The Landslide that Never Was

Screen shot image courtesy BBC website.

By Greg Kamin

May 7, 2010

It’s now been over 24 hours since polls closed in Britain, and still nobody knows who the next prime minister will be. The Tories had been salivating at the prospect of a huge breakthrough, but reality has a nasty habit of putting a damper on the best-laid plans.

You can see the full results here.

What happened in reality was this:

– You had a party (Labour) in power for 13 years -people get the itch for something new just because of that.

– Presided over by a colorless (colourless?) technocrat. Gordon Brown was Al Gore to Tony Blair’s Bill Clinton.

– A lousy economy, which the incumbent party always gets the blame for, fairly or not.

– An all too-willing acquiescense to jump into unpopular and disasterous American military adventures.

Throw in a charismatic young Tory leader who ran as his country’s Barack Obama (if Obama were a white, patrician conservative). This should have indeed been their year for a landslide. The only problem is that unregulated predatory capitalism of the sort that Tories tend to support caused the economic downturn in the first place; the Tories wouldn’t exactly be any more likely to pull out of the unpopular Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, and the prospect of David Cameron as Prime minister only reminded people of the worst excesses of Thatcherism. That’s not exactly the “change” that most Brits had in mind.

So with no love for Labour, and a visceral fear of return to Tory rule, the British people briefly turned to the third party in Britain, the Liberal Democrats. After their leader Nick Clegg’s “game changing” performance in the debates, the Lib Dems briefly surged into first place in some polls. A Lib Dem government wouldn’t be so bad for Progressives. They’ve drank a little too much of the “free” market theology Cool-Aid, but they understand that public services need taxes to pay for them (unlike the Tories who would privatize everything in sight). They also firmly support civil liberties and privacy protections – not insignificant in a country where privacy and liberty are being sacrificed at the altar of the war on terrorism to an alarming degree; they’re in favor of environmental protection; they’re completely devoid of the xenophobia and anti-EU snobbism found in some other sectors of British society; and unlike the Labour leadership, they never sold out on Iraq. And Nick Clegg gets major points for political courage for openly coming out as an atheist. Hey, what’s there not to like?

Unfortunately, the Lib Dems once again fell victim to the system that they’d been fighting to reform, the most insane political system ever invented – winner-take-all, first-past-the-post. What that means is that the a party which gets a quarter of the popular vote can wind up with zero seats in parliament. Or conversely, a party that squeaks through against a divided opposition can get the lion’s share of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, even if 60 percent or 70 percent of the population voted against them.

And this is exactly what happened. The punditocracy made it clear that the Lib Dems could never win under the current system due to the peculiarities of geography. At one point they even predicted that the Lib Dems could come in first in votes, Tories second, and Labour third. But in seats it could well have been Labour first, Tories second, and Lib Dems third. It all makes for great political theater, but it’s a lousy way to run a democracy. As it became clear that a vote for the Lib Dems could mean a return to Tory rule, their support began to slide.

The final result can only be described as a disgraceful mockery of democracy. Not that Americans have any reason to feel superior. We have the same system, and add a few more permutations to make it even less democratic if such a thing were even possible, such as entire states with less people than the city of San Francisco being entitled to two senators out of 100, and a capital city whose citizens are completely disenfranchised. But that’s another story entirely.

The Tories finished with 36%, Labour with 29%, and Lib Dems with 23%. In Parliament, that vote translates to 306 seats for the Tories (47%), 258 for Labour (40%), 57 for Lib Dems (9%), with the rest of the seats divided among several minor, mostly nationalist regional parties. One bright spot was that the Greens won their first seat ever.

As for the three major parties, none of them can be very happy with the result. Labour lost its majority, and Gordon Brown will probably lose the post of Prime Minister. The Lib Dem surge evaporated; just a couple days ago everyone thought they’d gain dozens of seats, and instead they lost 5. The Tories eeked out a “victory” of sorts, if you can call two-thirds of the public voting against your party a “victory,” but there is no way that Cameron can form a government purely from the right. Even if you generously add in the votes of minor right wing parties, the right barely got 42% of the popular vote and no more than 48% of the parliamentary seats (if one includes the Democratic Unionist Party’s 8 seats).

The rest of the minor parties tend to be broadly center-left, including the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein, Social Democratic and Labour Party, and the Greens. The center-left received over 56% of the popular vote between Labour, Lib Dems, and various minor parties, and technically a bare 51% majority of the seats. In practice though, it would be impossible to form a coalition because many of these parties want independence for places like Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

So basically, a mess of a system produced a hung parliament mess where no one can comfortably form a majority coalition, though David Cameron will certainly try, claiming “moral authority.” At the moment, he’s talking to the Lib Dems for lack of anyone else to talk to, but the price of their support would almost certainly be electoral reform. Even if he succeeds in forming a coalition, he won’t be able to push through a hardcore neocon agenda. And it’s entirely unclear how long such a government would even last.

But then, that might be the best thing about this result. If there’s another general election soon, and if it’s done under more democratic rules that would confine the Tories to a seat percentage more in line with their actual popularity (which is pretty much in the toilet), that might be the best outcome of all.

Greg Kamin

San Franciscan by choice, not birth, Greg Kamin is an activist with a passion for civil liberties and issues of social and economic justice. He is a world traveler, foodie, and all-around experience-seeker, who chronicles his life with a point-and-shoot camera and occasionally writes when feeling particularly inspired.

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