Name:     Michael L. S.   [E-Mail]
      Location:  Earth
      Website:  Middle East Resource Center

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Remember 1997: "Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiings can only get BETTER!" with a triumphant Tony Blair practically floating on the hands of the stage-managed crowds into power? Well, yesterday that was supposed to happen to Cameron and the Tories.

So, the Conservatives won the election in Britain in terms of getting the most popular vote and the highest number of seats in the parliament but not even remotely securing an absolute majority of either. Incumbent prime minister Gordon Brown's Labor faction got 6% fewer votes and 7.7% fewer seats. The Liberals, despite much hype and great expectations many had had of them, acquired 57 seats, actually losing some on their previous tally. (We'll get back to this in a second.)

Neither political party can thus form a majority government and both depend on a coalition with or, at a minimum, support from the Liberals. Brown is clinging on for dear life and refuses to vacate his residence, as is, in fact, his legal right: The sitting premier has the right to a first shot at forming a new government. Nick Clegg of the Liberals had said though that he would first talk to the party with the parliamentary majority. So, not Brown.

Oy vey zmir!

Well, I used to be a diehard Tory up until and quite a bit after their crushing defeat in 1997. I then switched to the Liberals, right around 2003/2004, either of which could be described as my annus horribilis. But I digress. When Brown succeeded Blair - whom, to my belated credit, I could never stomach, what with all his fakery - I took to him for the whole of 2-3 months before realizing he was as big an asswipe as Blair had been if for somewhat different reasons.

Tories' Cameron came to the scene at some point, I doubt anyone remembers when, and he began harping on about "change," but it was very obvious very early on that the only "change" he had in mind was replacing Labor with his Conservatives. Forget about proposing any measures to deal decisively with soaring crime, a failing public education system, a diabolical national medical care system, a societal disintegration (involving everything from seditious immigrants to a violent underclass), a shambles of a social security system (which means that it is as profitable to stay at home doing jack as it is to go out and work, and of which millions of the lumpenproleteriat and other deadbeats have been happily availing for years), the crapulent Europhobe vs. Europhile jousting, and so back and so forth. Most of his proposal were stunts, gimmicks and vacuous escapades to portray himself as e.g. "green" (cycling to work and having his chauffeur follow him by car) or "caring" ("hug-a-hoodie"). But I divagate again.

After my brief flirtation with the Liberals, I decided I didn't really care anymore. When this election started going down, however, I wanted to see Brown and Labor out but I was not overly concerned about who would replace them. The first electoral debate - which Clegg nailed - and the subsequent nauseating assaults on the Liberals in the right-wing media changed that. The more vociferous those attacks got, the more they endeared Clegg to me. Plus, he had some good policies: Slimming down Britain's defense expenditure, making a firm and positive stance toward the E.U., having a clue about how to deal with immigration, etc.

Anyway, the election happened; I stayed up all night to watch the results streaming in (yeah, sad), and here we are. For any deal to be sealed, Clegg demands, inter alia, a reform of the electoral system. The extant system hails from the Victorian era and means that a defined district (constituency) returns the one person who courts the most votes. So, if we have an extreme situation of four candidates who score thus:
Candidate A - 10,000 votes
Candidate B - 9,999 votes
Candidate C - 9,999 votes
Candidate D - 9,999 votes,
Candidate A is returned to represent that district even though at least 75% of the electorate did not vote for him/her!

The Liberal faction is deeply unhappy with that. And who can blame them! This time around, they garnered 23% of the popular vote but attained 9% of the parliamentary seats. A system that produces such a result is anomalous, inequitable and unrepresentative. In a word: Undemocratic.

The Liberals are totally right to demand it be changed and, if the Tories and Labor had any moral fiber in them, they would want the same. But, of course, all they crave is power and to hell with morality and fairness.

You see, if Britain adopted the proportional representation system or any system that roughly translated the accumulated number of votes into a corresponding number of parliamentary seats, it would mean that Britain would likely never again have a majority government, as there was only one time in the past 130 years that a political faction gained more than 50% of the popular vote! So, Labor would invariably have to form a coalition and would hence be beholden to another party (most probably always the Liberals) and the Tories would likely never see themselves in government again as there is no way they would find any faction large enough with which to form a coalition. So, both Labor and the Conservatives would prefer to retain the old way of doing things, even at the expense of disenfranchising a huge part of the electorate.

The Liberals are now putting the screw on both of them and militating for a change. The Tory-supporting media are vituperating them for it, depicting the situation as a small "loser" faction holding a triumphant Cameron to ransom.

What bullshit.

Fact is that after thirteen years of a thoroughly abysmal Labor government, which ruined Britain to such an extent that many of its aspects are unrecognizable from even just a decade ago, and I don't mean for the better, the Tories should have cruised to a landslide victory. But they didn't. They didn't capture the public's imagination, address the public's concerns in a comprehensive and realistic manner, or present themselves as much other than new New Labor. Rather than sneering at and lambasting the Liberals who did absolutely nothing wrong in this campaign or election, why not ask how come the Tories failed so miserably?!

I expect there'll be more to come on this.

* * *

The election itself was the main theme last Thursday but there was a glittering sideshow, too: Hundreds of people being turned away from the polling places because too many people had shown up, because they had run out of ballots, because the ballots had misprints, etc. Britain thus proudly joins the illustrious ranks of the Third World in yet another way.

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