It has just been announced that the Crown Prosecution Service has charged the Conservative candidate for Thanet South, Craig MacKinlay, with filing incorrect expenses claims. Mackinlay’s agent, Nathan Gray and Tory staffer, Marion Little, have also been charged with the same offences. It would seem the Tories have found their fall guy.
For anyone hoping that Mackinlay would be forced to stand aside, I’m afraid those hopes have been dashed. He will continue to stand as a Conservative candidate. Nowhere Towers thinks that smacks of institutionalized corruption.
Here’s what Peter Oborne said on Twitter.
Vindication for painstaking and persistent Channel 4 investigation. Serious repercussions for British politics. https://t.co/uiWnAmJzYB
Owen Jones' point v simple. Marion Little's involvement means that it is NATIONAL issue involving CCHQ – and not just a local embarrassment. https://t.co/fRA0ALsH7z
As Oborne points out, this is a national issue and not, as has been claimed by the likes of Newsnight’s Nick Watt, a “little local difficulty”. One person not named by the CPS in the election expenses fraud is Theresa May’s joint Chief of Staff, Nick Timothy, who was deeply involved in the South Thanet campaign. According to The Guardian:
Nick Timothy was not accused of any wrongdoing and would have played no role in the recording of campaign spending, but Downing Street has been dragged into the controversy because the Electoral Commission found at least some of the expenses of party staff involved in the campaign should have been recorded as local spending rather than national spending.
Few people can be surprised that the CPS will not be prosecuting Tory MPs and agents for failing to correctly declare their elections expenses. This is a serious blow for democracy in the United Kingdom, which continues to operate the archaic First Past The Post system to elect its legislators. It is well known that the Conservative Party is awash with money from shadowy donors, who are themselves drawn from the 1%.
The BBC only really started reporting the story in its television and radio news when it appeared certain that no charges were to be brought. Now, one could suggest that this was a non-story and that is the reason the BBC avoided it. However, The Cat would narrow his eyes and say “nonsense”.
The response from the Tories was predictable and shrill. Patrick McLoughlin, the Conservative Party chairman claimed “false and malicious claims” were made about his candidates on the Internet and added:
“After a very thorough investigation, we are pleased that the legal authorities have confirmed what we believed was the case all along, that these Conservative candidates did nothing wrong.
“These were politically motivated and unfounded complaints that have wasted police time. We are glad that this matter is finally resolved.”
Make no mistake, if Labour or Green candidates had been accused of falsely declaring their election expenses, the Tories would have made a lot of noise. Hypocrisy much?
Karl McCartney, the Tory candidate for Lincoln, said: “This whole saga amounts to no more than a politically-motivated witch-hunt.” You clearly don’t know what a witch hunt is, Karl.
Jeremy Corbyn told BBC: “I am interested and surprised by it. We will have to look at the details.”
One case, that of Craig McKinlay in Thanet South, remains in the hands of the CPS. There could still be prosecutions.
“A number of false and malicious claims continue to be spread on the internet. People should be aware that making false claims about a candidate’s personal character and conduct is an electoral offence, as well as being defamatory.”
Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads was forthright:
Do your worst, CCHQ. I wasn't in violation of the law previously, and I'm not now. You're a corrupt party with corrupt candidates. Deal.
The Tories are bullies (qv. Lucy Allan, Mark Clarke, Grant Shapps et al) and will threaten anyone that speaks up with the courts. Why? Because they have the money and money talks. The legal system doesn’t work for the majority; it works for those that have the money, power and influence.
Tomorrow belongs to me? Megalomania, bullying, blackmail and sexual assault.
As the Crown Prosecution Services prepares to announce whether it intends to prosecute over 30 Tory “individuals” (sic) for failing to correctly declare elections expenses during the 2015 General Election, it’s worth remembering the other scandal into which the Tory Election Expenses Scandal is interwoven. That scandal is the Tory Bullying Scandal.
It is worrying that for more than a year the entire story has gone quiet. Indeed, a current government minister, a former minister and the party chairman are entangled in its web. A party worker actually committed suicide after a campaign of bullying and intimidation, and a sitting MP was blackmailed for having an affair.
Here is what we know about the Tory Bullying Scandal:
In 2014, Mark Clarke was appointed director Conservative RoadTrip2015 by Grant Shapps, the then party chairman. This organization, bussed activists around the country to key marginals. RoadTrip2015 is at the heart of the Tory Election Expenses Scandal.
Clarke threatened to blackmail Robert Halfon, MP over an alleged sexual infidelity.
A file on the bullying was passed to party chairman, Lord Feldman, who failed to take action.
Elliott Johnson, a young party activist committed suicide after being bullied by Clarke and Andre Walker, whom he regards as a friend. Walker himself was covertly recorded on a train plotting to smear Alison Knight, the deputy leader of Windsor Council with an associate. Walker also claimed to be Johnson’s lover.
David Cameron invited Clarke to Chequers to celebrate the activists’ role in the campaign’s success
Sayeeda Warsi, a former party chair, wrote to Shapps demanding action be taken against bullying. She claimed that she received “no satisfactory response”.
There was considerable overlap between Thatcherite group, Conservative Way Forward (CWF), Conservative Future (youth wing), RoadTrip2015 and Young Britons’ Foundation (YBF). It was revealed that Clarke had sexually assaulted several female members of YBF. This forced Donal Blaney, the YBF’s leader to cancel their annual conference. Blaney was also forced to resign from CWF.
Shapps was forced to resign as International Development Minister.
Clarke was suspended and later expelled from the party.
The internal Tory Party inquiry found there were 13 alleged victims. The same inquiry, conducted by Clifford Chance, concluded that senior party figures were “unaware” bullying was taking place. Elliott Johnson’s parents condemned the inquiry as a “whitewash”.
Clarke appeared on The Cat’s radar back in 2012, when he was listed as the YBF’s Outreach Officer. I’d already written a piece on the YBF and its role as the self-styled ‘madrassah’, which trained young Tory trolls activists. Clarke and the YBF had even plotted to “take over” the City of London Corporation (Council). Aidan ‘Nazi Boy’ Burley, the former MP or Cannock Chase, was a member of the YBF. He was also an associate of Clarke and the pair worked together in the Trade Union Reform Campaign or TURC. Indeed, given the names of those involved in the YBF (Blaney, Burley et al), it is entirely possible that this scandal also involves certain members – past and present – of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Party. Clarke was also stepping out with Justine Greening, the current Education Secretary.
While the Tory Bullying Scandal was bubbling along, in December 2015 it emerged that Lucy Allen, the MP for Telford, had left one of her workers a series of bullying rants on her voicemail. Not satisfied with what she’d already done, Allan added the words “unless you die” to a message from a constituent that criticized her support for bombing Syria. Allan was neither investigated nor disciplined for her actions.
This is a scandal that goes right to the heart of Downing Street. But why has this story gone so cold? Could it have something to do with the Conservative Party’s internal inquiry, dubbed by some as a “whitewash”? The corporate media dropped the story soon after the inquiry. Yet questions about bullying in the Tory Party and the connection between RoadTrip2015 and the Tory Election Expenses Scandal persist. Will we ever get to the truth?
UPDATE 25/4/17 @ 1808
The Guardian have taken up the story and added more detail.
The Conservatives have failed to hand over a report on allegations of bullying within the party to police despite repeated requests from detectives, it has emerged.
British Transport police (BTP) have asked the Tory party to disclose the full report on the bullying inquiry, which was launched after allegations were made against the former election aide and failed parliamentary candidate Mark Clarke.
The Conservatives failed to hand over a report? Now where have I heard that before? Ah yes, last year, the Tories were rather sluggish to hand over a file to the Electoral Commission. Remember?
Back in 2013, I argued that the Conservative Party could only win the 2015 General Election if it cheated. Why did I make this claim? Was it because I think the Tories are uniquely given to cheating and lying? No, many political parties cheat and lie but the Tories take it to a new level. The Blairites and much of the PLP are cheats and liars too. We know that, because we’ve seen them in action over the last 2 years. They will say and do anything – no matter how embarrassing – to achieve power. Principles and ideas are for political pansies, milquetoasts and those horrible protesters. Power is all that matters. In this, the Tories and the Blairites are in complete agreement. But that’s a subject for another blog.
Deeply unpopular from the beginning
In 2010 and not long after the first 100 days of the coalition, I knew the only way the Tories could win the 2015 election was to cheat. Why do I say this? Because anyone with eyes could see the Conservatives and their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, were deeply unpopular. They seemed to delight in upsetting people. From the outset, the Tories lined up its list of ‘enemies within’, which looked remarkably similar to Thatcher’s blacklist. That was only the start.
The blame game
One group listed as ‘enemies’ were benefit claimants and a series of lies were duly constructed to convince the gullible public that poor people were responsible for ‘destroying the economy’. One such lie was the claim that there was “intergenerational worklessness”, which had to be stamped out. “Work” the Tories erroneously claimed, “raised people out of poverty”. The media, for the most part, failed to challenge these absurd claims and willingly aided the government in its quest to punish the poor for, well, for being poor.
Universal Credit was rolled out and the Disability Living Allowance was abolished and replaced with the Personal Independence Payment. The chronically ill and those with mobility issues continue to the subjected to cruel Work Capability Assessments carried out by people with no clinical experience. Many people have died through committing suicide or because their medical condition worsened. Many more have been pushed deeper into abject poverty.
Around the same time the initial ‘welfare reforms’, Higher Education tuition fees were increased, despite a manifesto pledge made by the Lib Dems not to do so. This forced more students into debt and effectively limited access to university for many working class people.
Along with the poor and the disabled, the public sector was also blamed for “bankrupting the country”. This absurd claim was never once challenged by journalists or commentators. Yet, if the country was ‘bankrupted’ as the Tories and their allies claimed, then there would have been no money to pay civil servants, service personnel or even MPs. More Tory lies? We’re just getting started.
Lynton Crosby
Realizing its chances of securing an outright majority in the next election were quite slim, the Tories hired Lynton Crosby as its election strategist in 2013. The event passed with nary a mention by much of the public, but The Cat was already aware of Crosby’s track record. His past campaigns relied wholly on smears, dirty tricks and racism to woo voters. The Tories were determined to hang onto power at any cost and hiring Crosby was the first step. The second step was to introduce The Fixed Term Parliament Act, a naked act of political power-grabbing, which made it nigh on impossible to for a censure motion to be tabled .
Crosby began working his poisonous ‘magic’ from the start by slipping stories to the press about immigrants and the Labour Party. His trademark dead cat was used to divert attention away from the Tories’ problems and put the focus onto Labour. Do you remember that Daily Mail story about Ralph Miliband “hating Britain”? That was Crosby’s handiwork. Yes, the article bore Geoffrey Levy’s name but it originated from Crosby’s office.
Stealing elections, Tory style
Cameron’s government then turned its attention to the Commons itself and announced that it was committed to reducing the number of seats. He proposed a bill in 2010, shortly after the General Election to redraw constituency boundaries and reduce the number of MPs, which led to claims of gerrymandering. Yet Cameron claimed the changes would be fair because it would equalize the parliamentary constituencies. However, without proportional representation, any claim to ‘fairness’ was just more Tory hot air. Yes, the coalition permitted a referendum on what it described as ‘fair voting’ by allowing us to decide whether we wanted the same old First Past The Post (FPTP) system or the disproportional Alternative Vote, but it was another con. Yet people fell for it and some even told me that it was “better than FPTP”. When I asked them “in what way was it better?”. I got no reply.
The only way the Tories could secure a majority was to use underhand methods and outright lies. The party’s representatives like to claim that failing to declare election expenses was little more than an “administrative error” but given their history, this defence is weak. The party overspent on elections and relied on the scrubbed electoral registers that had been cleansed of particular kinds of voters: the young, students, the unemployed and Labour supporters. This contributed to the Tories’ modest majority.
Election expenses overspend and the aftermath
It was only because of Michael Crick’s sterling work at Channel 4 News that we know anything about the Tories’ election overspending. The BBC refused to touch the story and it was mentioned only occasionally by Andrew Neil on The Sunday Politics and briefly on Newsnight, which seemed reluctant to talk about it. The story never made an appearance on BBC Breakfast, the One O’Clock, Six O’Clock and Ten O’Clock news programmes nor did it appear on Radio 4’s Today programme. If you took your news from any of these programmes, you were kept in the dark.
Last week the Electoral Commission fined the Conservative Party a mere £70,000, a figure that was dwarfed by its own election overspending. The fine was roundly ridiculed as inadequate. However, 12 police forces involved in the investigations have handed their files to the Crown Prosecution Service. We await the outcome. If the CPS decides to prosecute, there could be fresh by-elections in at least 12 seats.
Conclusion
This was a party and a government that was all too conscious of its lack of popularity and legitimacy, and resorted to every possible trick to hang onto to power and win the 2015 General Election. Cameron and his Tories, far from being popular, pitted people against each other, while at the same time rewarding their friends with ever generous tax cuts. The poor were set up as patsies, who were fingered for ‘crashing the economy’ alongside the Labour Party. Any claim to be the “worker’s party” are empty and little more than the appropriation of a sign, which itself has been emptied of all meaning.
Tory election overspending is just the tip of a very large iceberg of politically corrupt practices. But don’t expect the BBC to report on any of those. Instead, they’ll keep reporting Tom Watson’s paranoid non-stories about ‘Trotskyite infiltration’.
The net is closing in on the Tories. The Cat thinks that election over-spending is the tip of a very large iceberg that includes other forms of malfeasance. Stay tuned!
UPDATE 15/3/17 @ 1203
Last night, Craig McKinlay, the Tory MP for Thanet South was interviewed under caution by Kent Police. The BBC’s Nick Watt did his best cover for the Tories by claiming that he’d spoken to a Tory grandee, who apparently advised him that nothing would happen but a few slapped wrists. However, a fine could result in the result being overturned, meaning fresh by-elections could take place.
I wrote this blog during the General Election and didn’t get around to finishing it. The Tories didn’t run a good election campaign. if there were prizes handed out for the best campaign, the Tories would have lost. There, I said it. There was nothing substantive: just the usual half-arsed crap that they tend to write on a hooker’s backside during one of their cocaine binges. Flog off this or that asset (even if it doesn’t belong to the state), and keep beating up the poor and the weak. The public want more of that shit! Yeah! *Sniffs* *Twitches*
Labour’s campaign wasn’t great either. There was the embarrassing immigration mug and the cringe-inducing pink ladies’ (sic) battle bus. But it wasn’t as bad as the Conservative Party’s campaign, which was a dismally negative affair, full of lies, smears and good old fashioned scaremongering. Labour had some mildly social democratic policies like some form of rent control, but the party seemed to suffer from an inferiority complex. This was evident in the way they failed to counter the Tories’ constant lie that they “crashed the economy” and “bankrupted” country.
David Cameron was just as gutless and like all good bullies, he got his friends to do his dirty work. He refused to debate Ed Miliband in a head-to-head interview and it’s no secret that the former was shit scared at the prospect of being found out as a phony and wriggled his way out. The SNP ran a good campaign and their leader Nicola Sturgeon put the three unionists in the shade during the Leaders Debates. Such was Sturgeon’s popularity that many English voters wanted to vote for her as Prime Minister… not realizing, of course, that we don’t have a presidential system. As for the Lib Dems, we never really heard from them much until the final week. UKIP spouted the usual rubbish about immigrants and the Greens ran the kind of campaign that Labour should have been running. That’s pretty much it.
Although it is unfinished, the blog below gives a snapshot of the third week of the election. It’s mainly about the Gruesome Twosome: Michael Gove and Sarah Vine.
Scaremongering. That’s what this election is all about. Forget the policies. Just be afraid. Be afraid of the big bad SNP and Labour walking together through the aye lobby. The Tories and their preferred coalition partners, UKIP, have resorted to scare tactics to win over voters. The former uses the spectre of communism, while the latter relies on the fear of the Other. The Tories are past masters of the scare tactic and they have access to the best practitioners of political skulduggery. Indeed, they employ people whose job it is to smear their opponents and plant the seeds of fear in people’s minds. The Conservative Research Department (CRD), for example, is well known for its smear tactics, espionage and dirty tricks.
When Michael Gove was moved to the whip’s office in the last cabinet reshuffle, he was apparently given the extra role of chief propagandist. Since the election was announced, Gove has popped up in television and radio studios to smear the Labour Party. He paints nightmarish images of a Labour minority government supported by the SNP that are worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. Gove and wife, Sarah Vine, are a sort of husband and wife smear team. He spreads poison on the airwaves, she spreads poison in the print media and online. Vine recently claimed, with unintentional hilarity, that Britain would become a “communist dictatorship under Labour and the SNP“. But she went further and insulted northerners and Scots too. Her husband’s a Scot, but he’s one of those Scots who’s mair Sassenach than Scottish. Great way to win over voters in the, er, ‘Northern Power House’ too, eh Sarah? How about sticking to what you’re good at? Like accusing the Director of Public Prosecution, Alison Saunders, of being “politically correct”.
In August last year, Judge Mary Jane Mowat, who spent 18 years on the bench in Oxford before retiring, claimed the rape conviction rate would not improve until women stopped drinking so heavily.
‘I’m not saying it’s right to rape a drunken women,’ she added. ‘I’m not saying that it’s allowable to take advantage of a drunken woman.’
She simply explained that a jury in a case where a woman can’t remember what she was doing ‘because she was off her head’ is less likely to convict.
She was speaking a basic truth. For her trouble she was vilified by the feministas.
Vine is no friend of feminists either, here referring to them as “feministas”. Fuck the sisterhood, eh Sarah?
Then there were the snide jibes about the Milibands’ kitchens (sic).
Not much prospect of a decent meal emanating from that mean, sterile, little box. No succulent joints of beef dripping in juices, no half-drunk bottles of red wine and mountain of fluffy white roast potatoes. It’ll be a quinoa salad with a side of shaved fennel, if you’re lucky. Let’s hope there’s a decent kebab shop around the corner
How petty.
Gove’s appearances on television have been nothing short of cringeworthy. Here he is attempting to explain his party’s manifesto commitment to extend Right to Buy to Housing Association tenants. He and his fellow ministers failed to tell the voracious Housing Association chief executives, who each draw down six-figure salaries about this, er, plan.
The plan… yes, that’s it. The Tories have a plan. So we’re told. It’s been given a name too. It’s the ‘Long Term Economic Plan’ or LTEP. Really trips off the tongue, doesn’t it? But it’s not a plan; it’s a slogan. Nothing more. Nothing less. It was coined to give the impression the Tories actually have something worth voting for. They don’t. They’re still recycling what’s left of Thatcher’s policies. Do you really want to go back to the 1980s? I know I don’t.
The Tories are hoping that many voters will internalise their scaremongering and lies. I watched a segment on Wednesday’s edition of The Daily Politics which had Giles Dilnot interview three workers in a Northamptonshire shoe factory. Two of them claimed they weren’t going to vote Labour, having voted for them in the past. Like an ‘I speak your weight’ machine (ask your grandparents), one said, bang on cue “I don’t have any faith in Miliband”, the other repeated the silly sub-Cain and Abel story, “He stabbed his brother in the back”. The former Labour voters told Dilnot they were going to vote UKIP, while the other claimed he was going to vote Tory. Gove was probably rubbing his hands with glee when he heard that. But these three workers (if indeed they were workers rather than managers) were not a representative sample of the nation’s voters and seemed to have been chosen for the purpose of claiming Labour’s fortunes were in the toilet and the Tories were now going to cruise home to victory.
Back to Gove. Yesterday, he told The Scotsman that his party was “closing the gap on Labour” and claimed that the Tories would win “three seats” in Scotland. What’s he smoking? Let me tell you something: it ain’t crack.
Here’s Gove talking up his party’s chances in Scotland last week on Newsnight. He also gets a chance to do some scaremongering. Gove repeats the “coalition of chaos” slogan while, at the same time, ignoring his own government’s chaos. The so-called “Omnishambles” budget, anyone?
There’s clearly too much of Gove on Newsnight. Gove is a dismal, unpleasant, obsequious, slimy, spiteful, repellent little creeptwerp man, not content with smashing up our education system, he has been unleashed on the nation’s viewers and listeners as the Tories’ number one attack dog.
After the Leaders Debate a couple of weeks ago, Gove appeared on Question Time claiming Nicola Sturgeon would “hold the whip hand” over Ed Miliband and then repeated the lie that the last Labour government “bankrupted the country”. He wasn’t challenged by Andy Burnham. Huh? Then Gove tangled with Parker lookalike Peter Hitchens. The man in the audience who claimed Farage was “having a proper conversation” with the nation had clearly internalized the crap he’d read, seen or heard in the media. At one point he enters into a dialogue with Hitchens and claims that Farage “looked real”. I thought he looked sweaty and spoke a load of nonsense. What do I know? When pressed on a possible deal with UKIP, Gove squirmed, wriggled and fudged his reply. When the man in the orange shirt tackles Gove on his lies about the country “being close to Greece economically”, he squirms again. Then Hitchens, who’s no left-winger by any stretch of the imagination, steps in and finishes the job… and then goes on to claim the UK “encourages mass (sic) immigration”. Sigh.
So there it is: the third week of the nastiest general election since 1992, which ended much the same way as that election. Anyone would think…
This isn’t the end of the matter. There’s more to come.
Pusillanimous is a good word and it’s a useful word. It sums up Labour’s last five years in opposition. The definition of pusillanimous is:
showing a lack of courage or determination; timid
Either through cowardice or weakness, the Labour Party failed to counter the absurd allegations made by the Tories that they had created the recession and had driven the country to bankruptcy, because they “crashed the economy”. One ridiculous statement put forward by the Tories and the Lib Dems claimed the United Kingdom was in a similar situation to Greece. Not a single Labour politician that I saw on television or heard on the radio bothered to counter these accusations. Instead, they rolled over and let the Tories get away with murder.
Governments don’t create or cause recessions: these happen because of external factors, like banking collapses and stock market crashes. The current recession (What? You think it’s over?) was caused by a combination of factors, the most notable of which was the subprime mortgage crisis, which was triggered by the collapse in house prices and an increase in mortgage foreclosures. Mortgage companies lent money to people who didn’t have the means to repay the loan. Household debts like these were bought by unscrupulous companies hoping to capitalize on debts. Unfortunately the high rate of default meant that these debts were ‘toxic’.
The other factor in the recession story was the banking crisis, which was caused by the light touch regulation of the financial sector that has its origins in the 1980s under Thatcher and Reagan, and was continued under Blair and Clinton. The banking crisis and the subprime mortgage crisis are interlinked. Both crises were created by unabashed greed and a lack of regulation; the very cornerstones of neoliberalism.
Governments may not cause recessions, but they can make them worse through inertia, complacency and sheer incompetence. The latter includes handing out tax cuts to the rich; attempting to stimulate a property boom and basing a notional economic recovery on inflated house prices. All of these things happened under the Coalition government and look set to continue under the Cameron regime. Labour did little to challenge these things.
One more thing: the country wasn’t and isn’t “bankrupt” as the Tories and their erstwhile partners, the Lib Dems, have claimed. If the country was “bankrupt” it would not have been able to pay its civil servants or even its MPs. If the country was “bankrupt” it would not have been able to borrow money at preferential rates of interest on the international bond markets. Another Angry Voice comprehensively debunks these myths and others.
Instead of opposing the coalition’s fiscal imprudence, Labour actually walked through the Aye lobby with the Tories and Lib Dems and condemned the nation to more austerity by committing themselves to Osborne’s spending plans.
LABOUR MP Diane Abbott accused her party’s leaders yesterday of doing working people a “great disservice” by backing Tory plans for permanent austerity.
The London mayoral hopeful was among five Labour MPs who defied their whips to vote against the Con-Dems’ budget responsibility charter.
Katy Clark, Dennis Skinner, Austin Mitchell and Roger Godsiff also opposed the charter alongside 13 MPs from other parties.
But support from shadow chancellor Ed Balls saw the charter, which includes plans to slash public spending by a further £30 billion, passed by a whopping 515 votes to 18.
The Star reported that Green MP Caroline Lucas called his position “feeble and inconsistent” during Tuesday’s debate.
It’s little wonder those who would have ordinarily voted Labour decided to give their vote to another party or stay at home. I mean, why vote for a party that’s going to do exactly the same thing as the party in power? It doesn’t make sense.
And Ms Abbott yesterday revealed her dismay at watching fellow Labour MPs ordered to troop through the lobbies with Tories and Lib Dems.
“I was hugely disappointed yesterday to see the Labour Party vote in favour of further austerity and in doing so we have done hardworking people a great disservice,” she told the Morning Star.
“Instead of simply mimicking current practices we should be offering a solid alternative through investment in public services to create real and sustainable growth.”
Yet Labour apparatchiks denied this ever took place and here’s an MP saying that it had. Only 13 Labour MPs could be bothered to vote against Tory spending cuts. That’s pretty sad, but it’s also a disgrace. It’s as if Labour actually wanted to lose the election.
Whatever you think of George Galloway, he’s got the two main parties bang to rights. They are indeed “two cheeks of the same backside”.
There’s an appalling stench to the election result and it’s one of scaremongering and dirty tricks, but there’s also a faint odour of Labour’s weakness, complacency and drift. Scottish Labour, especially, ran an abysmal catch-up campaign in which they adopted Tory scare tactics to try to frighten voters into returning to them. Labour also made a huge mistake in standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Tories and the Orangemen in the Scottish independence referendum. This, as well as their reluctance to offer a clear alternative vision to voters, cost them dearly not only in Scotland but south of the border too.
The turnout for this election was 66% nationwide. That’s nothing to crow about. In French presidential elections, the vote often exceeds 80%. According to the Daily Mirror, in Lucy Powell’s constituency, only 18% bothered to vote in the 2012 by-election. Yesterday the turnout was 44%. It isn’t great. That tells us that some voters who would have voted Labour didn’t bother to vote. Then there were the million plus voters who were simply scrubbed from the electoral registers. The Tories were counting on this to carry them over the line. The Greens had around a million voters but only held onto a single seat. Even UKIP’s numbers only gave them one seat. The Lib Dems apparently got more votes than the Greens. How the hell is this possible? The real issue with this election was the antiquated First Past The Post voting system that favours a two-party system. Times have changed and this is not the 18th century when the only parties in Westminster were the Tories and the Whigs.
Already the BBC’s presenters are doing their best to restrain their joy at the Tory win. Andrew Marr has indicated, in not so many words, that Labour’s salvation depends on a move further to the right. This tells us something else: the range of political and economic discourses permitted in the British media is worryingly narrow. If you have an opposing point of view, it will not get aired either on the BBC or the other channels. If you are allowed on, let’s say, The Daily Politics, you’ll get shouted down, talked over and patronized by the hosts and their right-wing studio guests. You must not question the orthodoxy, for to question it (in the minds of the right) is to spit in the face of God Himself.
For over 30 years, we have lived with a neoliberal consensus that says spending is bad and taxation is evil, yet governments that fail to collect enough tax revenues create huge economic problems for themselves. Governments that refuse to spend money will also run into trouble as the nation’s infrastructure crumbles and public services are driven into the ground. We know the rich don’t rely on public services, so they don’t care and they will even say as much. In the early coalition years, many Tories were practically celebrating the closure of public libraries. “If you can’t afford to buy books, that’s tough. Why should we pay for public libraries” was one such comment I’d read on Telegraph blogs.
So that’s five more years of cuts, cruelty, bullying and lies. Or is it? It’s up to you if you want to roll over and let these bastards trample us into the ground. But that isn’t me and I hope that isn’t you. We need to start our fightback by agitating for a fair voting system.
It’s time to take to the streets. See you at the barricades!
The Tories and their allies in the press seem to believe that the party with the most seats in the event of a hung parliament should have the automatic right to form a government. They also claim that should Labour get fewer seats than the Tories and if they form a minority government with the support of smaller parties, then this government would be illegitimate. This has been comprehensively debunked time and time again. Yet the Tories and Nick Clegg continue to lie about this, relying on widespread ignorance of how parliament and governments function.
There is a historical precedent that has never once been mentioned during this election campaign by those commentators whose job it is to ‘explain’ the political system to the voters. The General Election of 6 December 1923, which Stanley Baldwin had called over tariff reform (which meant very little to many working class voters), produced a situation similar to the one commentators claim will happen this Friday. Baldwin hoped that he could cement his authority after succeeding Andrew Bonar Law as party leader and Prime Minister, and he was eager to make his mark.
But Baldwin’s plan to increase his party’s already large majority backfired. Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party came second with 191 seats. Herbert Asquith’s Liberals came third with 158 seats (the Liberals were split). Baldwin’s Tories came first with 251 seats . When added together, the combined anti-Tory seats outweighed the Conservatives’ numbers. However, things were not straightforward: Baldwin claimed legitimacy and appeared before the Commons, but was defeated on 21 January by a no confidence motion tabled by former Labour leader, J.R. Clynes. George V had no choice but to appoint MacDonald as Prime Minister. Labour then formed a minority government with the support of the Liberals on 22 January, 1924. There was no question of Labour’s legitimacy to form a government on that occasion, because everyone knew how the game was played. Today, the Tories and their media chums continue claim that should Labour come second, they will lack legitimacy. The front page of today’s edition of the Murdoch-owned Times has printed a variation on the lie.
However, the role of the Liberals in 1924 should not be read as the facilitation of a Labour government but as part of a plan to secure more power for themselves, should the government fall. Indeed, the Daily Mail begged Asquith to form a coalition with the Tories to keep Labour out. Asquith hoped that the voters would see Labour as incompetent. What the voters actually saw were squabbling, power hungry politicians knifing each other in the back. Even so, MacDonald’s government was weak and unstable and suffered its first defeat in March. By October, it would be voted out of office thanks to the Zioniev Letter.
The Liberals paid for their treachery and they were reduced to 40 seats. Asquith lost his seat, was kicked upstairs and died four years later. Even though Baldwin secured a massive majority, he would again lose out to Labour in the so-called ‘Flapper Election’ of 1929, which resulted in another hung parliament. MacDonald relied on the support of Lloyd George’s 58 Liberal MPs. But this government wouldn’t last long and in 1931 another election was called. Again, this produced a hung parliament and the notorious National Government was eventually formed with Baldwin pulling the strings.
In February 1974, Edward Heath’s Tories came second and Labour came first. Heath remained in Downing Street as the caretaker Prime Minister and attempted to form a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberals. But Thorpe rejected the Tories’ coalition proposals on the basis that Proportional Representation wasn’t offered as part of the deal. Harold Wilson was invited to form a minority government with the support of the smaller parties. Again, there was no question of legitimacy. This government lasted until October, when Wilson called another election and won a wafer-thin majority. By 1976, Wilson was gone and replaced by’ Sunny’ Jim Callaghan, whose majority began to evaporate due to by-election losses and defections. Callaghan was forced to enter into a pact with the Liberals (the Lib-Lab pact) in 1977. This lasted until the end of 1978 and the rest, as they say, is history.
What these elections reveal to us are the flaws inherent in the First Past The Post voting system. Whichever party forms the government after tomorrow’s election, we must take to the streets to demand electoral and constitutional reform. There must be no let up.
Guy Debord's Cat 