Clare Short was MP for Birmingham Ladywood from 1983 to 2010, and Labour's secretary of state for the Department for International Development from 1997 to 2003. That, of course, was in Blair governments. She quit over Iraq. She served her last four years in parliament as an independent, no longer able to serve Blair's Labour Party.
She has an article in the Guardian this morning. I highlight two of her arguments. The first is this:
[B]oth main political parties relentlessly target the swing voter, which makes it impossible to really face up to the enormous crisis the world is facing, and be honest about the contribution that Britain might make to create a more sustainable and just future. Life for many in Britain is very hard and unlikely to get better soon. But due to our voting system, to win parties have to compete on the centre ground for the votes of a really small proportion of people. This is unhealthy and leads to growing frustration that may well break out again, as with the Brexit referendum. My greatest fear is that if people who are struggling are offered little hope, the appeal of racist populists will grow.
She is right, of course. We need proportional representation to address this fundamental problem.
She then added:
All that said, I think it is almost inevitable that the Tories will lose the election. The worst result for Labour would be a hung parliament, where it would need support for its programme from the Lib Dems and the SNP. But would this be such a bad thing? The outcome could be a more pluralist and less authoritarian government, and stronger commitments on inequality and the environment.
Again, Clare Short is right. We can do better than have a majority Labour government. And, as yet, I am still not convinced that we will have one.
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I point out to my Labour friends that we are an Emergency Powers Act (Johnson’s is still available/) and a Reichstag Fire away from a hung Parliament or worse. If the Reichstag Fire event is a major terrorist attack, add in internment of the ‘enemy within, “bring back the death penalty” and the New Conservatives are in with a chance. These are volatile times, and Starmer is compromised without a major narrative that’s radically different.
Laboured lost my vote aeons ago when they got rid of my final salary pension in 2003, keeping I think to Tory spending pledges. The party of working people – yeah, right. Iraq was the nail in the coffin. I still don’t know if I’ll even bother to vote next year. Most of our politicians I think are quite simply ridiculous people who do not share the real world with voters.
That’s why I like reading Mike Parr’s posts – the only real defence we have is to ridicule them in the good old British tradition and at least try to bring a smile to our faces as we lament the stupidity that rules over us.
I miss Labour’s serious politicians like Clare Short.
Oh stop, you are making me blush.
Imagine we stand in 1985 & I tell you what is coming down the track & what the Uk would look like in 2023.
You would regard me, rightly, as insane. But, in an insane world, where politicos like Starver think they are serious, ridicule provides some sort of outlet.
& as Richard noted – even mainstream media persons – now regard Tory2 and its politicos & their responses to question with disbelief.
Welcome to UK Bedlam 2023.
“main political parties relentlessly target the swing voter”……….begging the question with what, exactly?
PoliticsJoe interviewed Jamie Driscoll (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnSJg4J2Jwg) , purged from Tory2 because…. his face didn’t fit? he got results?? he met a bloke that made films?
His comments towards the end of the interview suggest that Tory2 rank & file don’t support Kid-Starver & his politburo’s outlook, indeed they seem to support Mr Driscoll and his results-for-people attitude & actions. This begs the question on tory2 rank & file & their willingness to troop the streets for Starver & his politburo during an election, for a party with no substantive policies and, in their own, words, offering no hope. (I believe it was Streeting that came out with that – No-Hope Streeting).
On a slightly related note, one of the outcomes of lots of tory govs (both T1 & T2) is that the UK no longer has British companies capable of building off-shore wind farms – apparently the Uk is a world leader (in having them) but not building them. Arn’t the Brits lucky to have a Belgian company just cross the water – that can.
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2023/10/10/flemish-company-embarks-on-construction-of-the-worlds-biggest-wi/
Siemens in Hull were building the largest offshore wind farm just two years ago, Hornsea2. They were given a grant by Johnson’s government.
What happened there? Humberside is closer to Dogger Bank than Belgium, I think.
https://doggerbank.com/construction/worlds-largest-offshore-wind-farm-produces-power-for-the-first-time/
Clearly what the world needs is a level playing field for capital investment. It does not need a failed WTO that allows currency rigging and unfair tax breaks or government subsidies. Obviously in evolutionary terms we are a long way from that as a species!
Richard, terrible typo in initial Short quote: [B]main.
PSR, I agree with your sentiments and I also miss serious politicians. The current ones are so dire, I wonder how they can get out of bed on a morning.
Corrected
Thanks
In answer to John Griffin’s comment. The situation with the Tories now is similar is many respects to Thatcher in 1982. Behind in the polls, facing “the wets”, threatened with a challenge to her leadership.
She and Thatcherism were saved by the Falklands.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-falklands-gamble
With what’s going on in the world now something along similar lines could not be ruled out.
Also, when PSR refers to Mike Parr’s ploy of ridiculing them, it immediately brought to mind Harry Potter and the Bogart. A shape shifting entity that assumes the most fitting shape to terrify people. It’s banished by making it look ridiculous.
Quite apt for the Tories I thought.
With a combined military (army, navy and air force) that personnel-wise couldn’t fill Wembley stadium, a navy and air force that lack any respectable substance in terms of ships and aircraft ( I will not mention our two white elephant aircraft carriers), and an industrial capacity that cannot sustain any conflict beyond three days, I suspect that a Falklands-like campaign to “unite” the nation behind our apology for a government would fall flat on it’s face.
In the last fifty years I have known many people who classified themselves as natural Labour voters but who were constantly at odds with the policies of the Labour party.
In 1997 a good friend and colleague who was a long-time active Labour member did not get to the end of the year before he felt it necessary to resign as a matter of principle over some long forgotten action of the New Labour government.
I am sure that there are members of the Greens, the Lib Dems, the SNP and possibly even Conservatives that on matters of principle are in serious disagreement with the actions of their leaders, but for some reason it does not seem to produce the violent reactions that appear constantly in left of centre politics.
I wonder why this happens?
And for the record I am appalled by what may become a Labour Prime Minister governing based on neo-liberal gibberish but will still vote Labour as the least worst option to protect me, my family, my friends, my community and the country.
“will still vote Labour as the least worst option to protect me, my family, my friends, my community and the country.”
Protect from what? austerity? failing public services? loss of democratic rights? Can you, at least, suggest how you will be protected rom those things by the current Labour offering> Otherwise yours is just the triumph of hope over reality.
As an adult I have lived through three periods of Labour Government.
In each case, for the overwhelming majority of people their quality of life was better and better protected than in any of the Tory governments that preceded them or followed them.
Even the Thatcherite worshipping New Labour period was almost immeasurably better than what came before it and what came after.
Ringo Starr’s analysis after meeting Geoffrey Archer has always seemed applicable to all Tories, “He seemed like a nice man but he was the kind of bloke who would try and bottle your piss and sell it”
Paul Langston
Why do you think history is a better indicator of the future than the policies proposed by the current Labour party? Hope over reality.
You’ve obviously not noticed the mess the country’s in after successive Conservative and Labour governments starting with Callaghan.
I am actually a supporter of proportional representation ( and a return to Local Government with the power to raise and spend its own revenues) but the disgusting Con-Dem coalition 0f 2010-2015 is a warning that like all other forms of democratic Government, proportional representation has its faults.
Difficult to disagree that SNP/ LIBDEM /Green would not be a good influence on Labour.
Starmer and the interviewer this morning still framed within ‘health is just a cost’ – only economic benefit would be to get sick people back to work ‘in the economy’.
NHS is part of the economy – spending on it could be part of the much vaunted ‘growth’ , but he either doesnt understand or just daren’t say so.
The Thatcherite idiot Rachel Reeves said working as a doctor in the NHS isn’t a proper job!
“There’s no substitute for business investment, business innovation — it’s not government that creates jobs in towns and cities across the UK.”
https://www.ft.com/content/652d0a56-03b0-422a-a9c5-c0bf66db4e3c
Surely proportional representation guarantees more extremists get to frame the debate – that’s inevitable.
Why is that a benefit, unless you’re part of that extremist viewpoint?
Why?
What is the more extreme party you are more worried about than the Tories right now?
John the Donkey
The point about giving credence to fascists and other extremists in PR scenarios has been made before by Europeans I speak to.
Personally I can live with that because as Gramsci once alluded (I believe) even your most severe opponent’s view will/may have a kernel of truth in it. The trick is to acknowledge this. But in the ‘Not one of us’ Thatcherite tradition in this country we seem unable to capture this because its ‘Them or Us’ and nothing in between.
For me therefore an effective system of PR is one where you can see what the other side are up to (because issues are dealt with in a parliament) and it should be set up for some sort of compromise. Allied to that, the issue of political funding and political favouritism in the media must be addressed.
But it won’t.
I don’t think we’ll ever get PR myself, but not because of the reasons you have stated.
There’s too much skin in the game.
Rich people’s skin.
The PR threshold for the Knesset is 3.5%.
With some 6.7m eligible voters and a 70% turnout that means approx. 165,000 voters – certainly enough for a solidly voting minority group to get some representation.
And we all know who holds the balance of power there.
For the Reichstag during Weimar it was as low as 60,000 votes, but modern Germany has a 5% threshold for parliamentary representation, of an electorate of just over 60m … currently about 15-160,000.
In the UK in 2019 only three parties reached a 5% threshold – with the SNP on 3% ..
It is difficult to know how 1.2m SNP voters would feel at having no representation with a rigid 5% barrier,.
Even if both Labour and Tory parties fragmented into two parties we’d still only have five at Westminster (very possibly with no Greens or SNP)
There are no satisfactory arguments against PR on the basis of democratic representation, but its shape would need very careful consideration.
I think you misunderstand how this process might work
This has been the case in the US for some while now, with a small number of swing states essentially holding all the power. Everyone seems to know this is the case and just accepts it, despite the fact that it is deeply undemocratic.
Agreed
I think despair at the prospect of an unalloyed Starmer Labour government is entirely justified not only because of the neo-liberal idiocy of their announced economic policies/fiscal rules etc. but rather, and especially, because of the signs of brain-dead refusal to engage with the facts in interview after interview given by their Chancellor in Waiting, Rachel Reeves. Ask her a question about anything and out comes a pre-programmed response parroting the approved line – irrespective of whether it engages with the question asked. Apart from being economically depressing, it betokens a party Leadership which places obedience to their authority above anything else – sense, facts, the economy or even good manners. If this is how they treat their most important potential Minister, waes me for you, me or the any future – itself an airy void which they have plastered with a Union flag as meaningless as Starmer’s dreadful word salad of a Leader’s speech.
On that last point, I could run on! It was an almost policy free zone, improving on Blair only by the use of slightly more verbs. But in actual policy promises amounting to what? We are to be bamboozled by the lure of occasional alliterations and impressed by the assertions of intended force – a word trail beloved by all proto-fascists. Mosely trumpeted ‘Action’ to cite only the domestic exemplar. The accusation of being Tory2 is misleading for Starmer’s version is instead a tribute act to the same mix of political prejudices that produced the very Brexitania from which he is alleged to wish to diverge. The trouble with his earnest rant is that it promised nothing that engaged with real problems in real terms. It only sought to harness disatisfaction by waving a frankly jingoistic fantasy of insular exceptionalism – “a Britain where…” and the next line was “world-beating” in all but quotation, just like the Johnson/Truss/May/Farage/Frost Brexitanian, imperial, fake-history delusionists who have shafted their supposedly beloved country’s future.
I’m truly sorry to say that this is just a very bad time in history – and after a, historically very rare, relatively good last half-century, it is a salutary shock to discover that our luck has simply run out.
UK politics now degenerated to the childish level both amongst voters and politicians of “Here’s a lollipop I’d like to have a taste of that!” This is exemplified by Starmer supporters not having a clue where he will find the money to make the changes the UK badly needs!