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May 4, 2010
A few days out from the general election and Britain is locked in a tight three-way race. All three parties are within five points of each other. Cameron's Conservatives look as if they won't get an overall majority even though they are "measuring up the curtains for no 10'; the Liberal Democrats may come second, though that looks unlikely; whilst Labour continues to trail, clinging on to the hope that something might turn up.
None are leveling about what is needed to address Britain's huge fiscal deficit, its bloated state and soaring public debt. This election is not about the parties' plans to tackle Britain’s deficit:
Dave Brown
What has changed is that there are now three parties in electoral contention, and an overall majority of the sort first-past-the-post used to yield may become more difficult for any party to achieve. A hung parliament may knock some sense into the corrupt political system.
Labour deserves its come uppance says George Monbiot because Labor under Blair and Brown has:
abandon[ed] everything it once stood for, and hand[ed]us, trussed and oven-ready, to big business and the Daily Mail. We'll be trapped like this for ever, in New Labour's Bermuda triangulation, unless we vote for what we believe in rather than just against what we don't.
The New Labour era is limping to a close. The unfair electoral arithmetic of first-past-the-post still massively disfavours the Liberal Democrats, and will limit its seat-gains to a few dozen even in the best circumstances. At this stage it looks to be a Tory minority government dependent on Lib Dem cooperation.
More realistically Cameron's Conservatives would seek pacts with Unionists in Northern Ireland, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalist Party in order to avoid having to accommodate Lib Dem demands for electoral reform. The momentum does seem to lie with the Conservatives. They may even win a majority of seats if the momentum continues in the last days.
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I understand why people take such an interest in the UK, even though on objective criteria the election outcome is about as relevant to us as one in Italy and less important than Japan, which hardly anybody bothers to follow. I do it too.
However I've never understood why UK politics gets such attention in the USA. Could it be that after all these years, there's still a sense that it's the mother country? When a British parliamentary committee recommended the end of the 'special relationship' recently, some of the conservative pundits in the USA reacted as if they'd been slapped by their wives.
Anyway the ridiculous disproportion between votes and seats in the UK, like the first George W Bush election outcome and the relative representation of the Nats v Greens here, is further evidence of the grievous flaws in the polity of Western 'democracies'.