – but given the actual result, I believe the above is the best scenario we have. Let the Tories run a minority administration with unpleasant allies, restraining their excesses. In the next general election the Lib Dems will poised nationally to pick up a huge bonanza of Tory seats. Cameron will meantime be in the minority government position that killed Callaghan and Major electorally. But he will also face the problem that the electorate always punish anyone who inflicts an unnecessary election on them.
So play it long and cool. Resist the tempations of instant power and ministerial limousines, and especially resist blandishments of referenda on electoral reform in which the entire Murdoch and Tory media empires will again be deployed against us to devastating effect.
Clegg will be the fox for the Tories’ hounds. Tally-ho!
The problem with this plan is that the Tories will institute boundary changes that’ll make them almost impossible to evict – and then they’ll obliterate all possible action on climate change, destroy the economy and undo what little social equity the Blair/Brown failed enterprise has created.
It’ll be a sore and sorry mess and we won’t be rid of them for years.
Your reply is revealing and also patronising.
You key words are weakness, stength, enemies…
The Japanese have already had two holocausts delivered upon their people. They probably do not want another.
Anyway your scenario of Chinese and Russian enemies is so outdated. WWIII will start in the Persian Gulf if the Israelis get their way and nuclear weapons can be delivered at long range via missiles. An American base (one of 700 worldwide) on a Japanese island irrelevant.
We have had enough of burning human flesh now.
Here’s how to contact the Lib Dems & leave a message, though their phone lines are busy and I bet they’ve all collapsed. I hope Nick Clegg at least takes the weekend to sleep on it:
[email protected]
phone on (020) 7222 7999.
angrysoba: thanks for compliment. Tried to re-contemplate your elected upper house idea but realised this would result in Noel Edmonds and Simon Cowell running the country. Or anyone else with the funds to run for election. Perhaps I’m being too cynical.
Mary: don’t think anyone who’s promoting a people’s demo outside Parliament can be accused of ‘grovelling before their enemies’. Perhaps it’s the name – I picture you as a bearded Cornish ex-fisherman, in fact. Otherwise, how would PR here serve the interests of the Israeli state?
Manda Scott: “and then they’ll obliterate all possible action on climate change, destroy the economy…”
Hilarious.
Clegg should be saying something, I feel. Latest message on Lib Dem website is a bit rubbish. Maybe he’s too knocked back by the results and doesn’t believe the genuine good well that was there towards the Lib Dems?
@Mary, ignore that last question, subject far too off topic.
“Noel Edmonds and Simon Cowell running the country.” Technicolour
Oh my God! That would be my idea of the ninth circle of Hell. I’m not a celebrity so please get me out of here!
I do understand Angrysoba’s concern about the Upper Chamber becoming a sort of retirement asset for Geoff Hoon, Neil Hamilton and Patricia Hewitt, not to mention “I’m a taxi, broom-broom!” Stephen Byers. I guess there’s no way of totally avoiding patronage, corruption and sleaze but perhaps if there were different modes of inflow, it might be minimised or at least there’d be checks and balances, so it wouldn’t be hegemonic Noel Edmonds – from whose cynical jowls even Lucifer would run!
“Get me out of here, I’m just a devil, I didn’t ask for this! Take me back up there, I promise I’ll be really good, I’ll polish my wings, I won’t exhibit more than 8,000 lux and I will bow down before humankind! But Peter, there’s a good chap, there’s a good rock, please, please don’t send Noel Edmonds down here!”
Lucifer, Rising Again in the Face of Noel Edmonds
Technicolour I am puzzled. I was replying to Angrysoba. He used the phrase ‘grovelling before your enemies’ in a reply to my question about the Japanese people wanting an American base removed from Okinawa.
@mary, sorry not to be clear – was saying I didn’t see it, myself.
“I guess there’s no way of totally avoiding patronage, corruption and sleaze but perhaps if there were different modes of inflow, it might be minimised or at least there’d be checks and balances”
Yes. An elected HoL would make them subject to all the same pressures that need to be checked-and-balanced, it needs to be selected by a criterion that’s not connected with those for the HoC. (Though I wouldn’t mind if the lower-house criteria could move away from the current “I’m an emptier suit than my opponents”).
“WWIII will start in the Persian Gulf if the Israelis get their way ”
Mary, Mary, quite contrary!
The Israelis don’t want war! They want peace! They want to live in peace! How many of the wars since 1948 were started by the Israelis?
Ah, here we go… boom, boom, boom!
1956
1967
1976
1982
2006
2009
Re. the first four of these (the ones fought while he was alive), Menachim Begin said so.
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0794/9407073.htm
Israel – whatever party is in power – wants a Pax Israelica. Peace, with itself as regional hegemon and everyone else in the area as a slave.
Btw, I do not write this as someone who hates Israelis or whatever. But I think that if Israel wants to survive in the long-term, it needs to accede that other people in the region are human beings and engage on a real peace process, not the fake, forked-tongued ones it has favoured hitherto. Some of my pals have lived on kibbutzes, etc. and I very much enjoyed visiting a reading by an Israeli-American (by which I mean his father was an Israeli who moved to America) writer in Washington, DC, a journalist, I forget his name right now, who was of Kurdish origin and who spoke very well about the relations that previously existed b/w Muslims and Jews in the Middle East. I want to see the end of war in that region.
@ Tony,
I have seen the clip of Galloway before the US Senate Committee. Quite impressive.
Galloway is still a young man, and I suspect that we have not heard the last of him in politics. He is down but most probaly not finally out.
CB
Why no support for the outright merger of Cons and Libs, I wonder. I mean, they’re both fascists according to John Pilger. He makes it sound like the perfect match:
“All three party leaders are warmongers. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats leader and darling of former Blair lovers, says that as prime minister he will “participate” in another invasion of a “failed state” provided there is “the right equipment, the right resources”. His one condition is the standard genuflection towards a military now scandalised by a colonial cruelty of which the Baha Mousa case is but one of many.
For Clegg, as for Gordon Brown and David Cameron, the horrific weapons used by British forces, such as clusters, depleted uranium and the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of its victims’ lungs, do not exist. The limbs of children in trees do not exist. This year alone Britain will spend £4 billion on the war in Afghanistan, and that is what Brown and Cameron almost certainly intend to cut from the National Health Service.”
Read the rest of it here:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25392.htm
Rejoice, rejoice, the dictator-loving mountebank Galloway kicked out by the electorate(as were the other Respect candidates). Along with the thrashing of Nick Griffin, that has to be a highlight of election night. Such a shame he was too embarrassed to face the announcement. Still, one less bigot is the main thing.
Alfred… Pilgers article was great.
I’m just waiting for the Lib Dem voters to NeoLabourize their minds, develop logical and moral redaction and start ranting off the “need” to bring stability and democracy to the ‘stans’ and Iraq, expressing “regret” at the deaths of more innocent people, and now much more money needs to be spent to claim more new scalps, young or old, male or female, born or yet to be born – it doesn’t matter, it will be a ‘price worth paying’, and a ‘necessary sacrifice’. The prediction is so obvious it may as well be scrawled into the history books right now.
That good old Shitish Army literally caving out and up Afghanistan – which will coincidentally ’emerge’ as a hobbled country with a pro-western outlook, eager to acquire foreign revenue, yes, that good old Shitish Army, will engage in further acts of mass crime and cowardice – a Caucasian speciality I might add, while reverse Robin Hoods make off with the last remaining loot before the UK’s usurious system comes apart at the seams.
Accomplices-in-waiting-to-mass-murder, as Lib Dems are, will, when Clegg and Dave the druggie pair up ?” Dave becoming PM, will become bathed in blood the second the first(next) British bomb, bullet or Bradley kills the next Afghani Iraqi or Pakistani.
It WAS in your name. You made it so,
More apologies…
*
Lax US Regulation is largely to blame.
The Oil companies are big and nasty and will do their best to maximise profit whilst skimping on environmental protection. They have caused complete environmental destruction in places like Nigeria because of weak or non-existent Government regulation.
Now there have been similar accidents in the North Sea, which is a much harsher environment than the Gulf of Mexico, but there have been very few of them since the late 1960’s, because of very tight regulation by independent UK Government appointed regulators.
Incidentally, I know one of them, and will probably see him tonight and will ask him what he thinks.
He with his team flies out via helicopter to regularly inspect all issues with regards to all aspects of safety and good practice.
He is a tough guy and in his spare time he does stuff like climbing up mountains in the harshest possible conditions.
He won’t take any shit off any fucking Oil Company that is cutting corners.
However, I do again feel the need to apologise for what BP has done, simply because I am British and know some of this stuff although I have never worked for an oil company.
Tony
Incidentally my friend is completely incorruptible – if anyone offered him a bribe he would stuff it down their throat
Here’s an extract from a recent article by John Pilger:
‘All three party leaders are warmongers. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats leader and darling of former Blair lovers, says that as prime minister he will “participate” in another invasion of a “failed state” provided there is “the right equipment, the right resources”. His one condition is the standard genuflection towards a military now scandalised by a colonial cruelty of which the Baha Mousa case is but one of many.
For Clegg, as for Gordon Brown and David Cameron, the horrific weapons used by British forces, such as clusters, depleted uranium and the Hellfire missile, which sucks the air out of its victims’ lungs, do not exist. The limbs of children in trees do not exist. This year alone Britain will spend £4 billion on the war in Afghanistan, and that is what Brown and Cameron almost certainly intend to cut from the National Health Service.’
Mr Campbell… Shame that many of the war criminals and their apologists in New Labour somehow hung onto their seats… We know how Jack Straw does it, but Hazel Blears… how on earth did she scrape back in ?
lwtc, was asking myself if the Lib Dems could, without having been elected first, declare their intention to bring the troops home? It’s OK for the BNP to do that, because who cares, but for one of the three main parties to do so before they had the power to achieve it might be completely irresponsible. You have to plan an exit strategy first.
I think many anti-war people voted for the Lib Dems because they felt this was the case, and were trusting on the Lib Dems’ relative decency/inexperience to do the right thing when in power.
And now we won’t know.
tony_opmoc at May 8, 2010 7:57 PM
Are we sure it wasn’t sabotage?
technicolour,
Whilst you may have been to the North West Frontier Province, if you want to understand the full picture then I suggest you read, listen to or even watch what a former Canadian Ambassador has to say on the subject.
His name is Peter Dale Scott
http://www.peterdalescott.net/
Tony
@technicolour
I think it’s very clear what Clegg has in store for the ‘Stans and Iraq, abundantly clear. Look at what Pilger reports on the matter.
Despite of my dearest hopes, I have seen NO basis to think Clegg will declare a cease fire and recall of British forces. NONE AT ALL.
He like the other two fools, carefully avoided discussion of the poisoned chalice, that of Britain’s ongoing Imperialist wars and the wards to come in the Presidential debates.
ScouseBilly,
I think sabotage is highly unlikely, however I wouldn’t rule out it being a massive fake job.
The proof is in the pudding…
If there is absolutely complete environmental devastation and thick oil sludge all over the Gulf of Mexico wiping out all the fisheries and the tourist industry, then we will know it is real.
But there is something about this story/event which stinks.
A bit like the London Bombings.
Tony
Respect came out of the anti-war movement that began around 2002 with the imminent invasion of Iraq.
From the beginning the dream rainbow coalition of pacifists,muslim groups,and SWP failed because it never nailed the 911 attacks as the false-flag trigger for the “War on Terror”.
Typically the movement,with the Trotskyite SWP element in its vanguard,could not bring themselves to denounce the Israeli Lobby for its prime role in instigating the drive for war.
To denounce the perpetrators of 911 and the Israeli Lobby,even to indict Zionism as the guilty party,would enable their enemies to accuse them of being “conspiracy nutters” and anti-semites.
God forbid!
Sheer timidity was as usual the reason for the movement’s failure to mobilize beyond the 2m march in February 2003.
So much of the initiative has been lost since those heady days when we thought we could prevent the elite embarking on their war that neither Afghanistan or Iraq figured at all as election issues.
Aside from the SWP having been infiltrated long ago,the egomania of Galloway,the infamous Big Brother TV appearance,and the failure to organize resistance in the work-place could only beget one result:the fragmentation and dissolution of the anti-war movement that exists today.
The elites calculated correctly that by ignoring the 2m march and going ahead with their war they would shatter the morale of their opponents long-term.
Few on the left today understand that the ideologies to which they owe their allegiance were created for them by the same elites that control international finance and build up and take down countries that stand athwart their geopolitical ambitions at will.
Without this understanding the elite-administered medicine of economic collapse we are about to have rammed down our throats will face little intelligent organized opposition.
RIP Respect and the anti-war movement.
Long live the NWO!
Yeah, I read the BNP were on the lookout for sites where they’re mentioned. Hello, boys! One thing you’re missing, apart from facts, is that the (one) million who marched were not trying to blame anyone for 9/11. They were trying to stop hatred and violence, not engender more.
But there’s a sperate thread for 9/11, if you want to give your facts, of course.
Clegg is def bent on getting rid of the Scottish brood than Lib Dem interests. Cameron would easily call a second election after few months when uses Cleg like a condom and grab more for a dejected and delegitimise Lib Dems and Labour.