With just under 2 weeks to go to the election the papers are starting to get just a little desperate. The
Murdoch stable have always had a vested interested in the status quo and now are feeling really quite vulnerable. As a result of this they are really starting to turn the screw on Nick Clegg and his Lib Dem policies. The Daily Mail and Telegraph are doing much the same thing, but in their own individual styles. They are also trying to argue that a disenfranchised electorate, but strong government, whatever that might mean, would be better than a government that reflected the will of the electorate. In short only a conservative government would be the best outcome.
There is only one problem with this argument. The electorate aren’t buying it. The conservatives have had months to consolidate their lead in the polls and have failed miserably. Now their message as the party of change, which surely is a contradiction in terms, has been exposed they are falling back onto more and more scare tactics – vote Nick get Gordon is my favourite. If they can’t articulate a message that rings true with the electorate then they don’t deserve to win.
A new message is seeping into the papers as a new reality starts to sink in. The conservatives could do a deal with the Lib Dems – but only as a stop gap measure until they can engineer circumstances so that they can call a snap election and get a majority of their own. If this really reflects the thinking within the conservative party then they really are not in touch with planet earth. Surely such a tactic would be exposed for the cheap political trick that it would be and punish the conservatives accordingly – remember
Edward Heath’s ‘ who governs Britain’ campaign in the 1970’s. Such things rarely work.
And what of Labour. Well they seem to be feeling quite smug with selves for no clear reason. As things stand today they are heading towards their worst ever election defeat, coming third in the popular vote, yet may return as the part with the largest number of MPs. How is that for democracy. This really reminds me of the conditions before the
Great Reform act of 1832. There whole cities, such as Manchester and Birmingham (combined population over 1 million) didn’t have a single MP, yet the
rotten burroughs, such as
Old Sarum (3 hoses and 7 voters) and
Dunwich (32 voters as most of the town had been washed away by the North Sea in the middle ages) returned two MPs when. There would be little doubt that should Labour try and form any type of government it would fail as it would have a mandate to do nothing. However, don’t discount anything when it comes to Gordon Brown and his attempts to hold onto power.
So what of the Lib Dems – how would they cope with such power thrust upon them? The truth is no one knows. Some of the scare tactics being put out by the papers would suggest that we would be marching back to the dark days of
stagflation and swollen public sector – but is this true? I suspect that many of the Lib Dem policies would be jettisoned for the one thing that would be to their long term benefit – electoral reform. I suspect they would support a conservative government’s attempt to reduce the budget deficit much more than is currently believed. Europe is a none issue at the moment as it exposes as many problems for the conservatives as it would for the Lib Dems. However, I don’t think that it is in the Lib Dem’s interest to formally enter government as this restricts their room to manoeuvre but rather deal with the government of the day on a case by case basis – something that seems to work in the
Scottish parliament.
The one thing to remember, and
Michael Portillo rightly pointed this out the other night, it was the conservative party that brought in the second
Reform Act in 1867 that provided the vote to most men and so enfranchised a huge new electorate ( but not women). The conservative have previous for these sort of things and will do many strange things to hold onto power. If this were to happen then a whole new world would open up.
One thing is for sure. What started out as very depressing general election campaign is now one of the most interesting and potentially epoch changing, since the election of the first true Labour government in 1945. This is how it should be.
Simon Marchini LRPS
Simon's Blog 