Further details forthcoming soonest.

Mark has reckoned and provided handy graphs for exactly how closely corruption and hubris in our halls of power correlate to the perceived job security of the official. Politicians who know they won’t lose take the piss; this is not exactly a subtle political insight, but we somehow failed to do anything about it for 30 years. What I suspect is that this represents a microcosm of the larger political reality of Britain in the 20th century.

I’m not the only person to see this general shape to what’s happening this year. Anthony Barnett’s analysis is much broader in scope, and examines wider categoric questions within British, and particularly Conservative, ideology and praxis. But he charts the same transition into a different view of government and administration, as well as of electoral politics, which followed Thatcher into power. Only three times in the 20th century did one party hold power for more than a decade. The Tories won two elections and governed under four Prime Ministers in the 50s and early 60s, but only the second electoral term had a significant majority, and then they lost power.

Thatcher, as I discussed yesterday, changed all that. She came to power at a nexus point, executed her agenda brilliantly and then dumped the consequences on John Major. During the decade of excess, the culture we have all come to know and loathe of Murdochian smears, casual insults to her own senior ministers delivered via the TV camera, governance by fiat rather than by cabinet, and all of the other trappings became entrenched in Westminster and Wapping. British politics has historically been polite and mature, as you’d expect from a sovereign nation who’ve been doing this about as long as anyone else in the West. In the 20th Century alone we saw no less than 8 coalition governments, one of which famously managed World War II. It is only in the 1980s that our politicians became hysterically, rather than ideologically, tribal.

Until recently on both sides of the pond, politicians could fight a friend on the floor of the house and drink gin [1] with him after. That is long gone and the older combatants, Lord Steel and Tony Benn, could be heard welcoming the return of conciliatory politics and reminiscing about the Good Old Days. One part of this urge is simple, old-boys-club wistful thinking; a nostalgia for the days when the politics was run like, and by, the Oxford Union.

But it also speaks to some truth. Two generations ago our politicians could oppose one another on rational grounds with intellectual honesty and passion, without having to believe each other evil. Misguided, frequently; selfish and dishonest, typically, but very rarely evil. Until Nixon there, and Thatcher here, the moderates in each wing held more ground than the violently divisive. What the Southern Strategy did for American politics, the breaking of organised labour and the sale without replacement of council properties did to Thatcher’s Britain. This was then replicated in the civil liberties and immigration discourse under New Labour.

Ianucci’s screaming gibbons have been permitted to debase our public debate to a red-top common denominator of insults, trite lines, scaremongering, sound bites, Alisdair Campbell, corruption prosecutions and bitterly personal acrimony. Its ultimate expression comes in the rush by New Labour power brokers to ruin any chance they might retain to establish amicable relations with a party that could easily offer them a return to power through coalition at the next election. That kind of rumpus is what the floor of the House is for. That’s the debating playground, set apart by law as a free forum where members can let themselves get carried away and throw tantrums if it’ll help. But administration, the process of governing, has to be grown-up politics; it is a persistent negotiation not a prize-fight.

Grown-up politics is pragmatic rather than ideological. Both Cameron and Brown made their political bones as foot-soldiers in the neo-liberal revolution. They helped the nation declare war on moderation and rationalism in the name of religious intolerance and class privilege. Thatcher pioneered in Britain the rather Stalinist attitude that government policy is more real than the facts in the case. God help you if the facts change over time. It is this hubris which brought Thatcher down over the poll tax: it is this willingness to willfully distort the truth in pursuit of ideology which led to the Dodgy Dossier and the sacking of Professor Nutt.

The last forty years have seen moderation locked out of British politics by autocratic majority governments elected on spin, scare-mongering and Murdoch’s propaganda machine. At this election the voters forced the return of compromise the only way they could under this constitution. And bizarrely, we had someone available who knew broadly how to handle that situation. I am not one of those who sees Nick Clegg as a kingmaker, because his role is less autocratic than that of either of the other two leaders (triple lock, etc.). What became very obvious through the election and the following five days was that one of the three party leaders knew the territory they found themselves navigating and the other two didn’t.

Anthony also commented on the extent to which the Liberal Democrats’ excellent credentials as European operators offset and the Tories’ ridiculous allies. What hasn’t been talked about as much is the impact of Clegg and Huhne’s route to the top of the party on the remarkable success of the Liberal Democrats at negotiating the minefields of coalition building. More on that next time on “JQP muses”.

[1] For any lost USAians, read ‘bourbon’. For ‘Oxford Union’ read ‘Ivy League law review editors’.

Both regimes exploited the strength of their perceived position as winning teams to orchestrate subtle, and then not-so-subtle, witch-hunts. Bizarrely, in the case of Thatcher’s social services, there was a literal witch hunt. As Reagan was expanding Nixon’s War on Drugs into Wars on other things, Thatcher was declaring war on organised labour, Irish travelers, peace-protesters, environmentalists and the counter-culture in general. And she was winning, because let’s face it, if you smash all the news men’s cameras and if you’re just beating up a gang of filthy hippies and left-liberal wets, why would middle England care? It’s not like your party will ever need the votes of the liberal and progressive middle class. Er, hang on…

Labour, having surfed into Cool Britannia on a wave of BritPop pizzazz, shambled to the right over the War on Terror and then proceeded to abandon the world of rationality all together. Evidence became a deprecated practice, science policy was subjected to political speculation and short-term party interest. The rational but leftist economic inspirations of a young Scottish Presbyterian in the 80s turned into slavish neo-Thatcherite greed in office in the 2000s. The hysterical Christian wing of the Labour Party are just as terrifying as Christina Odone and Nadine Dorries.

Why did I justify typing all of that when I’m lurking deep within the bowels of a pile of boxes significantly higher than my head, moodily smoking and wishing I’d had more than 4 hours sleep at any time this week? Patience, gentle reader, good things come to those who wait.

The last and most significant parallel I need to draw is between Black Wednesday and the collapse of Northern Rock. In both instances of over-long government by a functional dictatorship (full majority in the commons) their term saw the collapse of significant chunks of the Square Mile boom the government had been exploiting to maintain its autarchy. And unlike what usually happens, where a government is lucky to get ten straight years and very lucky to get ten years of a more or less free hand to legislate, in both cases the economic failure actually had been engineered by the incumbents, not the last guys.

Thatcher over-clocked the economy quite deliberately to gain the largest possible advantage from the North Sea, the privatisation binge, and the world-wide economic and financial boom that accompanied the rise of the Tiger economies. Most governments who run their economy too fast with inadequate cooling are safely out of office when the magic smoke escapes. The Tories weren’t, and David Cameron bloody well knows it; he was standing behind Lamont when the Chancellor announced an interest base rate of 15%.

Unexpectedly, Brown’s Chancellorship saw New Labour follow exactly the same pattern. The City was given its head, the communications boom was exploited ruthlessly while its lucrative consumers, mostly under 30, were demonised in Westminster and Wapping alike. The housing market boom was then artificially inflated well beyond its natural term to off-set the horrendous costs of the War on Terror. The Rock did not fall over because it was heavily invested in US sub-prime instruments, it was a home-grown collapse which came about because the government over-clocked the economy until something blew. What blew was Northern Rock.

I would argue that we can in part credit Gordon Brown’s response with saving us some half a million jobs versus the Tory management of the previous recession. Too late, and in the wrong way, but he did try to respond constructively for the country rather than just happily for the city.

The conclusions are three-fold. Firstly, it is clear that there is a natural cycle which is used by financial traders to consolidate their industry (ensure that very very few new contenders ever make it into the Deep Pocket Club). If permitted by government, it is in the interests of our official gamblers to over-inflate, bust, then over-inflate rather than reflecting the accurate market price of a given commodity or instrument. This is because market men make money in the margin (say that drunk): they can only ‘win’ if the market price is not the same as the actual worth. If the price is too low you make money buying; if it is too high you make money selling. If it’s right, there’s no margin for the Monopoly players in rainbow coats.

Secondly, it is clear that our system promotes governmental short-termism. Both of these two over-powered regimes governed in the short-term interest by actively inflating natural booms until they became insubstantial bubbles which, predictably, burst. This is most certainly not the only way to run a county, it’s just the only way that any Briton under 40 has ever experienced. Safe seats lead directly to ministerial corruption; safe majorities lead directly to autocracy and a bitterly divisive national discourse.

And thirdly, it is bad for Britain to have long-term, majority governments. Both times we’ve tried it in the modern era it has permitted those governments to engineer vastly damaging recessions for short term gain. Twice in that time it has allowed the government to engage us in a war of aggression we didn’t want. Both times won the government significant short-term political gains. Letting either the red or the blue teams run the country with an over-all majority guarantees that they will wreck your economy in their own interest at least once.

Our system is designed to produce majority governments, but it has evolved to deliver (in Sir Humphrey’s words) an aristocratic system of government occasionally interrupted by elections. This situation is well reflected in the educational backgrounds of our current cabinet. In vote-share terms, the country is more or less a quarter liberal, a third conservative and two-fifths labour. That is the direct result of two long, autocratic, socially authoritarian regimes both of which shot themselves in the foot while scuttling the economy. The people, as my friend Laurie suggests, have mumbled. They have spent two generations trying out elective dictatorship in the 19th Century model, and it would seem that they don’t like it much.

After lots of months, more bureaucratic idiocy than you can shake Michael Gove at and two weeks of stress, distress and uncertainty which I hope never to have to repeat, John Q. has bought a pub and is loading the van tomorrow. Then I’m going out.

I may be some time.

Which is interesting, because during the bit of the 20th century while we had things mostly working that didn’t happen a whole lot, no-one really got more than two terms in power, and frequently without a particularly secure majority. That all changed with the coming together of the dividends from North Sea oil and gas, the over-reaching of the militant end of the miner’s unions, the opportunity to start a politically motivated war shortly before an election, and the leadership of one of the best and strongest of our modern politicians. In that intersection a new era of tribal politics was created for Britain. Thatcher could dismiss her own moderates as ‘wets’, because she was winning. As soon as she wasn’t winning, things got messy and Major had to try and restrain the rampant excesses for which his party are famous. He largely failed. But throughout Back to Basics we were following the path Thatcher had charted; absolutism. We Are Right. This Lady’s Not For Turning. Maturity and compromise are not eternally lacking factors in British politics; they are aspects of our political debate which were deliberately excised by a party too powerful for too long, who succumbed to hubris.

Now we come to New Labour (the actual Labour Party have not held power during the new political era I’m describing). When they came in, they had a majority which reflected all of the following about the Tories; the arrogance of their backbenchers and financiers, the hypocrisy of their front bench, and the inadequacy of their response to the recession of the early 1990s which led to considerably more people unemployed than there are now off a smaller market crash. The majority they brought with them also depended from several things about New Labour; the success of Blair’s marketing of his message, the shifting of the Labour Party rightwards to park their tanks on the Tory’s lawn, the desperation of many people in a dead jobs market and the genuine belief in many people’s minds that the Labour Party represented a return to compassionate and progressive politics.

Like Thatcher’s Tories, the first term made it look like the country had been right. The economy began to recover. Money from the creation of the multi-billion pound Internet and mobile phone markets replicated for Labour the effects of the dividends from the North Sea finally coming in, after years of heavy investment by mostly Labour governments. A number of good laws, and several progressive policies, were implemented in New Labour’s first term; in Thatcher’s something similar happened, though ‘progressive’ is more debateable. In both cases the party was then given an opportunity to which they chose to react like hysterical authoritarian wing-nuts.

In Thatcher’s case it was Scargill, pushing the (valid, necessary, politically courageous) miner’s strikes into pursuing the wrong goal. Mining is one of those industries where after you’ve been digging up your country for 7,000 years eventually you start running out of stuff it is plausible to retrieve. You can’t keep empty pits running; but you can force the pit owners to look after the men and women who depend on them. You can pump money, education, expertise and industrial incentives into those areas before the pits close. That wasn’t what Scargill wanted. He wanted to beat Thatcher, to gain a symbolic and historic victory over the grocer’s daughter who sided with the mill owners; and ultimately, to have the mines last forever, to have the old economy never change. The support from other mining unions began to erode under him as did support from outside the industry. That handed Thatcher the opportunity to break the Unions, so she did.

Blair had developed a fair amount of token socialism in the first term while rapaciously consuming the short-term benefits of over-clocking your financial markets way beyond the red line. But the underlying nature of the New Labour echelons was Party Line; the signs of their authoritarianism were already there in their voting records. The opportunity was the evolution of the modern war on ‘terror’. The response was to launch New Labour into a spiral of self-referential and hubristic authoritarianism which may yet destroy the party as a force in British politics, if they don’t stop their scorched earth campaign against the Liberal Democrats.

Both leaders were then succeeded by a back-room battler who had significant intellectual credentials and absolutely no hope of controlling their party for the long haul. Of the two I would say Major discharged the responsibilities set before him more competently than has Brown: Major did manage to win at least one election.

All of this is preambulatory; it provides the context for a thesis about the financial economy, post-industrialism, the impact of the information economy and how these intersect to ignite a new desire for constitutional regeneration in a previously apathetic British electorate. Call back tomorrow for a further installment!

It’s about safe seats. AV is the only one of the alternative systems which preserves them intact. Safe seats are graphably the reason for the expenses scandal. Safe seats allow parachuting of candidates, placing too much power in the hands of central committees over local candidates and parties. Safe seats are wholly counter-democratic. And the LibDems have almost none of them, but the other parties have quite a few each.

For voting reform to matter, it must remove safe seats. Only one system does. Neither large party can countenance that easily. 62% of those polled recently support PR. Therefore neither large party can offer a referendum on anything other than AV, which isn’t PR.

For some more interesting analyses, check out Alix Mortimer and MatGB.

And they got him. It was remarkable in British politics to see a spontaneous demonstration of political intent call out a politician to stand on his steps and speak to them. It rather stunned the BBC, whose coverage has a slight scent of the bewildered about it. It seems to have surprised Mr. Clegg, though he was also pretty chuffed.

When I was young and drunken I used to bait people at Speakers Corner. One of them challenged me to take a turn on the soap-box, and I took him up; for a while, I became slightly addicted to the experience, which was invigorating for a fan of the Pythons and Withnail & I who had reasonable reflexes. But Speaker’s Corner is a safety valve; it is a place where the ignored can go to feel heard, without being heard by anyone who matters. The role it once played in providing a public and adverserial agora for the intrepid Foxes and thundering Burkes to sell their ideas in has been transferred to the Internet.

A bit of a theme of my writing since May last year is that Britain hasn’t seen real politics for so long that the denizens of the Westminster bubble and their clattering commentariat have forgotten what it looks like. A more recent theme has been comparison between the progress towards democracy of my adopted nation, and the slow lurch that way currently occurring in the UK. Well here’s installment 3; this is what real politics looks like. Only this is rather more polite than most real politics; though we may have recently fallen into the slough of complacency, we have a lot of practice at this and we do like good manners.

I thought I was indulging in black humour when I drew comparisons between the progress of Ghana toward democracy, and the current UK election. I really thought it would look funny later. But now I’m hearing about the kind of shit that used to happen under Achaempong. I’m hearing about police breaking through spontaneous protests of the disenfranchised outside polling booths.

The BBC report that hundreds of people in constituencies spread across London, Manchester, Chester, Liverpool, Bolton and Sheffield have been shut out of polling stations after multi-hour queuing. I fully expect to hear of more. I’m hearing about polling stations that ran out of ballots. I’m hearing about spontaneous protests at polling stations being broken by police.

The Electoral Commission have announced that they will be investigating electoral irregularities. 3 seats have returned and they are already saying this! In 1992, three separate sets of observers were in action; UN, some Swiss hired by the government and some Finns I never found out who hired. Everyone and the BBC agreed the elections were fair. One observer said on air, “If Eastern Europe could run elections this clean I’d be out of a job.”

Not if the returning officers of Sheffield Hallam have anything to do with it, mate. What we have here is students (the group most likely to vote LibDem) being separated from ‘residents’ into a separate queue. They were then processed so much more slowly that ‘hundreds’ (BBC) were turned away without being able to vote.

[ Edit 0040: Here is the 140-character saga of the Sheffield Hallam law student Rak Smith. Disenfranchisement in a modern democracy, tweeted live. I would like to congratulate Raksky for presence of mind and good liberal instincts in making a speech to angry riot police. And I would like to add my fury and support to the pleas of those who have been denied their right to vote. ]

This is scandalous. Leaving aside the convenient coincidence that this is Nick Clegg’s own seat; this is a travesty against one of the longest democratic traditions in the world. Be it conspiracy or not, it is most certainly cock-up, and that’s not bloody good enough.

We suspected that a hung parliament would reveal the bankruptcy of this system. There’s no evidence yet to suggest that the seats will accurately reflect the popular vote, so that is still likely. But it didn’t occur to me that we’d see the kind of voting irregularities we saw in elections run by the Bush regime.

I could never vote in Ghana. I campaigned, but couldn’t vote. And I remember what the polling queues looked like. Hundreds of people standing singing in the sunshine, baking and sweating and grinning their ears off. I remember hearing about violence in Gonja territory, and how fast it was dealt with. People were in jail by the end of the day. I predict now that no-one will go to prison for this. If we wouldn’t prosecute them for the Iraq war we won’t prosecute anyone for this.

BBC, in 2010, report that the police have broken picket lines in two places, where enraged voters who had been denied the chance to vote had blocked the ballot box until it carried their electoral rights within its seal.

The system is bankrupt. It cannot be permitted. I’ve heard calls for V masks in Parliament square. I’m inclined to echo them right now.

There is an argument that says the main difference between left and right wing is that the left believes scoring one success matters.

The gap between Labour and the Conservatives is far too small, but a lot of people live and die in that gap. If you say this difference doesn’t matter, you are saying all these people whose lives have been changed since the sun rose over the Royal Festival Hall that morning in May don’t matter to you. You are saying to the call-centre worker paid five times more because of the minimum wage, the gay couple getting a civil partnership, or the old woman who doesn’t have to wait two years to be able to walk again – that difference in your life isn’t worth a cross in a box to me. Wouldn’t that be a betrayal as ugly as New Labour’s? Don’t these people – the beneficiaries of what we all did on May 1st 1997 – deserve more than a defeated and dejected sigh to protect them from the Tories?

*        *        *

Laurie Penny is usually at her best when impassioned and also right. Many of us are. This post is an excellent example; her injucntion to vote to avoid your children growing up through the kind of schools I did, and the kind of hospitals I did, is well received. But there’s another aspect to the reason one should vote that isn’t in the post. It’s a fucking privilege.

Until this election, when asked the most significant domestic political event of my lifetime I would say “Ghana 1992″. I had lived in a military dictatorship all my life. I could remember Ak-47s from the muzzle end by the time I was five. The economy was fucked (mostly due to corruption and stupid policies in the 1970s, partly due to four years of harvest failure). “They” tried to kill the guy in charge 17 times before I hit ten years old, but he was still there. And in 1992, a decade after promising to fix the economy and then hold free elections, he actually did it. Even the BBC thought so. The country certainly did. The referendum on the 4th Republic passed with over 80% of the vote. Rawlings was re-elected in 1996; they wanted to change the constitution so he could stand a third time but he refused, stepped down, and left the world stage.

The children I grew up with had never hoped for control of their government but they got it. The social and political atmosphere in the villages and on the football fields of northern Ghana was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Jerry Rawlings, the Big Man, JJ himself had got his wealthy ass and his trademark sunglasses into a Land Rover for seven months. He’d driven it round the northern villages, standing in the sun and talking to chiefs and women and people in the markets. By day twelve, his message was simple. Elect me; I’ll fix the damn roads, they’re dreadful, why did none of us know? Because we stayed in the south where the money is. All of my opponents are still there. Elect me; I will build the roads that can bring that money north.

And he did fix the roads, too. And built a telephony system that kinda works. And got the power grid out into the countryside, and …

Because of the greater geo-political and economic significance of the United Kingdom, its slow lurch towards democracy must supercede my smaller and earlier experiences. But I would like to say this to those who have watched and read and talked and still don’t think they’ll bother. We in the West look down on the illiterate, because we have a culture whose success is based on literature. We look down on those who farm their own food on their own land as ‘subsistence’ farmers. But in that illiterate, hard-working, simple tribal village, there wasn’t anyone over 16 who didn’t see the chance to elect the government without getting beaten up as a gift from heaven to every free soul in their nation. No-one failed to be enthused; no-one stayed at home. At church, the people drummed and danced, and held up their ink-stained thumbs and chanted thanks to God for new freedoms. The pastor wasn’t even there, they were just encouraging those still queuing to vote.

Please, vote! Please help me believe that the peoples of the oldest modern state can still see beyond their complacence and become full citizens again.

Please: vote.