Why A Hung Parliament Would Be Bad, Part 74

A truly excellent, but entirely unnerving, article by retired senior civil servant and Labour Party member, Brian Barder, on the subject of the new procedures drawn up by the Cabinet Secretary, or "rule book", appeared on his blog a couple of days ago, and has just popped up on LabourLost.org. It's a long, comprehensive piece that discusses not only the post-war history of this, as he calls it rather refreshingly, "anomolous" outcome, but also explores several possible what-if scenarios in the event of its happening again, and how the new rules will work.

Simply put, if you are a Conservative supporter, the results would all be bad. The likelihood of Brown resigning as Prime Minister after the election are minimal, even if his party is second biggest in the House of Commons. In attempting to create "stability", these new codifications of previously unwritten constitutional practices have in my opinion severely skewed the system in favour of the incumbent. Simply put, if my understanding of the piece is correct, should a hung parliament of one form or another be the outcome in which Nick Clegg held the balance of power, there would be no legal or even moral obligation for Brown to resign, so Clegg would be forced to bring down the Labour government by refusing to endorse the Queen's Speech. This would trigger another general election which, you have to think, would hardly be in the Liberal Democrat's best interest. The chances are, therefore, that Clegg would do a deal with Brown and Brown would continue as Prime Minister for the time being, despite having a smaller share of the vote than the Conservative Party. As Mr Barder says:

Thus the logic of the situation may virtually force Clegg to accept any offer from Brown either to join a Labour-LibDem coalition, with a few seats in the coalition Cabinet for Clegg, Cable and one or two others, giving them considerable influence on government policy, but with an inescapable obligation to support some Labour-inspired policies that the LibDems would prefer to oppose; or alternatively to give a conditional promise not to vote against the (Labour) Queen’s Speech or against the Labour government in a vote of confidence provided that certain basic conditions were met by Brown. If that happened, there would be no opening for Cameron to be invited to try to form a government since the Brown government would continue in office without interruption. Of course this would mean the LibDems facing a storm of bitter invective for having kept an unpopular Brown administration in office despite Labour having ‘lost’ the election. But the alternative — ejecting a broadly like-minded centre-left government from office and installing a potentially far-right Tory government in its place — might be even more unpalatable for grass-roots LibDem members and supporters.

Of course, this is all moot, (and the description of the Tory Party as "far right" is ridiculous), but the point is, and Barder goes to some lengths to emphasise it, it is a very real possiblity if current polls are to be believed. The chances of Guido's "Change Coalition" ever happening, even it was desirable (which it absolutely isn't), are tiny, because the new written rules just won't allow it. The system, accidentally or otherwise, has been rigged.

My own view is that the polls are wrong and none of this will happen because there won't be a hung parliament. However, if it did happen the consequences for the country would be terrible. We would be in uncharted territory with a storm front of popular unrest and economic disruption on the near horizon (and that's the only message the Tories need send to the electorate on the subject, too).

I'm watching Sky News just now and they are speculating on this very issue, with that most dishonest of privileged socialists, Polly Toynbee, spinning this madly as some sort of political panacea. Tim Montgomerie, by contrast, has countered with the best set of arguments against this disastrous arrangement I've heard from a Tory yet. He says, in summary, that a new government and a fresh start can only be achieved one way, by voting Conservative.

However, what's now clear, at least to me, is that the Labour Party generally, and Brown in particular, think they have found a way out of their appalling political pickle and a way to cling on to power. What is more, it's also now clear beyond any shadow of a doubt, a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote for Gordon Brown. It's also a vote for PR, a permanent centre-left, vague, ineffectual, corrupt "progressive" coalition, with full EU integration and the Euro coming close on its heals. That would be the price of a LibDems/Labour stitch-up, with five more years of Gordon Brown into the bargain just to complete the hideous, Goya-esque image. It is terrifying.

If you need any further evidence for why a hung parliament would be a very, very bad thing in every way conceivable, then you must be a Lib Dem or a Labourist, in which case you should take a long, hard look in the mirror and wonder whether something as immoral as this is a price worth paying for power. If you think it is, then you're already a lost cause.

If not, then solve the problem before it starts. On Election Day, vote Tory!

"Time for this Idiot Incompetent to Call an Election General"

Listening to PMQs in the car earlier today was not a very pleasant experience, save for one thing. All the Labour crowing and fake hilarity at Cameron's so-called U-turn on the referendum served only one, unintended purpose: it showed them up for the lying, scheming, malignant, two-timing, self-serving national wreckers that they really are. And how! By pouring meaningless scorn on Cameron, who was railroaded into his decision in much the same way the entire country has been railroaded into an EU constitution by this Labour government, they merely showed themselves to be capable of any level of betrayal and of breaking any promise to further their puerile, socialist-federalist agenda. Their line of assault backfired, and backfired pretty comprehensively, because they are so utterly out of touch with the will of the people they claim to represent.

The least representative of them all, architect of the EU constitution stitch-up, and crower-in-chief, Gordon "Iron Cast" Brown, came across as a shifty, unpleasant doubletalker as he tried to score petty points off a statemanlike David Cameron. The Speccy's Lloyd Evans summed it up very well earlier today.

There were a few lighter moments today provided unwittingly by Labour’s whips. These parliamentary gangsters had spent a busy morning getting backbenchers to memorise questions. Here was their plan. (Decide for yourself how brilliant it was.) The stooge was ordered to refer to a promise Labour has fulfilled thus providing the PM with a chance to needle Dave over the Euro-referendum. Brilliant or not, the scheme misfired. Asked about cancer waiting times Brown cheerfully launched into ‘a quote from the shadow health secretary’. Mr Speaker promptly cut him dead. ‘I don’t think we need to go into that today, prime minister.’ The yellow card should have warned David Blunkett to alter his question but, no, he surged onward into the waiting trap. ‘What does the prime minister think of the credibility of a party leader who has made a cast-iron guarantee that turns out to have been made of plywood?’ The Speaker instantly ordered Brown to refer only to government policy. This effectively muffled the PM’s guns.

During the occasional moments of levity, Brown seemed in a jolly mood today but he didn’t realise the joke was on him. Briefed to keep mentioning Labour’s ‘cast-iron’ promises he continually repeated the phrase ‘iron-cast promises’. Time for this idiot incompetent to call an election general.

Amen to that. But Cameron has since come out fighting, disappointing the leftwing press of the Grauniad and the BBC by instantly proving that there will be no split in the Tory party over what is, after all, a cynical breach of a manifesto pledge by the Labour party. It is an unfortunate position to be placed in, to be sure, but we have all been placed in that position, not just the Tories. Labour's (and the left media's) massive miscalculation is in imagining that this has somehow harmed Cameron or the Conservatives. It hasn't. All he and his party have to say - and they would be truthful in saying it - is that it's not the Conservative Party Labour has harmed with its double dealings on Lisbon, it is every British subject. In addition, now that Cameron has outlined his key policy changes in his speech this afternoon, in which he promised the setting up of a constitutional court, referendums for any and all future EU proposals that materially affect the British constitution and to claw back powers from Brussels, I predict that support for the Tories will, if anything, grow.

It was a major miscalculation for Labour and Brown to behave in that way during PMQs. In gleefully attempting to rub the Tories' noses in what they and the press have wrongly branded a broken promise over the referendum, in reality they were laughing at the people of Britain. That will only make the electorate more furious about the government's appalling behaviour and even more hostile to Brown, who, as Evans points out, couldn't even get his lines right ("Iron cast", anyone?). He's not just an arrogant, politically tone deaf bully, he's completely flat-footed, to boot, and when people are faced with a political fait accompli, against their will, they simply revolt. Cameron knows this so watch as he runs rings around Brown from now until Labour's election defeat.

The spectacle of Brown being jolly at the expense of the British people will not be forgotten - or forgiven - any time soon. If their broken manifesto promise on a Lisbon referendum, which helped to win Blair the '05 election, was just a joke to Labour, then that joke was not on the Tories, it was on us, the British people. "Dumb" is, I think, the right word to describe their posturing. Dump and insolent - and politically suicidal. Then again, if Labour and Brown "got" that, they wouldn't be 17 points adrift in the polls (and rising) and about to be annihilated at the next GE.

As far as I'm concerned, therefore, they can laugh and be as scornful as they like from here until doomsday. "Doomsday" being May 9th 2010, at least for Labour.

It'll be VE Day for the rest of us.

Boris On Blair, EU

"If we are faced with the prospect of Tony Blair suddenly emerging,
suddenly pupating into an intergalactic spokesman for Europe, then I
think the British people deserve a say on it."

- Boris Johnson

So do I. The funny thing is, if Cameron committed to a referendum tomorrow, regardless of the ratification red herring, he would be guaranteed a landslide victory. So his continuing obfuscation on the issue leads me to believe that the Leon Brittans and Kenneth Clarkes of the Tory world are still threatening to tear the party apart for the sake of their bizarre attachment to the socialist wet dream that is the European super-state.

Be that as it may, in the real world, all we, the people who so I'm led to believe elect the damn government, want to be able to do is have our say. Clearly, that's too much to ask.

This is all such a pity. The Left have dishonestly, hungrily, pathetically seized on it as evidence of a Tory split (ignoring the fact that Labour is just as divided on the issue), while the shaven-headed gargoyles of the BNP are also exploiting it for all they are worth, (which is very little).

What we need is, to paraphrase a tired, old but appropriate cliche, the smack of firm leadership on this issue. And we need it from one man: David Cameron. We're getting mixed signals from him which, as any military type would tell you, are the worst signals of all.

Not so with Boris, it seems. At least he appears to realise that as soon as the British people decide that the entire mainstream political class of the UK are preparing to sell us down the EU river, the Tories will be up shit creak without a paddle.

As the most powerful Conservative in Britain, let's hope he can finally get through to Dave.

Cameron Must Guarantee A Referendum On Europe

A message from David Cameron I discovered in my Yahoo inblox this morning:

I want to make one thing clear: there will be no change in our policy on Europe and no new announcements at the Conference. There will be no change in Conservative policy as long as the

Lisbon Treaty is still not in force. The Treaty has still not been ratified by the Czechs and the Poles. The Czech Prime Minister has said that the constitutional challenge before the Czech Constitutional Court could take 3-6 months to resolve.

I have said repeatedly that I want us to have a referendum. If the Treaty is not ratified in all Member States and not in force when the election is held, and if we are elected, then we will hold a referendum on it, we will name the date of the referendum in the election campaign, we will lead the campaign for a 'No' vote.

If the Treaty is ratified and in force in all Member States, we have repeatedly said we would not let matters rest there. But we have one policy at a time, and we will set out how we would proceed in those circumstances if, and only if, they happen.

Sorry, Dave, that won't do. For one thing, the 'one policy at a time' rhetoric is plainly nonsense. The population of the UK having the chance to decide the destiny of their own country is absolutely not contingent upon the decision of the Irish or the Czechs. It's a matter of principle. The 'wait and see' invertibrate non-leadership option is just a sop to the wetter 'big beasts' of the Tory party (Clarke, Hesaltine etc). They have to get behind the principle or get out because we, the people have had enough.

What there must be is a concrete resolution - and a guarantee - that there will be a referendum as soon as the Conservatives win power no matter what. We undertand that the abject dishonesty of New Labour - you know, people like Alastair Campbell, Mandelson and President Bliar - has put us into this parlous position (by committing treason and then boasting about that fact at every opportunity - Campbell's at it again today), but David Cameron and the Conservative party need to steer us out of it. This really will become a test of Cameron's leadership. If he fails to meet the challenge, I think he will be percieved as incapable of leading even his own party. That could quite easily cost him the election.

So let me repeat it: the UK must be guaranteed a referendum on the EU constitution Lisbon treaty, regardless of the outcome of votes in other member states.

Let Brussels hold its breath for a change.

Fake Reformers, Fake Reform

So the first Bercow 'big reform' is to cast off the Speaker's wig. This is a laughable, disingenuous gesture designed somehow to provide a visual representation of that 'clean break' the Berk referred to in his cringe-making speech yesterday. But if you take the wig off the man, all you are left with is the man - and this man is part of the problem. Dan Hannan:

...the hairpiece isn't simply a mediaeval relic. It's a reminder to its wearer it that his office is bigger than he is. It was a bad start when Michael Martin arrogantly refused the headgear. "It's just not me," he insisted, presuming to take the job on his own terms - an attitude which prefigured his eventual disgrace. Had the old boy slapped on the horsehair, it might have inspired him to try to live up to the role, to be a bigger man.

Tee hee. But through this first, empty act, Bercow's immediately fallen into line and begun to do precisely the kind of thing that Brown-Labour wants: distracting, fake iconoclasm motivated not by any genuine principle or sincere wish to modernise - or 'reform' - constructively a parliament that has been rendered rotten only by its current members' systematic abuse of its time-honoured traditions, but by a simple, dishonest desire to stay put. And they will do anything and say anything they can to that one end. As Peter Oborne said in a TV interview today, Bercow is the manifestation of the corruption that has crippled parliament. He was forced to pay six grand of evaded capital gains tax and over a thousand pounds' worth of dodgy claims for a personal accountant.

How can this man, along with all the other MPs now tainted by serious and proven sleaze, be trusted to reform the system? The answer is he most certainly cannot. The problem is, that question is part of the distraction. The fundamental point is this: forget trust - we're well beyond that - MPs, including Bercow, no longer have the moral authority to change or create law. For Labour to think that it can install its placeman in the Speaker's chair and carry on regardless is a (further) deep insult to the electorate. It is a travesty and the so-called reforms that will be generated consequently will be no more than meaningless windowdressing and a waste of precious parliamentary time.

It has already begun. Harriet Harperson's first announcement on reform is to table legislation making it a criminal offence (a criminal expense?) for MPs to fiddle their fees or fail to declare their interests punishable by 'up to a year' in stir. Have you stopped laughing yet? Aside from the fact there's no mention of existing legislation that covers the small matter of tax evasion - or of false accounting - here we have in your proverbial nutshell the contradiction that will confront this bankrupt government and the parliament it helped to corrupt: legislation like this would not be necessary if honourable members were just that, honourable. That they deem this legislation necessary merely proves to the public that they consider themselves untrustworthy. "Well, if they can't trust themselves with public money, why the hell should we," the public will rightly think. (I do.)

They will go around in circles, new Speaker in the chair he does not merit. They will make laws to constrain a future generation of politician who might well need no such constraint, given the inevitably far higher level of public expectation and scrutiny that new generation will accept it will have to endure. What's clear is that this government and this parliament were incapable of obeying the letter and the spirit of the rules they themselves partly created. They were also incapable of exercising judgment in the realm of propriety, both individually and collectively. There is therefore no reason for them to expect people to swallow the notion that they themselves, in some sort of "reflexive lawmaking", should be permitted to make a new law that forces them to obey the rules. We say: no thanks, you no longer have the right. Besides, it will miss its target because such a law is always contingent upon what those rules actually are and those rules are made by, you guessed it, MPs. You see? Going around in circles.

The old system might be flawed, but flawed or not its basic operating premise, that MPs are honest and honourable, is essential if we are to have real democracy. It requires a degree of faith on all our parts to be successful. An honour code is the only way our elected representatives can exercise the power we give them to supervise the sovereignty of parliament, thereby ensuring the continued health of the body politic. And therein we find the root-cause of the problem: one dishonourable MP can cause enormous damage to parliament and to that health. Six hundred dishonourable MPs, including the Prime Minister, and you have a severe crisis. And the longer they stay in parliament, the graver the damage they do, by the very fact of their continued presence. But it should be unsurprising to us that these people are reluctant to leave, regardless of this damage. They are who they are, after all: they don't care.

Bercow, with his fake iconoclasm, is merely another sign of that 'graver damage' to which I refer. This man is an insult to our intelligence, with or without a wig. He's the latest symptom of a decayed, diseased legislature. The chief carriers of the disease are Gord'elpus Brown and his gang of amoral Labourists. (Tory sleaze has become a mere secondary infection, incredibly.)

The cure? It's a purgative and it always works: a general election.

Constitutional Deform

Yours truly has been down the beach enjoying the glorious summer sun all day. Why, then, did El Gordo have to spoil it all by opening his disconnected gob? I avoided Marr's much-trumpeted interview assiduously this morning, knowing full-well that it would contain the kind of platitudinous, backtracking, soundbitten horseshit that is Brown's bankrupt oratorical currency. But I failed. This afternoon I succumbed to curiosity and read the Sunday Times coverage of it. What I found was not pleasant and is lingering in the atmosphere like a disowned fart.

Dan Hannan's deoderising is the best so far, so I'll leave it to him:

Just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, along comes Gordon Brown with a proposal for statutory regulation of MPs. Prime Minister, it was the "I have acted within the letter of the rules" mentality that brought Parliament to this pass. You cannot compel moral behaviour by legislation; on the contrary, such laws replace a culture of conscience with a culture of compliance.

The PM, in an unwontedly pharisaical aside, said that some recent revelations "offended my Presbyterian conscience". But any good Presbyterian would see that external regulation smothers personal responsibility. (See here for the full case against the Broon's abominable idea.)

Yes, the House of Commons needs an external regulator. Happily, it already has one: the electorate. Have we so little confidence in ourselves as voters that we are content to surrender our right to choose our representatives to a government-appointed quango? Is this what Coke and Hampden and Pym fought for? What fools our fathers were if this be true.

It's a pretty simple point but it's one that liability Brown is incapable of grasping: there was nothing wrong with the expenses 'system'; the problem is the MPs who exploited it. Revealing their utter turpitude through temptation is, in fact, the system's triumph. Then again, with his deflection tactics and mishmash 'reforms' (which, as Hannan implies, will only actually serve to deform our democracy still further), perhaps he knows exactly what he's doing - sort of. He will say, do, destroy, obfuscate, bully, cheat, steal, burn, ruin and annihilate anyone and anything to cling on to power. So wrecking British democracy will be a stroll in the park for this new Caligula.

“We will be the reforming party on the constitution. It’s always where I have wanted to be.”

Priceless. If you're going to be a hypocrite, might as well be a massive one. If you're going to tell a lie, it might as well be an absolute whopper. He's clearly got Balls. People of Britain, deliver the crushing defeat to this tyrant on Thursday that will start the countdown to his demise. It's not just desirable now, it's vital.