General Election 2019 – 12 December

This was first posted on Facebook on 31st October 2019, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

On General Election 2019, 12th December – Register to vote: encourage everyone you know who has a right to vote to get registered.

Tactical voting in my view is a matter of personal conscience. If you decide to vote tactically in order to ensure the worst are kicked out or the least-bad get in, that’s as much a right as the right to vote, in a FPTP system: it can be gamed and it’s your right to try to game it in the direction you want – or to refuse to do so and to cast your vote for the candidate/party you actually want to win. I have no criticism or judgement to make either way – I think both are valid choices and you should do what feels right to you.

That said: If you’re going to simply vote for the candidate/party you want to win, you don’t need advice from anyone else in figuring out who that is.

Oh, Snap! General Election 2017

“Guess what we’re doing on 8th June 2017?” I asked.

“I dunno,” said the love of my life, busy with her coursework.

“Having a general election.”

Theresa May today announced (following a cabinet meeting) that she would hold a “snap general election” on 8th June 2017.

If you want to read her claimed reasons for doing so, her full statement is available.

Shetland and Orkney and Alistair Carmichael

Alistair Carmichael has been the LibDem MP for the Orkney and Shetland constituency since 2001. It’s been a distinguished constituency for the Liberal Party for over sixty years.

BBC News – Nick Clegg: The choice is me, Salmond or Farage http://t.co/VtW4mnpfY2

— Alistair Carmichael (@acarmichaelmp) April 15, 2015

In 1950, Jo Grimond won the Orkney and Shetland constituency for the Liberal Party (defeating Sir Basil Neven-Spence, whose family had owned land in Shetland for generations and who had been the Unionist MP for twenty years). Grimond was one of nine Liberal MPs elected in 1950, and he was to hold his seat for thirty-three years: he stepped down in 1983. Jim Wallace succeeded him, and Alistair Carmichael succeeded Wallace in 2001. Jim Wallace went on to become the LibDem MSP for Orkney until 2007, when he was succeeded by Liam McArthur: Shetland has had one MSP since 1999, Tavish Scott. Jim Wallace and Tavish Scott were each at one time leaders of the Scottish Liberal Democrat Party, and Jo Grimond was twice leader of the Liberal Party. Alistair Carmichael is deputy leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and was Secretary of State for Scotland from 7th October 2013 to 8th May 2015.

“A LibDem, a Labour, and a Tory MP walk into a bar. Oh, says the bartender, this must be Scotland.”

The last time the Orkney and Shetland elected a parliamentary representative who wasn’t a Liberal / LibDem was in 1945 (Sir Basil Hamilton Hebden Neven-Spence, as one would expect, was standing for the Unionist Party). Orkney and Shetland local councillors are invariably independents.

The LibDems have had worse elections than in 2015, though not for some time. In 1951, Jo Grimond was one of only six Liberal MPs in the Commons: but from 1956 onwards there were nine, from 1966 twelve – and apart from a 10-month dip in 1974, they were never again in single figures until 7th May, 2015: when Alistair Carmichael beat the SNP surge by 817 votes.

Alistair Carmichael said (the Shetland Times reported)

it had been “quite a remarkable election campaign”. He congratulated the SNP on quite a remarkable political achievement. “We truly live in remarkable political times in Scotland.

He said it was a tremendous privilege to retain the seat and thanked the voters of Orkney and Shetland.

Shetland MSP Tavish Scott said he was relieved and delighted that Mr Carmichael had retained his seat and held off “the Tsunami” of SNP support that had been shown on Mainland Scotland.

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.

Stop Complaining (and Vote)

If you live in Scotland, you’re almost certainly registered to vote – practically everyone was in the referendum in September 2014, and if you haven’t changed addresses since then, you still are.

If you didn’t receive a polling card because you registered too close to the 20th April deadline, or for some other reason, you can still vote: find which is your local polling station from your local election office and just go there. You don’t need ID to vote, but if you don’t have a polling card it would be a wise precaution to take some proof of address/identity with you: a local polling officer may not know the regulations and it would be faster to provide your proof than to argue with them. (You shouldn’t have to argue with them and you probably won’t, even if you don’t have a polling card: please don’t go in with a confrontational attitude.)

If not for the rise of the SNP, Labour would be looking forward to five years in government, the Conservatives would be lagging behind Labour by 30+ MPs, and the LibDems would be looking forward to five years as the party that helps either Labour or the Tories form a majority government.

If not for the rise of the SNP, Labour would be comfortably the largest party in the House of Commons after 7th May instead of desperately trying to save what they can in Scotland, and the LibDems might be expecting to lose only half their seats, instead of a likely two-thirds.

GE2015: Liberal Democats

GE2015: In six weeks time

On Sunday 10th May 2015, I anticipate that I will be waiting to hear the results of several days closed-door coalition negotiations, all depending on what number of MPS each of the four major parties won on 7th May.

As the May2015 site reminds us: “Technically, 326 is a majority. In practice, 323 is.”

(The deadline for registering to vote is 20 April: you can register online, you just need your National Insurance number.)

I plan to vote Green. One reason why I do not plan to vote Labour: look to your right. Immigrants are not the problem.

As Maya Goodfellow noted on LabourList:

The problem here then is not the mug, but what the mug reminds us of: just how wrong Labour are on immigration. The proposed policies centre around the idea that immigration needs to be managed, the implication being that it’s out of control. This is a response to the belief that New Labour let far too many immigrants come into the country – Miliband has branded this a mistake on numerous occasions.

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.

GE2015: The Sorting Hat

First-past-the-post voting systems don’t lend themselves to coalition government. But that’s what we’ve got, and there are four possible governments we could have after the General Election on 7th May 2015.

How we vote on that Thursday in just over three months time has very little to do with the government we’ll end up with. The rise in support for the Greens across the UK no more translates into increased numbers of MPs than the rise of support for UKIP means they’ll become a major party.

But the SNP are likely to be the third or fourth largest party in Westminster after May 2015. Electoral analysis shows a huge swing to the SNP across Scotland, which – if we had a more representative electoral system – could translate to over forty seats for the SNP (Labour down to seven MPs and LibDems to one), But just as the tremendous fall in LibDem support isn’t likely to be reflected in an equivalent loss of seats – Greens are more popular than LibDems but aren’t likely to do more than retain their one MP – the Labour wipeout isn’t expected to be as extreme as a naive reading of the polling figures would suggest.

Toscafund, an established asset manager based in London and Dubai, chaired by former Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Sir George Mathewson, commissioned Professor Richard Rose to carry out seat by seat analysis of polling across the UK. For Scotland, their report says:

“A uniform ‘national’ movement of votes is unlikely because the SNP must jump from third to first place over different challengers in different parts of Scotland. Because the median Labour seat is held with a margin of 31.6 per cent over the SNP, any recovery by Labour would reduce the depth to which Labour plunged.”

I’m discounting the Voldemort option – Tory majority or Tory/UKIP coalition – because this is not a probable option. The Tories can’t win a majority, and UKIP can’t win enough seats to help them out.