Tory lies, anti-Semitism, the Labour Party, Israel, and Palestine

There are two general things happening through this election.

One of them is that the Conservatives keep getting caught doing very public, very stupidly bad, disinformation actions.

During the BBC Question Time leaders special, the CCQH Twitter account – which is a blue-tick verified account and therefore is not allowed to change its display name without informing Twitter – changed its display name/header image to appear at first glance to be a fact-checking account and proceded to tweet support of Boris Johnson.

The morning after the night before

“A Labour, a LibDem, and a Tory MP walked into a bar. Oh, said the bartender, I must be in Scotland.”

I stayed up til 7am hoping to hear Thanet South declare – the only Tory victory of the campaign that I’m delighted with.

Four party leaders will likely be gone by Monday: Jim Murphy lost his seat and will have to resign, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband look likely to go, and Nigel Farage already quit. (Update: Ed Miliband resigned as I was posting this blog: Harriet Harman, as deputy leader, is caretaker until the next leader is elected.) (Second update: and Nick Clegg’s also resigned.)

I wonder what Ed Miliband will do with his big lump of stone now?

It’s not funny. This is a horrific result. And it’s Labour who lost it. This is a re-run of 1992 – and in 1997 the New Labour won a majority and gave us Tony Blair and the Iraq war. Who will “reform” Labour after Ed Miliband?

Even now not quite all the results are in. But enough to be able to see the picture for the next five years. Six constituencies yet to declare.

Conservatives

The Conservatives now have 326 MPs. They have a working majority in the Commons. The polling results were wrong. The “shy Tories” are back – the voters who know how shameful their desire to vote Tory is, who know they should care about the people suffering more poverty, more food banks, the deaths via sanctions, but they want to vote for the Tories anyway because they think the Tories have done good for them personally or they’ve been frightened off Labour with hellstories of what Labour would do to them. (Analysis about “Is there a shy Tory factor in 2015?” at Number Cruncher Politics.)

So, Iain Duncan Smith will get to continue with his sanctions and bullying and lies at the Department of Work and Pensions. George Osborne will get to make his twelve billion cuts to welfare. David Cameron will announce a referendum on EU membership. There will be no taxing the rich, no ending the non-dom tax loophole, Rupert Murdoch will continue to own swathes of UK media, and people will die of hunger and neglect: because that’s what the Tories do. We have no hope of ousting them until May 2020, and perhaps not even then.

What are you staying up for?

The exit polls look depressing:

• Conservatives: 316
• Labour: 239
• SNP: 58
• LibDem: 10
• UKIP: 2
• Green: 2
• Plaid Cymru: 4

If the DUP get 10 seats, as some polls predicted, the Conservatives would be able to choose between a coalition with the LibDems or a coalition with DUP, whichever they pleased: either would get them to 326, and if so, we are screwed.

Cameron announces coup in Telegraph

Only in England would the leader of a political party announce he plans a coup to overthrow the democratically-elected government, in the Daily Telegraph, two days in advance.

Just a month ago, Adam Ramsay warned on the OpenDemocracy site:

If they [the Tory press] can possibly get away with it, they will find any way they can to declare Cameron the winner, even if it’s going to be almost impossible for him to command a parliamentary majority. In doing so, they will seek to make it impossible for Miliband to govern. This circumstance would in effect be a coup by newspaper proprietors against the people of the country. Because our constitution is written not in statute, but headlines, this is perfectly possible.

It’s complicated by the fact that until a new government is formed, Cameron and the other Tory and LibDem Ministers remain in Downing Street as a caretaker government, even if they have lost their seats and aren’t MPs any longer. Just as Gordon Brown correctly remained in Downing Street as Prime Minister until Cameron and Clegg had finished their coalition deal, so must Cameron stay on as PM until the House of Commons decides how to form a democratically-elected government out of the results of the 7th May election.

Does Ed Miliband want to be Prime Minister?

If Ed Miliband and David Cameron have both learned something terrible is coming before 2020 that they would rather be in Opposition than have to deal with as Prime Minister, this could explain both David Cameron’s lacklustre campaigning and Ed Miliband’s curious statement last night on Question Time: neither one wants to be Prime Minister.

However, this does seem improbable to me.

Take it as a given: Ed Miliband wants to be Prime Minister.

Yet, on Question Time on 30th April, with just a week to go to the election, he seemed to reject the job:

“I am not going to have a Labour government if it means deals or coalitions with the Scottish National Party.”

“If the price of having a Labour government is a deal or coalition with the SNP, it’s not going to happen.”

What was Miliband thinking?

The threat of Nicola Sturgeon

Nicola Sturgeon is – as we know in Scotland – an experienced, able politician, with ten years experience as the leader of the Opposition, as the Deputy First Minister, and now as the First Minister, in Holyrood.

A Yougov panel of undecided voters failed to recognise Nicola Sturgeon at all when shown her photo in advance of the leaders’ debate on 2nd April: but after the leaders’ debate, Sturgeon was topping UK-wide polls, her results comparable to those for Miliband and Cameron.

Nicola Sturgeon spoke as older voters will remember Labour politicians once speaking – of an economy that should support the people, against people being ground up by austerity to “support the economy”, of concern for immigrants and asylum seekers as human beings. Ed Miliband and David Cameron both looked scripted: Miliband constantly turned to speak to “you at home”, not to the audience or to his six fellow debaters: Cameron seemed to have a checklist of things he’d been told to repeat when he was stuck for answer, and he was stuck for an answer a lot.

GE2015: Why there will be no grand coalition

Vince Cable just made me laugh.

He declared:

that it would be inconceivable for the Liberal Democrats to agree to any post-election deal involving the Scottish National party after the general election.

On 8th May 2015, a fairly sure prediction is that the LibDems will have lost half of their MPs, perhaps more.

While nothing is certain, it’s looking quite likely that the SNP will have gained 30+ MPs and that the SNP, not the LibDems, will be the third-largest party at Westminster.

Electoral Calculus currently predicts Labour to have 301 MPs, the Tories to have 262, the SNP to have 46, and the LibDems to have 17.

Either Labour or the Conservatives would have to find 326 MPs to support their government.

On the face of it, then, it doesn’t matter what the LibDems want: they won’t have enough MPs to give Labour a majority, let alone the Conservatives.

“The Lib Dem majority is a mountain, but it’s a soft mountain and it’s crumbling in the face of austerity” – Mike Parker, Plaid Cymru PPC for Ceredigion, currently held by LibDem Mark Williams with 8,324 majority in 2010

Nothing is certain. The prospect of the SNP as the third party in UK politics is so unwelcome to Labour, Conservatives, and LibDems, that if the LibDems are a viable partner for a Labour coalition, I think that both Miliband and Cameron would prefer that to the SNP.

If the LibDems and Labour both do even slightly better than current polling predicts, they might be able to reach the magic number and sign up to Ravenclaw.

You may think I’m being over-cautious here. A YouGov poll released yesterday makes things look even worse for Labour in Scotland. But where I think the LibDems are likely to do better than expected is in southern England, where voters will have effectively to choose between the LibDem incumbent and the Tory and UKIP offerings. I think it very likely that in Scotland the LibDems will be left with only one MP, Alistair Carmichael.

The Ravenclaw coalition would be an English affair with hardly any Scottish representation, and it would validate the swing to the right on the part of both Labour and the LibDems, leaving the left-wing majority almost as unrepresented at Westminster as we have been since the LibDem swerve in 2010, and the Scots more unrepresented at Westminster than we have been since John Major’s time. Scotland could become, like Northern Ireland, a country within the UK that sends an entirely distinct group of MPs to Westminster.

The outcome that looks likely to us all at the moment, is that the SNP will have enough MPs – and Labour not enough – that Labour will need the support of the SNP to form a government. (That Labour hasn’t publicly committed to that is unsurprising: neither Labour nor the Conservatives can run campaigns based on telling their activists that they don’t expect to get a majority.)

The “Clegg’s Law” that the LibDems have tried to promote, that the third party in Parliament should always offer a coalition deal to the party with the largest number of MPs, never corresponded to UK Parliamentary procedure: it was a face-saving excuse to the left-wing supporters of the Liberal Democrats for Nick Clegg and Vince Cable’s plunge to the Tories in 2010.

“Clegg’s law, whoever has got the most number of seats gets first go. There is no such thing as Clegg’s law, apart form Nick Clegg saying it’s Clegg’s law.” – Gus O’Donnell, former cabinet secretary

But supposing the LibDems do as badly as predicted, or even worse – Sheffield Hallam is a predicted hold for the LibDems, but there is a concerted campaign led by student activists to unseat Nick Clegg from his constituency.

A coalition minority government between Labour and the LibDems may seem unlikely, but two things make it unwise to rule Ravenclaw out of the picture completely.

The first is, the artificial stability created by the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. This Act removes the Prime Minister’s power to set a date for a General Election at the time most convenient for his party, but also makes it more difficult for an incumbent government to lose power. The next General Election after 7th May will be held on 7th May 2020, unless the government formed after this general election loses a vote of no confidence or unless 434 MPs (a two-thirds majority of the Commons, including any vacant seats) vote to dissolve Parliament.

The second is, that as the SNP have already publicly committed to supporting a Labour government, Ed Miliband might risk forming a Labour-LibDem coalition as a minority government, calculating that the SNP would still support that coalition on most policies and certainly wouldn’t vote with the Tories.

What if Labour and the Conservatives formed a coalition?

They would have an overwhelming majority in the Commons: this would put paid to any presumptuous ideas the Scots might have that being in the UK lets us have any influence on the government: and it would – which I have some sympathy with – ensure the UK wasn’t in the odd situation of a party which gains less than 5% of the national vote being a large part of the national government.

Aside from that, a Labour/Conservative coalition has absolutely nothing in it for either party: prolonged for five years, Ed Miliband and David Cameron would die like the Kilkenny cats, and both parties would end up hemorrhaging votes and supporters. The leadership of both parties have definitively ruled it out.

A handful of Labour’s people have suggested that they’d rather partner with the Tories than the SNP. One MP, Gisela Stuart; a peer, Lord Moonie, and most seriously, John Mills, Labour’s largest business donor, who gave Labour £1.65m in 2013.

John Mills told the Financial Times:

Labour and the Conservatives were on track to finish “about neck and neck” on the basis of recent opinion polls, creating the possibility of a hung parliament and a second contest. If this fails to lead to a decisive victory, Mr Mills said that working with the Tories would be preferable to a deal with the Scottish National party or the UK Independence party.

The two things that a grand coalition could accomplish that both Ed Miliband and David Cameron would be likely to agree on, would be to ensure that the SNP are not an effective part of Westminster government, and to change the voting system of the UK so that never again can a party polling less than 5% of the national vote hope to get over 16% of MPs in the Commons.

They could then agree that their MPs should dissolve the grand coalition (Labour and Tory together would have the supermajority required by the 2011 Act) and end the 7th May Parliament, holding the next general election after a referendum in which proportional representation is campaigned for by Labour and Tories.

The only problem with that plan is that, as John Mills also noted: Labour is “not in bad shape financially” to campaign for the May 2015 election – Mills has donated another five-figure sum to Labour recently –

“But if they had to fight a second election Labour would be struggling.”

Labour won’t agree because there is no benefit to Labour, when they can be reasonably certain of being in government, even minority government, with no way for the Conservatives, whether acting alone or in partnership with UKIP, to force a general election on them.

That this plan keeps being mooted is evidence that it would certainly be preferable to the Tories than to return to Opposition with no prospect of winning a General Election for the foreseeable future: the Tories have not won a majority in the Commons since 1992.

Dundee and Tony Blair

Does Lesley Brennan stand a chance as the Labour PPC in Dundee East?

Electoral Calculus says no – Stewart Hosie has both the benefit of being the incumbent MP and the candidate on the rising tide of SNP votes. Maybe in 2020: Lesley Brennan has represented Dundee’s East End ward since 2012.

Nevertheless, Dundee East has been selected as one of 106 Labour “battleground seats”, and thus Brennan’s campaign became the recipient of £1000 from Tony Blair, who is donating £106,000 to the candidates in those seats, or so the initial publicity made it seem.

Who should be in the leaders debates?

What are the leaders’ debates for?

Because the UK is run by representatives from elected from constituencies, most of us watching a leaders’ debate will never get to vote for the party leader we think made best showing, or whose views we most agree with.

The current plan for the leaders’ debates – one on the BBC, one on Channel 4, and one on ITV – is for them to include the four men who lead four parties in the UK – the Conservatives, Labour, the LibDems, and UKIP: but exclude the women who lead the Green Party, the SNP, and Plaid Cymru.

In 2010, three leaders’ debates were for the three men who led what would obviously be the three biggest parties in the next Parliament, and in the sense that we saw David Cameron and Nick Clegg bonding as the two younger, public school men, excluding Gordon Brown, they were illuminating – even if Nick Clegg managed to parlay his brief popularity into a five-year crash for his party.

Did the Mail tip off Cameron?

When the story broke that David Cameron had refused to wear a t-shirt that said “This is what a feminist looks like”, ELLE professed itself surprised:

When ELLE asked him, along with Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party and Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats (and other influential men including Benedict Cumberbatch, Joseph Gordon Levitt and Tom Hiddleston) to wear the Fawcett Society’s iconic ‘This is What a Feminist Looks Like’ t-shirts for ELLE’s inaugural feminism issue (on sale October 30), he refused.

Not once, but five times.

It’s possible, of course, that Cameron refused because he knows he isn’t a feminist. Not only is he known for telling the Shadow Chief Secretary of the Treasury in the House of Commons to “calm down, dear” (six times), his government has since 2010 imposed austerity cuts that place a disproportionate burden on women.