Iain Duncan Smith is out. Why?

Paxman ?

I took a golf putter to the teevee over a year ago and still haven’t managed to hoover up all the glass. It’s a little like when a windscreen goes, you find shards for donkeys afterwards. For anyone contemplating violence apropos their Trinitron and on and on . . . I recommend the garden as a venue. Via an upstairs window. And don’t forget to unplug it, otherwise it looks a little avant garde hanging half-way down the wall.

Anyway, one of the very few things I miss is Paxo, Mon-Thurs at 10.30pm. A shame, but a small price to pay for being liberated from that nonsense box in the corner. And I’m not talking about the girlie.

What about Paxo, did he interview IDS ?

Some Brit please bring us Yanks up to speed here. For some reason, the American media rarely pay much attention to British politics, our “special relationship” notwithstanding.

For one thing, when is the next general election in the UK? I understand the prime minister can call one at any time; and Parliament can take a vote of no confidence and, if it passes, dissolve itself and force an election. But by statute there has to be an election at least once every . . . five years? Three years? What’s the term? When would there have to be another election?

Second, what are the main points of difference between Labour and the Tories these days? I understand Blair’s “New Labour” has done a lot to move the party towards the center, repudiate its socialist heritage, and curb the institutional power of the labor unions within the party – so what’s left, now, to distinguish the Conservative Party from the Labour Party? I mean, apart from the fact that the one is “a rump of atavistic, senile, nationalist bigots who are incapable of choosing an electable leader,” and the other is “a bunch of slack-jawed sweater-wearing bad-skinned malodorous bien pensant bicyling vegetarian chippy mommets.”

Third, I understand there is a significant third party in the UK, the Liberal Democrats, who occupy an ideological position between Labour and the Tories – but how much space in between them can there be, these days? And what are the LibDems’ prospects if an election is held in the near future? And what are the LibDems’ policies, exactly?

Fourth, is there any possibility, at this point, that the Blair government will fall because of controversy over its support of the Iraq war? Or is all that starting to die down? (The news over here hasn’t mentioned it in a while.)

I think someone did, but we threatened to over-rule him. :wink:

Paxman did a quite famous interview with Howard a while back when he asked him he same question about 20 times (“Did you threaten to over-rule him?”) and Howard evaded answering each time. He didn’t even do it particularly subtley, as all successful politicians do, it was obvious to everyone that the answer was ‘yes’ but he wasn’t going to say that.

Howard was Thatch’s chief henchman when it came to implementing the poll tax. We haven’t forgotten that one either.

Nope. Paxman V’s Howard a good few years. From http://www.guardian.co.uk/BBC/Story/0,2763,190939,00.html

and on it went ending with Paxman saying “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude but you haven’t answered the question. Did you threaten to overrule him?” Classic stuff and all done in the typical Paxo style. That site also has a follow up from Howard

Awww poor Howard.

Despite the, er, “Chelsea strip” incident? :smiley:

Answering Brain’s first question:

Elections must be held every five years. The next election must be held by 2006, as the last one was held in 2001.

And, with the fourth question:

There is a possibility for it to happen. However, it’s almost a Catch-21: If the left-wing of Labour does it over policy, the Tories (who voted for going into Iraq) wouldn’t support it, and if the Tories propose it, the left-wing of Labour will vote against it.

What about the LibDems? Does anybody have any pungent epithets for them, or are they not even worth the bother?

[nitpick]

Posted by Governor Quinn:

That’s Catch-22, actually. (From Joseph Heller’s WWII novel.)

This turned out to be a good debate didn’t it? :rolleyes:. Maybe this will help a little…

Further to what Governor Quinn said, allowing for the convention that British General Elections are held on Thursdays, the next one must be on 2 June 2006 or earlier.

Sadly there is little to choose between the main two parties these days. A few hot-button issues are these, however:
[ul][li]Replacing Sterling with the Euro[/li]
Labour’s stated policy is to use a five-step economic test to assess the suitability of this change. If the tests are all passed they would hold a public referendum with a recommendation that people vote in favour.

Conservative policy is not to adopt the Euro under any circumstances for at least the duration of the present parliament. They’ve called for a referendum to be held now with a recommendation to vote against.

The Liberal Democrats are pro-Euro and have called for the government to set a timetable for introducing it, subject to referendum.

[li]Tax[/li]Labour’s stated policy is not to increase direct taxes, such as income tax, and in fact have reduced income tax rates since 1997. However, they have raised indirect taxes, such as duty on petrol, alcohol and tobacco and National Insurance (which theoretically funds the National Health Service and pensions). This continues Tory practice from the ’80s.

Conservative policy is to reduce taxes across the board and cut public spending “on non-essential areas”.

The Lib Dems have a policy to increase the basic rate of income tax by 1 penny and to increase the highest rate to fund increased public spending.

[li]Education[/li]At the last election, Labour promised that this would be their main priority, but have received widespread criticism for failure to deliver. Their policy is intended to increase the number of kids in post-school education and to expand the range of vocational training courses. They have also retained the system of league tables introduced by the Tories to illustrate the relative performance of schools.

Conservative policy is to introduce a voucher system to assist parents in choosing which school to send their kids to, and assumes that the resulting competition will improve the overall standard of education. Parents, voluntary groups, charities, private not-for-profit and for-profit companies would be encouraged to set up their own schools.

Lib Dem policy is to increase income tax to fund improvements to state schools.

[li]Health[/li]All parties claim to be committed to supporting the National Health Service because it would be electoral suicide to say anything else. However, in practice there are still differences:

Labour claim to have increased NHS spending to unprecedented levels during this parliament. They are also investigating ways that some NHS services could be contracted out to the private sector. Critics claim the standard of service is still unsatisfactory and that they have failed to improve it as promised before the 1997 election.

Conservative policy is to encourage as many people as possible to opt out of the NHS and take out private insurance instead.

Lib Dem policy is to increase funding of the NHS from a ring-fenced tax.[/ul]
You can check further details of policies as they were presented to us at the 2001 General Election from this page of the BBC’s site.

Monetary policy used to be a big contrast between Labour and the Tories, but since the current Chancellor of the Exchequer transferred responsibility for setting interest rates from his department to the Bank of England it no longer matters for that purpose who is Chancellor or what party they belong to. Neither the Tories nor the Lib Dems have any plans to reverse that policy.

Public or private ownership of key industries was also a big litmus test in the past – Labour broadly favoured nationalisation and the Tories privatisation. Since 1997, Labour have continued the privatisation process. The only future exception might be the railway network, which was privatised under John Major and has seen a number of fatal crashes, a general decline in the quality of service and increase in ticket prices. There is a remote possibility that Labour might renationalise, but there is no such stated policy. They have at least changed the umbrella organisation that runs the UK’s railways to a not-for-profit company (which was a Lib Dem policy at the 2001 election). The Tories’ plan is to increase penalties on rail operators who fail to hit performance targets but claim that privatisation has been a success.

Two more key reasons why voters claimed they had switched their allegiance from Tory to Labour in 1997 were that:
[ul][li]The Tories had presided over a long decline in public services generally, and that Tory MPs didn’t use them so couldn’t be trusted to care about them.[/li][li]Numerous ‘sleaze’ scandals blew up when the Tories were last in office. Several MPs were accused of taking payments from business contacts for raising issues in the House (against parliamentary rules); one of them became bankrupt after the collapse of a related libel suit he had begun; and two other MPs were convicted of perjury in separate cases and served jail terms. [/ul][/li]However, decline in public services seems to have continued under Labour, their MPs have also avoided public education for their kids, and it has been also accused of sleaze too (e.g. accepting donations from inappropriate sources in return for favourable legislation or the promise of it), so it is no longer seen as being any cleaner than the Tory party.

Nevertheless, there is no logic in switching your vote back to the Tories on those grounds. The Tories seem to be depending on the public having short enough memories to have forgotten why they were ditched last time, and that being the case, selecting Michael Howard as party leader is quite a gamble. Voter apathy is a much more likely result.

*…what are the LibDems’ prospects if an election is held in the near future? *
The Lib Dems also have a long-standing hobby horse of their own – electoral reform. They recognise that introducing some form of proportional representation system instead of the traditional first-past-the-post system would win minority parties like theirs more seats in the House of Commons. Without that sort of change it’s unlikely that they can win an election and they may not even become the second party now that IDS has gone, but the smart money is on them increasing their share of the vote with a greatly reduced turnout.

The Iraq war, and the ongoing cost of it, is certainly likely to cost the government votes next time around, but it is unlikely to earn any for opposition parties because they supported the war too (with varying degrees of reluctance).:rolleyes:

While I’d concur with London-Calling’s assessment of Michael Howard, and agree that such a leader ought to ensure the Tories lose the next election, I said the same thing about Margaret Thatcher.

Thank you very much, everton. But where does Ian Duncan Smith fit into all this? I learn from above posts that he was the former CP leader, and he was from the more “centrist” wing of the party, and now he’s been replaced by Michael Howard – is this Howard more conservative than Smith?

And what is the status of electoral reform? I seem to remember Blair made a campaign promise to hold a referendum on moving to proportional representation for elections to the House of Commons – and that was in 1997! But I haven’t heard of any referendum. Has it been scheduled? Scheduled to be scheduled?

And if Britain did switch to PR – is there any chance that would cause the Labour and Conservative parties to split up, along natural fault-lines, into several smaller parties? Based on posts in this thread, both parties seem to have a lot of internal divisions at present – are those divisions serious enough to cause a schism, if the electoral system no longer gave the parties a reason to pursue what we Americans call a “big-tent” strategy? (I ask because I’m very interested in PR for the United States and I’m wondering where it would lead – other countries’ experiences could provide some guidance.)

Absolutely excellent post, Everton.

However, I don’t think Labour have come anywhere close to the levels of sleaze achieved by the most recent Tory governments. There’s a lot to be said for an effective two-party system; too long a period in power obviously produces complacency and corruption, and it’s easy to see the current administration starting to go the same way. They haven’t gone THAT far, though.

Michael Howard, incidentally, is about as likely to lead the Tories to victory as Ronald McDonald is. He is, however, strong enough to unite the party. I think we’ll see Portillo (NO!) or Oliver Letwin (mmm… maybe) stand up and make a realistic effort at the next election.

And, just for the record, I hate the Conservative party and all they stand for (when I can work out what that is, exactly), but I’ve never been made more aware of the need for an effective opposition than when Blair rode roughshod over the electorate’s opinions about Iraq. Labour need a proper threat, not a comedy opposition.

In fact IDS was from the right wing of the Tory party, but having noticed the changes made by Labour during the '80s he adopted a much more pragmatic approach than his formative instincts might have predicted.

Howard is certainly very right wing, but has promised the left of his party to be a unifying candidate. My guess is that his policies won’t be very different from those of his predecessor and has only been chosen because IDS was so much damaged goods. Changing leader is just an opportunity for Tory MPs to adopt a less argumentative public face than they have shown recently.

It’s entirely off the radar. You’re right that Labour did agree to hold a referendum on voting methods in '97, but that never happened and although there were some mutterings about reviewing voting procedures more recently there is nothing practical on the agenda.

As far as I can tell, PR is not such a big deal for either of the big two that there would be party splits over it.

The UK has had some bad recent experiences of coalition government and that argues against increasing the influence of minor parties. In particular, the Tory government of Edward Heath was blackmailed into supporting certain policies on Northern Ireland in return for backing from the Unionist parties.

Another argument in favour of the current system is that the winning party can claim an electoral mandate for policies that were included in its election manifesto. If you have a cut-and-paste amalgam of policies favoured by the main party and minor coalition partners it’s harder to justify since nobody actually voted for that. The Tories made that point during a period of cooperation between Labour and the Liberal Party (as it then was) in the '70s.

Greater conciliation across parties in the HoC may be a good thing, however, and coalition government is commonplace in Europe where most countries have PR. IMHO, what is most likely to open the debate again is if our turnout falls to US levels and if the perceived explanation is that the public believe their votes are wasted if they don’t vote for a winning candidate.

Nor do I, but I think people are disgusted to discover any sleaze in the Labour government, given that it got a landslide in '97 on an anti-sleaze ticket.

Labour may be able to lose an election in the future, but the Conservatives are still damaged goods, despite an attempt to paper over the cracks. Their recent tactics appear to consist of of not talking about it, which won’t make the fundamental divides on Europe and social politics (homosexuality, decriminalisation of certain drugs and the like) disappear. Semi-jokey suggestions of splitting into two parties may be the best long-term way for them to go, although it certainly won’t happen in the near future.

The sad thing is, I actually first typed in Catch-22, then thought better of if.

Darned nagging thoughts.

Posted by everton:

You misunderstood. I was speculating on the possibility that the major parties would split up because of PR, but not over PR as a divisive issue.

The first-past-the-post system, by freezing out all but the two biggest parties, naturally produces a system in which the parties are big coalitions of several different factions. Here in the U.S., the Republican Party includes pro-big-business interests; neoconservative foreign-policy warhawks; religious-social conservatives; nativist-isolationist populist conservatives (like Pat Buchanan, who is trying to siphon these off into his own new America First Party); moderate libertarians, like Goldwater was (radical libertarians join the Libertarian Party but some continue to vote Republican anyway for strategic reasons); and a core of more traditional, middle-class, moderate conservatives. Obviously these groups don’t see eye-to-eye on everything, but they all stay in the same party, because where else are they going to go? But if we were to switch to a PR system, so that a given faction would no longer have to work within a major-party “big tent” to get its own representation in Congress, then the Republican Party probably would break up, along its natural fault lines, into several medium-sized parties. And so would the Democratic Party.

At least, that’s my theory. It can be confirmed only by observing how things go in a country that has had a first-past-the-post system for a long time and then switches to PR. But when I look around the world, I see only one such example: New Zealand. Which is too small a country, I think, to provide a reliable guide to what would happen in a larger one where politics are more complicated. (There’s also South Africa, but the difference between the old Apartheid regime and the current system is too vast to control for just one factor like the introduction of PR.) I was hoping that in the UK, where PR has at least been an issue on the public agenda for a long time, pundits would have developed some well-thought-out speculations on how adopting it would affect the party system. Was I wrong?

Posted by everton:

Ouch! I’m sure you’re right, but still . . . ouch!

OK I get it now. Unfortunately I’m not informed enough to give you the answer you’re looking for, but MPs do sometimes leave the main parties as a protest from time to time, and so if there was a lesser risk in doing so it may well increase. Your own analysis seems entirely plausible to me.

We also do already use PR systems for elections to the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, the Northern Ireland Assembly (which is currently suspended) and the European Parliament, but there doesn’t seem to have been a great increase in the presence of minority parties there. However, apart from the European Parliament, those examples are small scale like New Zealand, and Northern Ireland has always been very fragmented politically.

Perhaps candidates would still need to belong to a major party to achieve significant voter recognition?

A good source for further reading is this Charter88 site.

As far as low turnout is concerned, there are genuine concerns here that it has been declining for some time and suggested solutions seem to miss the point.

Voter apathy here seems to be a symptom of the current similarity between the two main parties, especially in their negative characteristics. There is also a problem with an increase in the use of focus groups to find out what people are likely to vote for and base party policy around that. The result is that the politicians seem not to have convictions of their own.

The way I think of it is that if you go to a professional specialist, such as a lawyer or a dentist, and they ask you for suggestions, you’re bound to wonder what expertise you’re paying for.

Ways of increasing turnout seem to be limited to new technology voting methods (online, SMS), or lowering the age of suffrage, or making voting compulsory. Personally I’d prefer the politicians to tell the truth for a change.

The voters themselves are partly to blame though, because our attention span does seem to be shortening, we seem more likely to react to soundbites, bullshit in tabloid ‘newspapers’ and contradictory policy combinations (low tax + good public services). At the same time our respect for our politicians seems to be at a record low.

I’m sure it must be frustrating to be a voter in the USA – I’m not at all sure I would vote if I lived there. But that’s our future.